Verse 14
14. His confidence… his tabernacle He shall be torn from his tent, his confidence; that on which he relies. As with us, his tent (house) may have been his castle; or, perhaps, the poet means his home, his children, which are the right arm of a man. Hitzig understands by TENT his body, (2 Peter 1:13; Isaiah 38:12,) “his strong, sound body, which promised a long life.” But the use of the same word in the next verse, as a habitation for others, is fatal to this view.
It shall bring It, the dark, unseen, unnamed power, shall make him to march. “Slowly march,” says Umbreit, with a view to the idea that the godless man has a fearful death before his eyes for a length of time an evident allusion to the case of Job. The Assyrian monuments give striking pictures of captives bound in chains, marching in procession to death. “The Psalm of Life” has a like figure of “funeral marches to the grave.”
King of terrors Death, whose first-born has done his work. This personification of death rests, probably, upon an instinctive feeling that, for the wicked, death is no mere privation of consciousness, but the entrance into a state of unknown horror. (Canon Cook.) It has been conjectured by some that in this term “king of terrors.” (comp. Hebrews 2:14,) there is an allusion to Satan, who has “the power of death.” In Jewish theology, Satan is called the prince over thohu, or chaos.
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