Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

Hebrews II. 6, 7. 333
no author better than David. The same royal singer, who in Psalm
ii. and ex. admired the Divine majesty of the seed promised to him,
is, in Psalm viii., lost in adoring wonder that God has selected a
lowly son of man as the instrument of his Divine conquests.
Sucklings, weak children, are the threads on which the hope of
Israel hangs. (How natural was it for the reflective reader already
here to carry out the antithesis ; God has not told his people to
direct the eye of their hoj^e to the appearances of angels, and to
hosts of angels).
The 4th verse of the 8th Psalm contains nothing that might
serve to confirm what is said in ver. 3 ; that the poet considers the
heaven as the work of God, can be no reason or proof that God has
chosen children to be the instruments of his power. We are therefore
not entitled to give to 'S the argumentative signification "for,"
but must render it as a syntactic particle by " when," so that ver. 4
forms an antecedent clause to ver. 5. " When I look upon thy
heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou
hast prepared ;
what (I must then exclaim) is man that thou are
mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him." To
translate the words »iDN-n» " how excellent is man," as Bohme and
Kuinoel do, is forbidden by the sense of sjisn, which, as is well known,
always designates man on the side of his weakness and frailty. The
whole passage is evidently rather an exclamation of adoring wonder,
that God, this mighty ruler of all heavens, should let himself
down to poor weak man, the suckling, and should give him so high
a rank. The words iuisn—n^a then, express the contrast between the
weakness of man and his high destination—not, however, the result
of the latter. The antithesis vaguely and generally implied
in ver. 2—that he who is enthroned in the heavens disdains not
the earth as the scene of his majesty—is thus rendered more definite
in vers. 3-5.
But the promised glory is at first oulj promised ; it lies still in
the future ; that it may soon be realized is the hope which the
Psalmist expresses in the 6th verse of the Psalm : t:yto !:ri';;BhPi:
nin^vj " thou hast made him to want a little of God." ith signifies
" to want," in Piel, " to cause to want," so in Eccles, iv. 8,
" I cause my soul to want good." The rendering :
" Thou hast
made him a little less than God" is therefore, to say the least, arbitrary
; nor does it suit the context, in which all emphasis is rather
laid upon this, that man, who is not " a little" but infinitely inferior
to God, is, notwithstanding, appointed to share with God in the dominion
over the world. We are therefore to understand ya not in
the comparative, but (as in Eccles. iv. 8) in the privative sense, and
ts?*? not as significant of degree, but of time. For a little while must
man be deprived of God—not God qua Jehovah, for it is purposely