13. Though ye have lain among the pots. Does he
mean that the women at home, who had been meanly clad as they performed their
household work, would be so gorgeously arrayed in the spoil that they would be
like doves of silver wing and golden plumage? Or, would he say that Israel,
which had been begrimed in the brick-kilns of Egypt, would come forth lustrous
and happy in triumph and liberty? Or, did the song signify that the ark would
be brought into a fairer dwelling-place? If we knew all that was known when
this ancient hymn was composed, the allusion would no doubt strike us as being
beautifully appropriate, but as we do not, we will let it rest among the
unriddled things. Of making many conjectures there is no end; but the sense
seems to be that from the lowest condition the Lord would lift up his people
into joy, liberty, wealth, and beauty. Their enemies may have called them
squatters among the pots—in allusion to their Egyptian slavery; they may have
jested at them as scullions of Pharaoh’s kitchen; but the Lord would avenge
them and give them beauty for blackness, glory for grime. Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold.
God’s saints have been in worse places than among the pots, but now they soar
aloft into the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
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