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To the chief Musician upon Gittith, A Psalm of David. O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.

To the chief Musician upon Muthlabben, A Psalm of David. I will praise thee, O LORD, with my whole heart; I will show forth all thy marvellous works.




New Defender's Study Bible Notes


1:9 dry land. The work of the third day began with the laying of the foundations of the earth (see notes on Job 38:4; Proverbs 8:29; Psalm 33:7) by the power of God’s spoken Word. The waters “under the firmament” apparently still contained all the material elements of the earth in solution or suspension until the energizing Word initiated a vast complex string of chemical and physical reactions, to precipitate, combine and sort all the rock materials and metals comprising the solid earth. The “earth” (Hebrew eretz) thus formed was the same “earth” which had initially been “without form” (the same word eretz is used in Genesis 1:1,2,10), but it was now “dry land,” no longer mixed in the initial watery matrix.



6:2 sons of God. The identity of these “sons of God” has been a matter of much discussion, but the obvious meaning is that they were angelic beings. This was the uniform interpretation of the ancient Jews, who translated the phrase as “angels of God” in their Septuagint translation of the Old Testament. The apocryphal books of Enoch elaborate this interpretation, which is also strongly implied by the New Testament passages (Jude 6, II Peter 2:4-6; I Peter 3:19,20). The Hebrew phrase is bene elohim, which occurs elsewhere only in Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. In these three explicitly parallel usages, the contextual meaning can be nothing except that of angels. A similar phrase bar elohim, occurs in Daniel 3:25, and another, bar elim, occurs in Psalm 29:1 and Psalm 89:6. All of these also refer explicitly to angels. The intent of the writer of Genesis 6 (probably Noah) was clearly that of introducing a monstrous irruption of demonic forces on the earth, leading to universal corruption and eventual judgment.

8:1 assuaged. As a result of the water subsiding, the phenomena described in Psalm 104:6-9 began to take place. The earth’s crust collapsed deep into the previous subterranean reservoir chambers, forming the present ocean basins, and causing further extrusions of magmas around their peripheries and through openings in their floors. The light sediments in the sea troughs were forced upward by isostatic readjustment to form mountain ranges and plateaus. Thus the waters originally stored in the vapor canopy and the subterranean chambers are now stored mainly in the present ocean basins (these waters would be sufficient to cover a “smoothed” earth to a depth of almost two miles) after the vast topographic adjustments that terminated and followed the Flood.

10:6 Mizraim. Mizraim is the customary name for Egypt in the Bible, which is also called “the land of Ham” (Psalm 105:23; etc.). It is barely possible that Mizraim is the same as Menes, Egypt’s first king.


11:7 Go to. A council in heaven (perhaps mocking Nimrod’s councils–note Psalm 2:1-4) decrees the confusion of tongues. This act is clearly supernatural, involving the divine creative power which Satan could neither duplicate nor reverse.


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