What Does Psalms 119:83 Mean?

(83) **A bottle in the smoke.**—The insertion of *yet *by our translators shows that they understood this as a figure of abject misery. The wine-skin would, of course, shrivel, if hung above a fire, and would afford an apt image of the effect of trouble on an individual or community. “As wine-skin in the smoke my heart is sere and dried.” Some think that as a bottle hung up anywhere in an ancient house would be in the smoke, nothing more is implied than its being set aside; but this is too weak. We find in the ancient poets allusion to the custom of mellowing wine by heat: “Prodit fumoso condita vina cado.”—OVID: *Fast. v.* 517. (Comp. Hor. *Ode *iii. 8, 9, 10). And so some understand the image here of the good results of the discipline of suffering. The LXX. and Vulg., instead of *smoke, *have “hoar-frost.” The Hebrew word has this meaning in Psalm 148:8, but in the only other place where it occurs (Genesis 19:28) it is *smoke. *The possibility of rendering *hoar-frost *here suggests another explanation. The word *nôd *(bottle) may be used of a *cloud, *and as the psalmist has just spoken of his eyes failing, we may have here only another expression for weeping.