es; before thee shall bow down the sons of
thy father._ Ver. 9. _A lion's whelp is Judah; from the prey, my son,
thou goest up; he stoopeth down, he coucheth as a lion, and as a
full-grown lion, who shall rouse him up?_ Ver. 10. _The sceptre shall
not depart from Judah, nor lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh
come, and unto Him the people shall adhere._"

Thus does dying Jacob, in announcing "what shall befall his sons in
the end of the days" (ver. 1), speak to Judah, after having dismissed
those of his sons to whom, in the name of the Lord, he must tell hard
things--things which did not, however, exclude them from the salvation
common to all of them (ver. 28), although their shadow made the light
of Judah shine so much the more brightly.[1]

In ver. 8 everything depends upon a right determination of the meaning
of the name Judah. Being formed from the Future in Hophal, it
signifies: "He (viz., God) shall be praised." This explanation rests
upon Gen. xxix. 35, where Leah, after the birth of Judah, says, "Now
will I praise the Lord;" and then follow the words: "therefore she
called his name Judah." It rests likewise on the common use of the verb
[Hebrew: idh], the Hiphil of which is, according to _Maurer_, almost
constantly used of "praising God," and is, as it were, set apart and
sanctified for that purpose. After having enumerated a multitude of
passages, _Gesenius_ says, in his _Thesaurus_: "In all these passages
it refers [Pg 58] to the praise of God, and it is only rarely (Gen.
xlix. 8 compared with Job xl. 14) that it refers to the praise of men."
Even these few exceptions are such only in appearance. In Job xl. 14,
he whom God will praise is not an ordinary man, but a _god-man_. By the
subsequent words in Gen. xlix. 8, "Before thee shall bow down,"
something divine is ascribed to Judah; we need not therefore be
astonished that, by the word [Hebrew: ivdvK], he is raised above the
merely human standing. They only who do not know the Lion of the tribe
of Judah, have any reason to explain away, by a forced exposition, the
slight allusion to a superhuman dignity of the tribe of Judah. The
greater number of expositors, referring to the subsequent words, "thy
brethren shall praise thee," explain the name by the expression,
"blessed one." But, even though we should retain the sure explanation
which has been given above, the idea now mentioned falls very naturally
in with it. He who, in the fullest sense, is a "G