1. And David spoke to the LORD the words of this song. It was a common literary practice in ancient Israel to place a long poem or “song” (shirah) at or near the end of a narrative book—compare Jacob’s Testament, Genesis 49, and the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32. In the case of the Book of Samuel, David’s victory psalm and Hannah’s psalm, respectively a song of the male warrior’s triumph and a song contextualized as an expression of maternal triumph, enclose the large narrative like bookends, and there is even some interechoing of language between the two poems. These long concluding poems were presumably selected by the editor or composer of the book from a variety of texts available in the literary tradition and then ascribed to a principal character of the story. There is, of course, a persistent biblical notion of David the poet as well as of David the warrior-king, and the idea that he actually composed this poem, though unlikely, cannot be categorically dismissed. In any case, most scholars (Albright, Cross and Friedman, Robertson) detect relatively archaic language in the poem and date it to the tenth century, David’s time. The archaic character of the language makes the meaning of many terms conjectural. Even in the ancient period, some of the older locutions may already have been obscure to the scribes, who seem to have scrambled many phrases in transmission; but in contrast to the confident practice of many biblical scholars, caution in presuming to reconstruct the “primitive” text is prudent. It should be noted that this same poem occurs in the Book of Psalms as Psalm 18, with a good many minor textual variants. In several instances, the reading in Psalm 18 seems preferable, but here, too, methodological caution is necessary: Psalm 18 appears to be a secondary version of the poem, and its editor at least in some cases may have clarified obscurities through revision.

2. my crag and my fortress. Albright notes that many of the northwest Semitic gods were deified mountains. Thus the imagery of the god as a lofty rock or crag abounds in the poetic tradition upon which the biblical poet drew. It also makes particular sense for a poem of military triumph, since a warrior battling in the mountainous terrain of the land of Israel would keenly appreciate the image of protection of a towering cliff or a fortress situated on a height.

3. horn. The idiom is drawn from the goring horn of a charging ram or bull. In keeping with the precedent of the King James Version, it is worth preserving in English in order to suggest the concreteness and the archaic coloration of the poem.

5. For the breakers of death beset me. The condition of being mortally threatened is regularly figured in the poetry of Psalms as a descent, or virtual descent, into the terrifying shadows of the underworld.

8. The earth heaved and quaked. God’s descent from His celestial palace to do battle on behalf of his faithful servant is imagined as a seismic upheaval of the whole earth.

9. Smoke went up from His nostrils. The poetic representation of God, drawing on premonotheistic literary traditions such as the Ugaritic Baal epic, is unabashedly anthropomorphic. One must be cautious, however, in drawing theological inferences from this fact. Modes of literary expression exert a powerful momentum beyond their original cultural contexts, as Milton’s embrace of the apparatus of pagan epic in Paradise Lost vividly demonstrates. The LORD figures as a fierce warrior, like Baal, because that works evocatively as poetry. This God of earthquakes and battles breathes fire: in an intensifying narrative progression from one verset to the next and then from line to line, smoke comes out of His nostrils, His mouth spews fire, in His awesome incandescence coals ignite before Him, and then He begins his actual descent from on high.

11. He mounted a cherub and flew. The cherub is a fierce winged beast, the traditional mount of the deity.

He soared on the wings of the wind. The translation reads with Psalm 18 wayeda’, instead of the weaker wayera’, “He was seen” (the Hebrew graphemes for d and r being very close).

19. They sprang against me. The verb here—its basic meaning is to meet or greet, sometimes before the person is ready—repeats “the traps of death sprang against me” in verse 6: first that act of being taken by surprise occurs metaphorically, and now again in the literal experience of the speaker on the battlefield.

21. The LORD dealt with me by my merit. It is often claimed that verses 21–25 are a Deuteronomistic interpolation in the poem—that is, seventh century B.C.E. or later. The evidence is not entirely persuasive because the theological notion of God’s rewarding the innocence of the individual by rescuing him from grave danger is by no means a Deuteronomistic innovation, and adherence to “statutes” and “laws” (verse 23), though encouraged in the Deuteronomistic literary environment, is neither its unprecedented invention nor its unique linguistic marker.

25. by the cleanness of my hands. The Masoretic Text has merely “by my cleanness” (kevori), but the parallel version in Psalm 18 shows kevor yadai “by my cleanness of hands,” as do the Septuagint and other ancient translations of this line. The concrete juxtaposition of idioms anchored in body parts—“cleanness of hands” for “innocence” and “before Your eyes” for “in Your sight”—is characteristic of biblical usage.

26. with the blameless warrior You are without blame. Many textual critics consider “warrior” to be an interpolation and either delete it or substitute for gibor, “warrior,” gever, “man.” The parallelism of these four versets, in each of which God, in a verb, answers in kind to the adjectivally defined human agent, is better preserved without “warrior.” The profession of blamelessness scarcely accords with David’s behavior in the body of the story.

27. twist and turn. This English phrase represents a single reflexive verb in the Hebrew. It is the sole instance in this series of four versets in which the verb describing God’s action has a root different from the adjective characterizing the kind of person to whom God responds, although there is still a manifest semantic connection between the two terms here, and this works quite nicely as a small variation on the pattern to conclude the series.

28. A lowly people You rescue, / You cast Your eyes down on the haughty. The opposition between low and high is conventional in the poetry of Psalms—it also figures in Hannah’s Song—but is nonetheless effective. The speaker’s people is “lowly” in the sense that it is miserable, afflicted, endangered by superior forces. God on high looks down on the lofty who seem to have the upper hand and, as the triumphant images from verse 39 onward make clear, brings them low.

30. I rush a barrier . . . vault a wall. The speaker who has just been seen among “a lowly people” and then vouchsafed a beam from God’s lantern as he gropes in the dark now suddenly takes the offensive, charging the enemies’ ramparts.

33. The God, my mighty stronghold. Although this phrase, ma‘uzi ḥayil, is intelligible as it stands, the variant in Psalm 18, supported by the Qumran Samuel scroll, is more fluent and sustains a parallelism of verbs between the two halves of the line. That reading is hameʾazreni ḥayil, “Who girds me with might.”

He frees my way to be blameless. The verb here, wayater, is problematic. The most obvious construction would be as a term that generally means “to loosen,” though the syntactic link with “blameless” (there is no explicit “to be” in the Hebrew) is obscure. The version in Psalm 18 substitutes wayiten, “he kept” (or “set”), but the use of that all-purpose verb may simply reflect the scribe’s bafflement with the original verb.

34. makes my legs like a gazelle’s, / and stands me on the heights. The swiftness of the gazelle accords nicely with the image in verse 30 of the warrior sprinting in assault against the ramparts of the foe. Standing secure on the heights, then, would mark the successful conclusion of his trajectory of attack: the victorious warrior now stands on the walls, or within the conquered bastion, of the enemy. The ai suffix of bamotai, “heights,” normally a sign of the first-person possessive, is an archaic, or poetic, plural ending. The sense proposed by some scholars of “my back [or, thighs?]” is very strained, and destroys the narrative momentum between versets that is a hallmark of biblical poetry.

35. makes my arms bend a bow of bronze. The verb niḥat has not been satisfactorily explained, nor is its syntactic role in the clause clear. This translation, like everyone else’s, is no more than a guess, based on the possibility that the verb reflects a root meaning “to come down,” and so perhaps refers to the bending down of a bow.

36. Your battle cry. This noun, ‘anotkha, is still another crux. The least farfetched derivation is from the verbal steam ‘-n-h, which means either “to answer,” thus yielding a sense here of “answering power,” or “to call out,” “speak up.” Given the sequence of concrete warfare images in these lines, from bronze bow to saving shield, this translation proposes, conjecturally, “battle cry,” with the established verbal noun ‘anot, “noise” or “calling-out” in mind. Compare Exodus 32:18: “the sound of crying out in triumph” (qol ‘anot gevurah). The battle cry would use God’s name (perhaps something like “sword of the LORD and of David”) with the idea that it had a potency that would infuse the warrior with strength and resolution and strike fear in the enemy. Thus the battle cry makes the solitary fighter, or the handful he leads, “many” against seemingly superior forces.

37. You lengthened my stride beneath me, / and my ankles did not trip. This focus on the long, firm stride jibes with the previous images of rapid running against the enemy and anticipates the evocation in the lines that follow of the victorious warrior’s feet trampling the foe.

38. till I cut them down. The English phrase, chosen to reflect the rhythmic compactness of the original, represents a Hebrew verb that means “to destroy them utterly,” or, “to finish them off,” but the former phrase is too much of a mouthful and the latter is the wrong level of diction. In any event, the narrative sequence of being provided with armor and weapons and charging against a fleeing enemy is now completed as the victor overtakes his adversaries and tramples them to death.

42. there was none to rescue, / to the LORD, He answered them not. The frustration of the enemy’s desperate prayers is meant to be a pointed contrast to the situation of the speaker of the poem, who calls out to the LORD and is saved (verse 4).

44. the strife of peoples. The translation follows the minor variation of the parallel reading in Psalm 18, merivey ‘am, literally, “the strife of people.” The Masoretic Text here reads merivey ‘ami, “the strife of my people,” which may simply mean the battles in which my people is embroiled, but it also inadvertently suggests internal strife. Despite the presence of Saul in the poem’s superscription, the immediately following lines here indicate external enemies.

kept me at the head of nations. This phrase and the language of the next verset are perfectly consonant with David’s creation of an imperial presence among the peoples of the trans-Jordan region.

45. Foreigners cowered before me. All that can be said in confidence about the Hebrew verb is that it indicates something negative. The common meaning of the root is “to deny” or “to lie.” Perhaps that sense is linked in this instance with the foreigners’ fawning on their conqueror.

46. filed out from their forts. The meanings of both the verb and the noun are in dispute. The verb ḥagar usually means “to gird,” but the text in Psalm 18, more plausibly, inverts the second and third consonants, yielding ḥarag, which is generally taken to mean “emerge from,” or “pop out from,” a restrictive framework. The noun misgerotam is clearly derived from the root s-g-r, “to close,” and “fort” (an enclosure) seems fairly plausible. (The proposal of “collar” has little biblical warrant and makes rather bad sense in context.)

50. Therefore I acclaim You . . . O LORD. In keeping with a formal convention of the thanksgiving psalm, or todah, the poem concludes by explicitly stating that the speaker has acclaimed or given thanks (the verb cognate with the noun todah) to God.

and to your name I would hymn. The pairing in poetic parallelism of the two verbs, hodah, “acclaim,” and zimer, “hymn,” is common in the conclusion of thanksgiving psalms.

51. Tower of rescue. The variant reading in Psalm 18, supported by the consonantal text here but not by its Masoretic vocalization, is “making great the rescues [or victories] of” (instead of the noun, migdol, “tower,” the verb magdil, “to make big”). The one attraction of the Masoretic reading here of this word is that it closes the poem with an image that picks up the multiple metaphors of a lofty stronghold at the beginning.

keeping faith with His anointed, / for David and his seed, forever. Many critics have seen the entire concluding verse as an editorial addition, both because of the switch to a third-person reference to the king and because of the invocation of dynasty, beyond the temporal frame of the warrior-king’s own victories. The inference, however, is not inevitable. Switches in grammatical person, even in a single clause, occur much more easily in biblical Hebrew than in modern Western languages, and if the triumphant speaker of the poem is actually David or in any event is imagined to be David, it is quite possible that he would conclude his account of attaining imperial greatness by a prayer that the dynasty he has founded will continue to enjoy God’s steadfast support for all time.