(director: of the Lord’s servant, of David, who spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day the Lord rescued him from the grip of all his enemies and from Saul’s grasp. He said…)

* * *

The parallels that shape biblical poetry on every level—from word to line, from verse to stanza to poem— are just juxtapositions. This, then that. These two, then those. The art is collage. The kiru in a haiku is similar, a jump cut from one image to another. So are the leaps in a Chinese shi (a word pronounced much like the Hebrew shir; both words mean “song”). The questions of reciter and writer are always these: why this with that? why here, why there?

In Psalm 18, these questions are best asked first of the fiery mythological passage in verses 7-15, in which God rages thunder and lighting, and of the bellicose passage in 37-45, in which the speaker, equipped “with strength for battle” (39), obliterates his enemies, grinding them to powder, dumping them “like the muck of the streets” (42) until other nations “cringe to me… wilt / they quake at the borders” (45). Why pair a powerful scene of divine descent with a bloodthirsty warrior’s boast? The theophany, including its introductory and closing verses, takes up almost the first third of the psalm (4-19), while the whole warrior’s passage takes up most of the last third (32-48). As panels surrounding a center, they invite—and reward— comparison. The warrior finishes what “the Lord / the Highest” started (13). God “sends his arrows | and scatters them” (14) which becomes, by narrative causality, “training my hands | for battle / so my arms can bend | a metal bow” (34). Cosmic precedent justifies both national conflict and the singular authority of the warrior. After all, it is God, the speaker asserts, who arms him, “who grants me | retribution / speaks down | peoples beneath me” (47). This much seems obvious: Psalm 18 works to authorize charismatic military force—“my enemies | you’ve given me their napes / those who hate me | I wipe them out” (40). It justifies war by making brutal personal vengeance seem both divinely sanctioned and as natural as a storm.

And yet between this pair, these two thirds of the psalm, is lodged a striking central section, verses 20-31, in completely different language and a completely different tone. The stitches show. In the tight and unified verses 16-19, the speaker claims that he has been rescued by the Lord from the dangers he describes only metaphorically back in verses 4-6, and that this rescue has occurred “because he likes me” (19b). The intervening mythological verses, by the way, make no reference to any humans, neither enemies nor victim, nor to good or bad (despite the suggestion of anger in verses 7 and 15). After verses 16-19, however, morality shows up suddenly, in full Deuteronomic language. As with the flood story in Genesis, where competing explanations for Noah’s rescue show up in subsequent verses, at a seam in the text—“Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations..” (Gen 6:8-9)—so here the center of the psalm offers a second, competing explanation for the speaker’s rescue. Not that God “likes” him, but “he treats me | as for my justice / as for my clean hands | he returns me” (Ps 18: 20). The center of the psalm introjects a moral:

With the caring                   you show yourself caring                           25

with one who’s whole          you show yourself whole

with the clean                     you show yourself clean                            26

with the twisted                   you show yourself wound up

From here the seams overlap. Verses 27-29 link the Deuteronomic vision of retributive justice to the speaker’s military prowess. They anticipate verses 32 and on: “by you I outrun an army” (29a) sounds more like “making my feet like a doe’s” (33a) than it does anything from verses 20-26 or 30-31. For their part, verses 30-31 pick up the word “whole” from verses 23, and 25, stitching together the moral that patches the poem: “he is a shield to all | who shelter with him” (30).

The tying together of the psalm’s three parts thus implies that the mythical, anthropomorphic God of storms and fury, doubtless already archaic by the time of Psalm 18’s assemblage, justifies military actions led by a charismatic fighter, because both ancient mythology and contemporary war are subsumed under the category of divine justice. This tying together is completed at the psalm’s edges, its beginning and its end, which rope the three parts to the story of David, turning the warrior into a king, making the mythical historical. That there is no mention between verses 1 and 50 of anything royal, let alone of David in particular, hardly registers with most readers. Most scholars still call it a royal psalm (Dahood, Kraus, and more).

Linking psalms to David, especially this one, which bears the book of Psalms’ longest superscription and which appears in slightly different form in 2 Samuel 22, has at least two important functions. The rhetoric and poetry of this psalm shape how we read David, deepening the history-like prose about Israel’s monarchy. Into David’s narrative is imported this psalm’s argument, its mythology, its militarism, its sanction. History gains immediacy. At the same time, the recitation of this psalm, whoever sings it, whenever, wherever, gains simultaneously historical and timeless meanings. Its justification of aggression brings to the performative present a newly mythologized David, whose offspring it emboldens to carry on.

 *

18:1 of the Lord’s servant… Despite its length, the superscription links this psalm not to one specific “day” in David’s life—one would be hard pressed to find such a day, either before or after he became king—but to the sweep of his life as a whole.

18:1 I feel tenderly for you | Lord my strength This line can be read as part of the superscription, part of the psalm itself, or both, or even neither. Stylistically it could fit with the first verse, perhaps. But it does not appear in the parallel version in 2 Samuel 22, and the image of tendern-heartedness—the root rechem comes from the word for “womb”—is conspicuously out of place.

18:4 they terrify me  This is a good example of why it’s important to register verb forms with care in translation. In a sequence of mostly suffixed verbs, the English past or present tense, this prefixed form stands out, with its imperfect aspect and present or future tense. Cords of death would continue to terrify me, too.

18:7 And the earth shakes | and shivers  Here the issue of tense is more complicated: we have prefixed verbs introduced with a vav, which usually functions in narratives like the historical present or the past tense (called the vav-consecutive, or vav-conversive). And yet as a sequence and in context both, this mythological storm works better in the present tense, blurring the line between the historical and the present. The words sound similar in Hebrew: vattig`as vattir`as.

18:10 climbs on a cherub  It was tempting to render “cherub” with a different spelling (keruv would be more accurate) to dislodge delicate images of doughy babies. The mythical cherubim were doubtless more like griffins. In Hebrew, there’s a tight play on words: Vayyirkav al-keruv.

18:12 out of the bright before him | thunderheads have passed  Strong wordplay in the original: minnogah negdow `avav `averu.

18:25 you show yourself caring  The reflexive stem of the verb chesed. It’s only three syllables in Hebrew, but that information density is impossible to capture here. The implication is that God’s caring is reflexive, caring for one who cares as well as for himself, perhaps even that he reveals himself in this caring-for.

18:27 the peering proud  Lit., the eyes of the rising. Since a literal rendering doesn’t work in English, the translation tries to capture both the hauteur and the eyes.

18:30-32 The god  The Hebrew ha’el can mean any number of things: God, a god, the god, even “is God?” Translation forces a choice, though each option is fraught. It’s used here three times—30a, 31a, 32a—and could mean God each time. But the passage seems to be asking, then answering what kind of god God is, so some distinction between Ha-‘El and ‘Elohim seems important to preserve.

18:41 They yelp | and none who helps them  The verbal roots are close in Hebrew: yeshavve`u and moshi`u.

18:44 At the hearing of an ear | they heed me  In the original, this is lesheim`a ‘ozen yisham`u li. The verbal dexterity is nice.

18:47 speaks down  Used rarely in the causative stem, the common verb “to speak,” dabar, takes on the meaning of “subjugate.”