2 Samuel 22: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter records a song David sang to the LORD on the day the LORD rescued him from all his enemies and from Saul. David calls God his rock, fortress, and rescuer, then describes God coming down in storm, earthquake, thunder, and lightning to pull him out of deep water and away from foes too strong for him. He says God repaid him according to his righteousness and the cleanness of his hands, and that God trained him for battle and put his enemies under his feet. The song closes with praise among the nations and a statement that God shows steadfast love to his anointed king, to David and his descendants forever.

Claim by Claim

1. 22:1
   • David spoke the words of this song to the LORD.
   • He spoke them on the day the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies.
   • He spoke them on the day the LORD delivered him from the hand of Saul.
2. 22:2
   • He said this.
   • The LORD is his rock.
   • The LORD is his fortress.
   • The LORD is his deliverer.
3. 22:3
   • God is the rock in whom he takes refuge.
   • God is his shield.
   • God is the horn of his salvation.
   • God is his high stronghold.
   • God is his refuge.
   • God is his savior.
   • God saves him from violence.
4. 22:4
   • He will call on the LORD, who is worthy to be praised.
   • He will be saved from his enemies.
5. 22:5
   • The breakers of death surrounded him.
   • Torrents of destruction (rendered as ungodly men) terrified him.
6. 22:6
   • The cords of Sheol surrounded him.
   • The snares of death confronted him.
7. 22:7
   • In his distress he called on the LORD.
   • He cried out to his God.
   • God heard his voice from his temple.
   • His cry came into God's ears.
8. 22:8
   • The earth shook and trembled.
   • The foundations of the heavens quaked.
   • They shook because God was angry.
9. 22:9
   • Smoke went up from God's nostrils.
   • Fire from God's mouth devoured.
   • Coals were kindled from him.
10. 22:10
    • He bent the heavens down.
    • He came down.
    • Thick darkness was under his feet.
11. 22:11
    • He rode on a cherub.
    • He flew.
    • He was seen upon the wings of the wind.
12. 22:12
    • He made darkness shelters around himself.
    • Around him were a mass of waters and thick clouds of the skies.
13. 22:13
    • From the brightness before him coals of fire were kindled.
14. 22:14
    • The LORD thundered from heaven.
    • The Most High uttered his voice.
15. 22:15
    • He sent out arrows and scattered them.
    • He sent lightning and routed them.
16. 22:16
    • The channels of the sea appeared.
    • The foundations of the world were uncovered.
    • This happened at the rebuke of the LORD.
    • This happened at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.
17. 22:17
    • He reached down from on high.
    • He took hold of the speaker.
    • He drew the speaker out of many waters.
18. 22:18
    • He delivered the speaker from his strong enemy.
    • He delivered him from those who hated him.
    • They were stronger than he was.
19. 22:19
    • They confronted him in the day of his calamity.
    • The LORD was his support.
20. 22:20
    • He brought him out into a broad place.
    • He rescued him.
    • He rescued him because he delighted in him.
21. 22:21
    • The LORD rewarded him according to his righteousness.
    • The LORD repaid him according to the cleanness of his hands.
22. 22:22
    • He kept the ways of the LORD.
    • He did not wickedly depart from his God.
23. 22:23
    • All God's judgments were before him.
    • He did not turn aside from God's statutes.
24. 22:24
    • He was blameless toward God.
    • He kept himself from his own iniquity.
25. 22:25
    • The LORD repaid him according to his righteousness.
    • The LORD repaid him according to his cleanness in God's sight.
26. 22:26
    • With the faithful, God shows himself faithful.
    • With the blameless strong man, God shows himself blameless.
27. 22:27
    • With the pure, God shows himself pure.
    • With the crooked, God shows himself twisted.
28. 22:28
    • God saves an afflicted people.
    • God's eyes are on the haughty.
    • God brings the haughty down.
29. 22:29
    • The LORD is his lamp.
    • The LORD lights up his darkness.
30. 22:30
    • By God he runs against a troop.
    • By his God he leaps over a wall.
31. 22:31
    • God's way is perfect.
    • The word of the LORD is refined.
    • God is a shield to all who take refuge in him.
32. 22:32
    • No one is God except the LORD.
    • No one is a rock except our God.
33. 22:33
    • God is his strength and stronghold.
    • God makes his way perfect.
34. 22:34
    • God makes his feet like the feet of deer.
    • God sets him upon his high places.
35. 22:35
    • God teaches his hands to war.
    • A bow of bronze is bent by his arms (rendered as broken).
36. 22:36
    • God gave him the shield of his salvation.
    • God's gentleness made him great.
37. 22:37
    • God enlarged his steps beneath him.
    • His ankles did not give way.
38. 22:38
    • He pursued his enemies and destroyed them.
    • He did not turn back until they were finished off.
39. 22:39
    • He consumed them.
    • He crushed them so that they could not rise.
    • They fell under his feet.
40. 22:40
    • God girded him with strength for battle.
    • God subdued under him those who rose against him.
41. 22:41
    • God gave him the necks of his enemies.
    • He destroyed those who hated him.
42. 22:42
    • They looked, but there was no one to save.
    • They looked to the LORD, but he did not answer them.
43. 22:43
    • He beat them as fine as the dust of the earth.
    • He crushed them like the mire of the streets.
    • He trampled them (rendered as spread them abroad).
44. 22:44
    • God delivered him from the strivings of his people.
    • God kept him to be head of nations.
    • A people he did not know will serve him.
45. 22:45
    • Foreigners submit themselves to him.
    • As soon as they hear, they obey him.
46. 22:46
    • Foreigners fade away.
    • They come trembling out of their strongholds.
47. 22:47
    • The LORD lives.
    • Blessed be his rock.
    • Exalted be God, the rock of his salvation.
48. 22:48
    • God is the one who gives him vengeance.
    • God brings peoples down under him.
49. 22:49
    • God brings him out from his enemies.
    • God lifts him up above those who rise against him.
    • God delivers him from the violent man.
50. 22:50
    • Therefore he will give thanks to the LORD among the nations.
    • He will sing praises to God's name.
51. 22:51
    • God is a tower of salvation for his king (or: God magnifies the deliverances of his king).
    • God shows steadfast love to his anointed.
    • God shows steadfast love to David and to his seed forever.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

22:1

In the King James Version, "LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of God in Hebrew, written YHWH. Jewish readers did not say it aloud, substituting the ordinary word for "lord," and English Bibles have followed that practice ever since. Nearly the same song appears again, with small differences of wording, as Psalm 18; Saul is singled out from the other enemies because David spent years as a fugitive from him before becoming king.

22:2

"Rock" is not a decoration here. In the rocky hill country of Judah, where David hid from Saul, a crag or cliff was a literal place of safety: hard to climb, easy to defend, impossible to surround. The "strong walled place" is a mountain stronghold of the same kind.

22:3

"The horn of my salvation" is an image taken from a bull or a ram: the horn is where the animal's strength is concentrated and where it strikes. To call someone your horn is to call him the force that fights for you. A raised horn means power and victory; a horn cut off means defeat.

22:5

The word behind the King James "ungodly men" is the Hebrew *belial*, which means something like "worthlessness" or "destruction." It is not certain here whether it names hostile people or, as many take it, the destructive floodwaters themselves; the rendering follows the second sense.

22:6

"Hell" in the King James does not mean a place of punishment. The Hebrew is *Sheol*, the underworld where all the dead were thought to go, good and bad alike, the grave understood as a realm. Also note that "prevented" in 1611 English meant "came before" or "confronted," the opposite of what it means now.

22:7

David lived before the temple in Jerusalem was built. The Hebrew word means "palace" as much as "temple," and here refers to God's own dwelling in the heavens, not a building on earth.

22:8

Ancient Hebrew poetry pictures the sky as a vast solid structure resting on foundations, like a building. When God appears in anger, the whole structure shakes.

22:9

Smoke from the nostrils is the standard Hebrew picture of rage. The ordinary Hebrew idiom for being angry is literally "his nose burned", the flared, hot nostrils of a snorting animal.

22:10

The sky is imagined as a solid vault or a stretched tent, which God bends downward as he descends.

22:11

A cherub in the Hebrew Bible is not a plump winged baby: that image comes from much later European art. Cherubim are powerful winged creatures that guard sacred space and carry or support God's throne; here one serves as his mount.

22:12

"Pavilions" in the King James means tents or canopies. The storm cloud is pictured as a tent God pitches around himself, hiding him from sight.

22:14

"The Most High" (Hebrew *Elyon*) is an ancient title for God as the highest of all powers. Thunder as the voice of the storm-god is a standard image across the ancient Near East.

22:15

Lightning bolts as arrows shot from the sky is a fixed poetic image of the time. The enemies scattering is the response of an army broken by a sudden storm.

22:16

The picture is of the sea blown back to expose its bed, and of the disc of the earth lifted to show the pillars it rests on, the world stripped down to its structure by a single blast of breath.

22:19

"Prevented" in the King James means "confronted" or "came at me first," not "stopped." The sense of the English word has reversed since 1611.

22:20

In Hebrew, distress is being squeezed into a tight, narrow place, and rescue is being brought out where there is room to move. "A large place" is that open ground: safety, freedom, the end of being cornered.

22:21

"Clean hands" is a legal-sounding idiom for innocence, hands not stained by wrongdoing, especially bloodshed or bribery. The claim is to being in the right in a specific dispute, not to being sinless in general.

22:23

"Judgments" in the King James does not mean condemnation; it means legal rulings, the decisions God had handed down. "Statutes" are written laws. Keeping them "before me" is the image of holding something in front of your eyes so you never lose sight of it.

22:24

"Mine iniquity" means the wrongdoing that was mine to commit, the sin he could have fallen into. He is saying he steered clear of it, not that he owned a particular sin.

22:26

"Shew" is simply the old spelling of "show." These verses are built as a mirror: whatever a person brings to God is what he gets back, phrase for phrase.

22:27

The King James "froward" means crooked or perverse, and "unsavoury" translates a Hebrew word meaning twisted, or shrewd and hard to outmanoeuvre. The Hebrew makes a deliberate pun: to the twisted person, God shows himself twisty.

22:28

"The afflicted" are the poor and powerless, people with no one to defend them. "Haughty" means arrogant, looking down on others; the Hebrew pictures literally raised, lifted-up eyes, which is why the next words are about bringing them down.

22:29

A lamp is the small clay oil lamp of an ordinary house. In Hebrew idiom a person's lamp burning means their life and line continuing; a lamp put out means death or the end of a family.

22:30

The Hebrew of the first half is disputed. It can mean charging at a raiding band of soldiers, or running at a barricade or wall; the second half, scaling a city wall, favors a military-assault image either way.

22:31

"Tried" in the King James means tested, as metal is tested by fire to prove it pure. "Buckler" is a small round shield carried on the arm.

22:34

A hind is a female deer. The point is not speed but footing: deer cross broken rock and cliff ledges without slipping. "High places" here means literal heights, the mountain ground a soldier must hold, not the hilltop shrines the phrase refers to elsewhere in the Bible.

22:35

The King James "bow of steel" is a mistranslation; steel did not exist in this period. The Hebrew is bronze, meaning a bow reinforced with bronze fittings, extremely stiff, so bending it to string or draw it was a recognized feat of strength.

22:36

The Hebrew word rendered "gentleness" is uncertain and much argued over. It can mean God's gentleness or condescension in stooping to help, or his answering when called on, or his discipline. The ambiguity is in the original, not the translation.

22:40

To "gird" is to belt something on. A soldier tied up his loose robe with a belt before fighting, so being girded with strength means being equipped and made ready for battle.

22:41

"Given me the necks of mine enemies" is a battlefield idiom. It means the enemy turned their backs and ran, showing the napes of their necks, and possibly also carries the image of a victor putting his foot on a defeated man's neck.

22:43

Streets in an ancient town were unpaved earth that turned to churned mud in the rains. Being trampled like street mud is an image of total humiliation, not just defeat.

22:44

"The strivings of my people" refers to conflict inside Israel itself, the long war with Saul's house and later Absalom's revolt, as distinct from the foreign wars in the surrounding lines. "Heathen" in the King James simply translates the Hebrew word for foreign nations or peoples; it carried no sneer in 1611 and implies nothing about their beliefs.

22:45

The Hebrew verb means to cringe or cower, and often to submit falsely, to go through the motions of obedience out of fear rather than loyalty. The submission described is not necessarily sincere.

22:46

"Close places" in the King James means enclosed places: walled fortresses and hill strongholds. The image is of defenders abandoning defenses they can no longer trust.

22:47

"The LORD liveth" is a set formula, the same words used to begin a solemn oath. It asserts that this God is a living, acting one, in contrast to gods that do nothing.

22:48

"Avengeth" here carries the sense of a legal wrong being put right (the punishment a judge or a kinsman exacts on behalf of someone who has been injured), rather than private spite.

22:51

"Anointed" translates the Hebrew *mashiach* (the source of the English word "messiah"), meaning smeared or poured over with olive oil. Pouring oil on a man's head was the ceremony that installed him as king; here it means simply the reigning king, David himself. The opening phrase differs between the two versions of this song: the Hebrew here reads "tower of salvation," while Psalm 18 has a similar-looking word meaning "he gives great victories."