Psalms 18: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The speaker praises the LORD as his rock, shield, and rescuer, and tells how he cried out when death closed in on him. God answers by coming down in a storm of earthquake, smoke, fire, dark clouds, thunder, and lightning, and pulls him out of deep waters. The speaker says God repaid him according to his righteousness and clean hands, then describes God arming him for battle, giving him strength and sure footing, and handing him victory over his enemies and over nations. The psalm ends with thanks and praise, and says God gives great rescue to his king and shows loving devotion to his anointed, to David and his descendants forever.

Claim by Claim

1. 18:1
   • The speaker loves the LORD.
   • The LORD is the speaker's strength.
2. 18:2
   • The LORD is the speaker's rock.
   • The LORD is the speaker's fortress.
   • The LORD is the speaker's deliverer.
   • God is the speaker's rock (a crag of refuge).
   • The speaker takes refuge in God.
   • The LORD is the speaker's shield.
   • The LORD is the horn of the speaker's salvation.
   • The LORD is the speaker's stronghold.
3. 18:3
   • The speaker will call upon the LORD.
   • The LORD is worthy to be praised.
   • The speaker will be saved from his enemies.
4. 18:4
   • The cords of death surrounded the speaker.
   • Torrents of destruction terrified the speaker.
5. 18:5
   • The cords of Sheol surrounded the speaker.
   • The snares of death confronted the speaker.
6. 18:6
   • In his distress the speaker called upon the LORD.
   • The speaker cried to his God for help.
   • God heard the speaker's voice from his temple.
   • The speaker's cry came before God, into his ears.
7. 18:7
   • The earth shook and quaked.
   • The foundations of the mountains trembled.
   • The foundations were shaken.
   • This happened because God was angry.
8. 18:8
   • Smoke went up from God's nostrils.
   • Devouring fire came from God's mouth.
   • Coals were kindled from him.
9. 18:9
   • God bent the heavens down.
   • God came down.
   • Thick darkness was under God's feet.
10. 18:10
    • God rode upon a cherub and flew.
    • God swooped on the wings of the wind.
11. 18:11
    • God made darkness his hiding place.
    • God's covering around him was dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.
12. 18:12
    • Out of the brightness before God his thick clouds passed.
    • There were hailstones and coals of fire.
13. 18:13
    • The LORD thundered in the heavens.
    • The Most High gave forth his voice.
    • There were hailstones and coals of fire.
14. 18:14
    • God sent out his arrows and scattered them.
    • God shot out many lightnings and routed them.
15. 18:15
    • The channels of waters were seen.
    • The foundations of the world were uncovered.
    • This happened at the LORD's rebuke.
    • This happened at the blast of the breath of God's nostrils.
16. 18:16
    • God reached down from on high.
    • God took hold of the speaker.
    • God drew the speaker out of many waters.
17. 18:17
    • God delivered the speaker from his strong enemy.
    • God delivered the speaker from those who hated him.
    • They were stronger than the speaker.
18. 18:18
    • They confronted the speaker in the day of his calamity.
    • The LORD was the speaker's support.
19. 18:19
    • God brought the speaker out into a broad place.
    • God delivered the speaker.
    • God did this because he delighted in the speaker.
20. 18:20
    • The LORD rewarded the speaker according to his righteousness.
    • The LORD repaid the speaker according to the cleanness of his hands.
21. 18:21
    • The speaker has kept the ways of the LORD.
    • The speaker has not wickedly departed from his God.
22. 18:22
    • All God's judgments were before the speaker.
    • The speaker did not put God's statutes away from him.
23. 18:23
    • The speaker was blameless before God.
    • The speaker kept himself from his own iniquity.
24. 18:24
    • The LORD repaid the speaker according to his righteousness.
    • The LORD repaid the speaker according to the cleanness of his hands in God's sight.
25. 18:25
    • With the loyal, God shows himself loyal.
    • With the blameless man, God shows himself blameless.
26. 18:26
    • With the pure, God shows himself pure.
    • With the crooked, God shows himself tortuous.
27. 18:27
    • God saves an afflicted people.
    • God brings down haughty eyes.
28. 18:28
    • God lights the speaker's lamp.
    • The LORD the speaker's God lights up his darkness.
29. 18:29
    • By God the speaker runs against a troop.
    • By his God the speaker leaps over a wall.
30. 18:30
    • God's way is perfect.
    • The word of the LORD is refined and proven.
    • God is a shield to all who take refuge in him.
31. 18:31
    • No one is God except the LORD.
    • No one is a rock except our God.
32. 18:32
    • God girds the speaker with strength.
    • God makes the speaker's way perfect.
33. 18:33
    • God makes the speaker's feet like the feet of deer.
    • God sets the speaker upon his high places.
34. 18:34
    • God trains the speaker's hands for war.
    • The speaker's arms bend a bow of bronze.
35. 18:35
    • God has given the speaker the shield of his salvation.
    • God's right hand has upheld the speaker.
    • God's condescending gentleness has made the speaker great.
36. 18:36
    • God enlarged the speaker's steps beneath him.
    • The speaker's feet did not slip.
37. 18:37
    • The speaker pursued his enemies and overtook them.
    • The speaker did not turn back until they were consumed.
38. 18:38
    • The speaker shattered them so that they could not rise.
    • They fell under the speaker's feet.
39. 18:39
    • God girded the speaker with strength for the battle.
    • God subdued under the speaker those who rose up against him.
40. 18:40
    • God gave the speaker the necks of his enemies as they turned in flight.
    • The speaker destroyed those who hated him.
41. 18:41
    • They cried out, but there was no one to save them.
    • They cried to the LORD, but he did not answer them.
42. 18:42
    • The speaker beat them fine as dust before the wind.
    • The speaker cast them out like the mud of the streets.
43. 18:43
    • God delivered the speaker from the strivings of the people.
    • God made the speaker the head of the nations.
    • A people the speaker had not known will serve him.
44. 18:44
    • As soon as they hear of the speaker, they obey him.
    • Foreigners cringe in submission to the speaker.
45. 18:45
    • Foreigners lose heart and fade away.
    • Foreigners come trembling out of their strongholds.
46. 18:46
    • The LORD lives.
    • The speaker's rock is blessed.
    • Let the God of the speaker's salvation be exalted.
47. 18:47
    • God is the one who gives the speaker vengeance.
    • God subdues peoples under the speaker.
48. 18:48
    • God delivers the speaker from his enemies.
    • God lifts the speaker up above those who rise against him.
    • God delivered the speaker from the violent man.
49. 18:49
    • The speaker will give thanks to the LORD among the nations.
    • The speaker will sing praises to God's name.
50. 18:50
    • God gives great deliverance to 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.

18:1

Where the King James prints "LORD" in capital letters, the Hebrew has God's personal name, four consonants usually written YHWH. By the time the psalms were being read aloud in synagogues, that name was not spoken; readers substituted the ordinary word for "Lord," and English translations have followed the substitution ever since. This same poem appears, with small differences of wording, as 2 Samuel 22.

18:2

"Buckler" is an old English word for a small round shield carried on the arm. "The horn of my salvation" uses the horn of a bull or ram as a stock image for strength and the power to attack, the way we might say "muscle." The string of images here is military architecture: a rock is a crag or cliff too steep for attackers, a fortress a walled refuge, a high tower a lookout keep.

18:4

The Hebrew word behind "ungodly men" is *belial*, a term meaning something like worthlessness, ruin, or destruction. Older translators took it as a description of wicked people; most modern ones take it as a name for destruction or the underworld itself, so the line becomes "torrents of destruction." The image is floodwater sweeping a person off his feet.

18:5

"Hell" here translates *Sheol*, the Hebrew word for the grave or the underworld, the place all the dead were thought to go, good and bad alike. It is not the place of punishment that the English word "hell" suggests to a modern reader. Also, "prevented" in 1611 English meant "came before" or "confronted," not "stopped."

18:6

"His temple" can mean either the sanctuary in Jerusalem or God's dwelling in heaven; the Hebrew word covers both, and the poem does not settle which is meant. The verses that follow describe him coming down from the sky, which pulls toward the heavenly sense.

18:7

Verses 7 to 15 describe God arriving as an earthquake and a thunderstorm. Poets in Israel and in the nations around it used this same stock of images for a god coming out to fight: shaking ground, cloud, thunder, lightning and wind.

18:8

In Hebrew, anger is described physically as heat in the nose or a burning nose, the idiom in verse 7 translated "he was wroth" literally says his nose burned. Verse 8 keeps that image going with smoke rising from the nostrils.

18:9

The sky is pictured as something solid enough to be bent, a spread canopy or dome that God pushes down and steps through to come to earth.

18:10

A cherub in the Hebrew Bible is not a chubby winged baby; that image is a much later European invention. Cherubim were powerful composite creatures, part animal and part human, carved with outstretched wings over the ark in the sanctuary and pictured as bearers of God's throne. Here one serves as a mount, paired in the next line with the wind itself.

18:11

"Pavilion" in the King James means a tent, especially the large tent a king or an army commander sets up and sits inside.

18:12

"Coals of fire" falling alongside hail is the poem's way of describing lightning strikes.

18:13

"The Highest" translates *Elyon*, "Most High," an old title for God. Thunder as a god's voice was standard storm imagery in the ancient Near East.

18:14

The arrows and the lightning are the same thing: "arrows" is a poetic term for lightning bolts, and the two halves of the line say it twice, which is how Hebrew poetry normally works. "Discomfited" in older English means thrown into panic and routed, not mildly embarrassed.

18:15

This assumes the ancient picture of the world: dry land resting on foundations, with sea channels beneath. Drain the water away and you would see the bottom of the sea and the pillars the world stands on. The storm strips the world back to its bare structure.

18:16

Deep water stands for deadly danger all through this poem, picking up the flood of verse 4. The rescue is being hauled out of a drowning.

18:18

"Prevented" again in its old sense: they got there first, confronted him, met him head-on.

18:19

Being brought into "a large place" is a standard Hebrew idiom for rescue. Distress is imagined as being hemmed in, squeezed, cornered; safety is open ground with room to move.

18:20

"Clean hands" is legal language for innocence, hands not stained by wrongdoing, a person against whom no charge stands. It is not about ritual washing.

18:22

"Judgments" and "statutes" are the standard terms for the body of law Israel understood as given by God: case rulings and standing decrees. Keeping them "before me" means keeping them constantly in view, the way one keeps written instructions in front of one's eyes.

18:23

"Iniquity" is an old word for sin, meaning doing what is wrong.

18:25

The King James "merciful" translates chesed, a Hebrew word for the steady, loyal kindness people owe one another inside a committed relationship. It is nearer to faithfulness than to pity.

18:26

"Froward" is an old English word for crooked, twisted, perverse. The Hebrew is a deliberate play on words: the same root is used of the person and of God's response, so the line says God deals with the twisted in a twisted way, meaning something like outmaneuvering them, matching cunning with cunning.

18:27

"High looks" is a literal translation of a Hebrew phrase for arrogance: eyes raised, looking down on everyone else.

18:28

A household lamp was a small clay dish of oil with a wick, and keeping one alight through the night was the mark of a living, occupied house. "My lamp" stands for a person's life and, by extension, the survival of his family line.

18:29

The Hebrew of the first half is ambiguous: the word can mean a raiding party of soldiers or a wall or rampart, so the line reads either "I can charge a troop" or "I can run at a barrier." Either way it pairs with scaling a city wall, the two hardest things a soldier had to do in ancient warfare.

18:30

"Tried" here means tested, in the sense of metal put through fire to burn off the impurities and prove it genuine.

18:31

"Save" here is an old word meaning "except." The line asks who is God besides the LORD.

18:32

To "gird" is to tie a belt tightly around the waist, hitching up the long robe so you can run or fight. Girding someone with strength means equipping them for action, putting on their war belt for them.

18:33

A hind is a female deer, proverbially sure-footed on steep ground. "My high places" here means mountain heights and commanding ground held by an army; it is not the same as the hilltop worship sites elsewhere called high places.

18:34

The metal is bronze, not steel, which was not yet in use. A composite war bow had to be bent by main force to string it, so bending a bronze-fitted bow is a boast about sheer physical strength, not about snapping a weapon in half.

18:35

The right hand is the sword hand and the strong hand throughout the Hebrew Bible, so "your right hand" is shorthand for God's effective power.

18:36

A wide path is the opposite of a narrow ledge above a drop. The Hebrew says the ankles do not give way.

18:40

The Hebrew idiom is literally "you gave me my enemies' neck": that is, you made them turn and run so I saw the backs of their necks. The related picture of a victor setting his foot on a defeated enemy's neck is a common one in ancient art.

18:42

Streets were unpaved dirt, so the mud of the street is the ordinary image for something worthless, trodden on and swept aside.

18:43

"Heathen" translates *goyim*, simply "the nations", peoples other than Israel. The English word has picked up a sneer that the Hebrew does not carry. The same word appears in verse 49.

18:44

"Strangers" means foreigners, people of other nations. The Hebrew verb translated "submit themselves" carries a suggestion of cringing or of feigned, unwilling obedience, submission given because there is no choice.

18:45

"Close places" are fortified strongholds, walled positions people shut themselves inside. The picture is enemies forced to come out of their defenses.

18:46

"The LORD liveth" declares that this God is a living one, set against carved gods that cannot move or act. "Blessed be" means may he be praised, not may good things come to him.

18:47

"Avengeth me" is more a legal idea than a personal one: to take up someone's case and get them justice against the people who wronged them.

18:50

"Anointed" translates *mashiach*, the word that comes into English as "messiah" and into Greek as "christ." It means smeared with oil, referring to the ceremony in which oil was poured on the head of a new king to mark him as chosen for office. Here it is the reigning king himself. "Seed" is the ordinary Hebrew word for offspring or descendants.