Devotional Short Note to Psalm 18: This
Psalm is almost a recasting of 2 Samuel 22. Whereas 2 Samuel 22 is
historiography and a factual accurate portrayal of the reality, Psalm 18 is the
same, but from a different angle, not historiographical but homiletical or
liturgical as background. 2 Samuel 22 is included in the biography of David.
Psalm 18 is par to the Psalms of David. Scholars in Adventism that wants to
delve deeper in the differences between the two castings, need to get the
following book: Abba BenDavid, Parallels in the Bible (Jerusalem: Carta), pp.
61-62. It is the originals side by side with differences annotated with red,
easy to analyze and compare. Do not call it errors. What happened is, Psalms
were copied under very serious circumstances, namely, during the exile and thus
good copies of the originals were not available. So what the Holy Spirit did,
is to allow them to use whatever they had available. Why did the Holy Spirit
allow this situation? Sin caused the exile and religion also suffers when it is
the exile. Manuscript qualities also suffered then. There are slips of the
memory, slips of the eye (2x) in verse 13 in Psalm 18 but the reality of the
shorter phrase is in 2 Samuel 22. There is a slip of the eye also in Psalm
18:16d where the orthography compares very well with Arad Ostraca orthography
of the 6th century BCE because a beth and mem looked similar. Omitted
letters in the text were corrected by a scribe and placed in the margin but the
exile scribe did not know what to do with the marginal corrections, so he wrote
them together and parked them with the beginning word (18:33a). Etymology also
changed between the time of David and the exile, since what was: “called” in
David’s time (2 Samuel 22:7) became “to look for/to seek/to concern oneself
with” in the exile (see the word of Psalm 18:7b in cuneiform at Niniveh as ši’ȗ
in L. W. King [1896]: 175). It seems as if the scribe of Psalm 18 heard the
text, memorized it and then repeated it later to someone since there is a slip
of the memory in the metathesis of letters 18 Psalm 18:46 and 2 Samuel 22:46.
Is the word of God a machine copy? Is it written by perfect angels? No, the
Holy Spirit used men like us for the copying and females for the neat
handwriting in the final product (especially in Byzantine Times when the females
rewrote it neatly on Uncial in a good hand, nothing to do with woman-ordination)
to preserve the Word of God. God claims ownership of us, degenerated human
beings and He claims ownership of His Word with the slips of the hand, eye,
ear, memory and tongue included. Slips and Exile is the same horror and God
wants us to see that. In 2 Samuel 22:43a it says that it will be “like the dust
of the earth” and Psalm 18:43 bring it out more vividly with “like the dust
upon the face of the wind”. It is the same since dust is kicked up by wind
anyway. In Psalm 18:46 and 2 Samuel 22:46 there are again a metathesis of
letters due to a slip in the memory. In Psalm 18:50 two words were transposed
compared to 2 Samuel 22:50 and again it is a case of a slip of the memory by
the scribe of Psalm 18 during the exile. Was the Psalm composed during the
exile? No. It got a Xerox copy of an exilic kind. A note on translation of
Psalm 18:2 where David is saying in the Hebrew, “I will love You, Lord my
strength” which was left out of his biography in 2 Samuel 22. The Coptic
translation also translated it with a Future first person singular “I will love
You”. Is your translation of the actions of God between Psalm 18:8-19 in the
present or past tense? The original verbs are all Future and should be
translated as “He will . . . “. It is the eschaton in mind here and God’s
program was very clear to David and others, namely the succession of Second
Coming, then a millennium in heaven and then the Hell with the Warrior Messiah
taking care of that Great Battle with words resulting in elimination and not
with actions of militancy. In this Psalm the images that were known well from
iconography of the Ancient Near East of power like dragons or great animals of
fear, were used to say that in that eschatological day, what the ordinary
public in David’s day think is fearful, will come about but this time that “monster”
will not be their monster but God. David almost says to the wicked, “Call your
monster ‘God’ because He is going to do great things in the Eschaton when He
will eliminate evil”.