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 6^th 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”.