Biblical Eloquence in Psalms 18

I have always found the Psalms to be particularly beautiful, especially considering that the word "psalm" means "praises" in Hebrew. The psalms of David were written to be sung with instrumental music - in other words, each verse and chapter is a song. Although we no longer have the music to which these lyrics were written, the method in which they were written still sing a song that can be "heard" by the reader.

In Psalms 18, David is reflecting on the greatness of God in preserving him from the hand of all his enemies, especially Saul. Several different rhetorical techniques are employed by the bard-prophet in several verses.

1 I will love thee, O Lord, my strength.
2 The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.
6 In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears.

Verses 1 and 2 are exploding with powerful metaphors, but the specific objects with which David compares the Lord to are war images: rock, fortress, buckler, horn, and high tower. Through this technique David allows the content to influence form, for this parallel structure forms a series that renames and praises the Lord in the specific context of war. This series is somewhat of a tricolon, where the three separate clauses (divided by semi-colons) are of equal/similar length that occur together. David's use of this series creates a compounding, powerful image of the Lord.


In verse 6, David uses a form of antithesis where he contrasts his distress and cries of prayer to these prayers reaching the ears of God Himself. The colon in the middle of the verse highlights the contrast between the two, as a before-and-after or cause-effect relationship between the two individual ideas. Overall, these verses use parallelism and vivid metaphors and imagery that capture the interest of the reader, streaming into the mind just as a song.