Top Highlights

• 1. He who dwells in the Most High’s shelter. This psalm is one of a number that have no superscription (though the Septuagint shows—or adds—“a David psalm”). It also does not belong to any obvious cultic genre of psalms. The Israeli scholar Yair Hoffman, noting its eloquent expression of God’s unflagging providential protection, has interestingly c...
• 2. I say of the LORD. Although the Septuagint corrects this to “He says of the LORD,” evidently in the interests of consistency, such unmarked transitions from one speaker to another (it is now the man who shelters in God who speaks) are not uncommon in biblical literature. In fact, there are three speakers in the poem: the poet (verse 1, verses 3–...
• 4. His pinion…His wings. It may be misguided to conclude that God is imagined as a large mother bird. The sheltering care of the bird for her fledglings is a recurrent biblical image for solicitous protection; thus, the metaphor appears to refer to the function, not to the imagined appearance of the deity. But such metaphorical usages may have had ...
• 7. Though a thousand fall at your side. In all likelihood, the setting evoked is a raging epidemic in which vast numbers of people all around are fatally stricken. The image of martial danger, however, introduced by the flying arrow of verse 5 and the shield and buckler of verse 4, is superimposed on the image of danger from the plague, life imagin...