2 Samuel 22:1

This song. The song also appears, with numerous slight variations, as Ps. 18. The first verse occurs as the title of that psalm. Certain other psalms that deal with incidents in David’s life carry titles that explain the historical setting of those psalms (cf. Ex. 15:1; Deut. 31:30; Judges 5:1).

All his enemies. David wrote this psalm after God had granted him a remarkable deliverance out of the hand of his enemies. That would not seem to have been until after the great victory over the children of Ammon and their allies (see chs. 8, 10). It also appears that the composition came while David could still speak before the people of his righteousness and the cleanness of his hands (ch. 22:21), which must have been before his sin against Bath-sheba and Uriah (ch. 11; cf. PP 716).

Out of the hand of Saul. These words tend to substantiate that the psalm does not belong to the last days of David’s reign, even though it here appears toward the close of the record of that reign. David’s deliverance from the hand of Saul, with his victory over the remnants of his house, was sufficiently recent to have been set forth by David as one of the reasons for the writing of the psalm. That observation would seem to require that the psalm be written some considerable time before the close of David’s reign.