At the time when Yhwh delivered him out of the palm of all his enemies and out of the hand of Saul" (Psalm 18,1) : from David in the Book of Samuel to David in the Book of Psalms and back again

Abstract

This article draws upon a reader-response and canonical-hermeneutical perspective in order to analyze the manner in which 2 Sam 22 and Ps 18 are embedded in their respective literary contexts. Psalm 18’s superscription functions both to guide the interpretation of the following psalm as well as evoke its “Doppelgänger” in 2 Sam 22 (and “behind” it the Song of Moses in Deut 32,1-43). It not only contains a prayer articulated in a situation of distress, as a song of thanksgiving it also retrospectively witnesses to divine acts of salvation that have an abiding validity. This analysis demonstrates that the intertextual reading of biblical texts as a significant moment of the “canon” is not a secondary imposition upon these texts from the outside.