Psalm 144

The subtitle wasn’t part of the original psalm. And the possible byline “of David,” isn’t necessarily a byline. The vague phrase could mean the song was written by David, about David, or was inspired by David. Almost half of the psalms are attributed to David in this way, 73 of 150. Ancient Jewish history tells of David playing a lyre and writing songs. For one, he wrote a song of mourning at the battlefield death of King Saul and his sons: “How have the mighty fallen!” (2 Samuel 1:19-27 New American Standard Bible). An ancient Jewish scroll from about the time of Jesus, discovered among the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, reports that David wrote 3,600 songs.

The songwriter doesn’t say what stories he’s referring to in verses 5-8. But it could sound like the story of God delivering Moses and the Hebrew ancestors of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. God spoke to those refugees of the Exodus from the heights of Mount Sinai, with smoke on the mountain, accompanied by thunder and lightning (Exodus 19). And God created an escape route for them through a body of water known as the Reed Sea, sometimes translated as the Red Sea (Exodus 14).

This could be a lute, a harp, or a smaller harp-like lyre. The Hebrew word describing the instrument is nebel.