Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Samuel · About this commentary
He Trains My Hands for War
2 Samuel 22:26-51
26 With the merciful you will show yourself merciful. With the perfect man you will show yourself perfect. · WEB
God answers people in the key they bring him, arms a soldier for battles he cannot win, and makes a man great by gentleness.
"With the merciful you will show yourself merciful... With the crooked you will show yourself shrewd" 2 Samuel 22:26–27.
The song's middle section states a principle rather than a story: God meets people in kind. It is not that God changes character, but that the same holiness is experienced as mercy by the merciful and as an unsolvable shrewdness by the crooked — the sun that softens wax hardens clay. The summary line follows at once: you will save the afflicted people, but your eyes are on the arrogant, that you may bring them down 2 Samuel 22:28, which is Hannah's theology in a king's mouth 1 Samuel 2:7–8, sung by a man who has now been on both ends of it.
"For by you, I run against a troop. By my God, I leap over a wall" 2 Samuel 22:30.
The imagery turns from being rescued to being enabled — and the two are not in tension. God does the delivering and then equips the delivered for work that is still theirs to do: he teaches my hands to war, so that my arms bend a bow of bronze 2 Samuel 22:35, feet made sure like a deer's on high ground, steps enlarged so the ankles do not turn 2 Samuel 22:34 2 Samuel 22:37. The picture is of a soldier's whole body trained by someone else.
"You have also given me the shield of your salvation. Your gentleness has made me great" 2 Samuel 22:36.
This is the most surprising line in the poem, and possibly in the book. Amid bronze bows and crushed enemies, the king says what actually made him: not his sling, not his generals, not the covenant's guarantees — God's gentleness, his stooping to a shepherd boy. Greatness credited to another's condescension is the opposite of everything Absalom stood at the gate saying about himself.
The battle stanzas that follow are hard and unembarrassed 2 Samuel 22:38–43 — enemies consumed, beaten as small as dust — the language of a warrior culture, and the honest voice of a man whose forty years were mostly war.
"Yahweh lives! Blessed be my rock! Exalted be God, the rock of my salvation" 2 Samuel 22:47.
The close turns outward twice. First to the nations — I will give thanks to you, Yahweh, among the nations, and will sing praises to your name 2 Samuel 22:50, a verse Paul later quotes as evidence that the nations were always meant to be included in this praise Romans 15:9. Then to the future: he gives great deliverance to his king, and shows loving kindness to his anointed, to David and to his offspring, forever more 2 Samuel 22:51.
The last word of the reign's psalm is the covenant of chapter seven, said in the third person about his anointed — the singer stepping back to look at the promise rather than at himself, and finding that it runs past his lifetime.
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