What is in David's mind at this time? Or to put it differently, what lessons is he learning as he reflects, first on the people's defeat by Edom and, second, on the promises of God to give an eventual victory? It seems to me that there are two of them.
The second section of the psalm contains an appeal to God to help those who have been attacked by the Edomites (v. 5), followed by God's answer in the form of an oracle (vv. 6-8). The oracle follows so closely upon the appeal that we know that faith has already won a victory.
We do not know specifics of the defeat that came to Israel at this time, but the opening verses of Psalm 60 portray it as a great disaster. It was so great that two powerful images are used to describe what it was like.
Even in times of blessing we can expect some things to go wrong. In fact, even when we are closest to the Lord ourselves, we can be sure that there are still areas of our lives that will cause us trouble and need correcting.
Psalm 60 is the last of the psalms with an historical setting from the life of David. This setting is given in the title, and the title is the longest of such introductory titles in the psalter. Psalm 18 also has a long title, but this is longer. It occupies three-and-a-half lines in our text and about the same amount of space in the standard Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew text the titles are numbered as verses, and the title is actually the first two verses of the psalm.
