Big Idea: God’s sovereign control of the universe establishes a touchstone for understanding God’s relationship to us and ours to him.

Understanding the Text

The content and form of Psalm 2 is generally identified as a royal psalm, composed for and used on the occasion of some Israelite king’s elevation to the throne. We do not know which king, but given the David collection that it prefaces, it could have been composed as a literary introduction to Book 1 (Pss. 3–41). Hilber has made a case for a prophetic origin based on seventh-century Assyrian royal prophecy.1His monarchic dating certainly fits the content and form of the psalm, whether or not it was actually used as a coronation piece.

We have already observed the relation of Psalm 2 to Psalm 1 (see the sidebar in the unit on Ps. 1…