Verse 1 contains a very nice image for what happened, for when David says "you lifted me out of the depths" he chooses a verb which was used of drawing a bucket up out of a well. He is saying that it is as if God reached down and pulled him up out of death's pit when, apart from God, there was no hope for him at all.

From time to time in these studies I have pointed out that there are various types of psalms—the scholars call them genres—and that it is often helpful to remember the type one is dealing with in a specific psalm. Psalm 30 is a thanksgiving psalm. However, it is related to a type of psalm known as a lament, since thanksgiving psalms are usually expressions of praise to God for having heard a lament. In this case, some of the words of the lament are preserved in verses 9 and 10. Thanksgiving psalms are also related to hymns, another genre, since the psalmist's thanksgiving usually takes the form of sung praise.

Elijah’s experience of God’s presence in the gentle whisper is what it is like as we come to the end of Psalm 29. The storm has passed by, and what remains is God himself, as peaceful and as much in control of all things as he has always been. Yet here are two more points.

We might think that a poem this narrowly focused would be dull, but the psalm avoids dullness by two forms of motion. One is the passing of the storm which is described as sweeping over the entire country from north to south (vv. 3-9). The other is the movement from heaven where the psalm begins (vv. 1, 2) to earth where it ends (vv. 10, 11). The more I study it, the less surprised I am that Harry Ironside called Psalm 29 probably the finest poem in the Bible and "one of the loveliest poems I have ever seen.²