Psalm 61

From the end of the earth does not mean the other side of the world. It means the far edge of the territory, and for a king of Israel that meant across the Jordan. The one time we know David was there was the Absalom revolt, when he crossed the river and made his base at Mahanaim; the psalm names no event, so this stays a likely setting rather than a fact.

The rock that is higher than I is a specific kind of refuge. The Judean and Transjordanian country is full of crags and flat-topped outcrops with a single approach, and a man who reached the top of one could not be rushed. Later fortresses were built on exactly such rocks for exactly this reason.

Two shelters run together in the middle of the psalm. The tent is the tabernacle on Zion where the ark was housed before the temple was built. And the covert of the wings is both the wings of the carved figures spread over the ark's cover and the ordinary sight of a bird pulling its young in underneath it.

The prayer at the end for the king's years to run through many generations follows a court formula used all over the ancient Near East, where subjects prayed long life for the ruler. In Israel it had grown into something larger — a prayer about a dynasty God had promised to keep.