Psalms 63 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
~1010 BC or ~975 BC, either during David's flight from Saul or his flight from his son Absalom
Location
The Wilderness of Judah, the steep waterless descent from the Jerusalem ridge toward the Dead Sea, one of the harshest landscapes in the region
Audience
Israelites in public worship, later a standard morning prayer in Jewish and Christian daily worship
Situation
The heading places David in the desert, and he turns physical thirst into the image for his longing for God, saying his soul thirsts in a dry and weary land with no water. He remembers seeing God in the sanctuary and vows to praise him through the night watches.
Key Background
The Judean wilderness gets only a few inches of rain a year and drops thousands of feet in a short distance, so thirst there was a genuine survival threat rather than a figure of speech. The psalm calls God's steadfast love better than life itself, which is a striking claim in a culture that generally saw death as the end of any relationship with God. Night watches were the fixed shifts into which the dark hours were divided for sentries, so praying through the watches means using the sleepless hours of danger for worship.