Today’s Passage: Psalm 133
This is one of the shortest psalms in the book, only three verses long, and it makes a single declaration and then holds up two pictures to help us feel the weight of it. There is oil running down a beard, and there is dew settling where dew has no natural way to reach. Nothing else is added. There is no complaint here and no plea, only the glad announcement that it is good and pleasant when brothers live together in harmony. We should let that one claim stand as it is, and let the two pictures serve it rather than pull us off into lessons of their own. The unity the psalm praises is something poured out, not something we manufacture.
As you read, hold this: How good and pleasant when brothers live together in harmony.
Psalm 133:1 (BSB)
A song of ascents. Of David. ¹ Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in harmony!
Context Of David, on the road up
A song of ascents. Of David. Pilgrims climbing toward the feasts arrived as tribes and households who were strangers most of the year, suddenly living together for a few days. The psalm calls them brothers. The word can mean a father’s sons. Here it reaches the covenant family under one God. That is the whole setting.
Good and pleasant are not simply the same claim said twice. Good names what is right, and pleasant names what is actually enjoyed, and the psalm says unity is both at once. It is the right thing and the sweet thing together, not a duty grimly tolerated for the sake of a little quiet.
Psalm 133:2 (BSB)
² It is like fine oil on the head, running down on the beard, running down Aaron’s beard over the collar of his robes.
Word study Oil on Aaron
This is the anointing oil of Exodus 30, poured, not sprinkled, over Aaron’s head at his ordination.
"He poured some of the anointing oil on Aaron's head and anointed him to consecrate him." Leviticus 8:12 (BSB)
It ran. It went down the beard and over the collar, further than the head it had been poured on. The word behind “fine oil” is the good oil, the same tov that opened the psalm, so that what verse 1 called good now has a smell and a texture to it. This is Aaron’s consecration, and it speaks of abundance rather than a single measured drop.
The oil does not stay where it is poured, and that is the whole picture. Brothers living together in harmony is not a private glow kept to itself. It runs.
Psalm 133:3 (BSB)
³ It is like the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion. For there the LORD has bestowed the blessing of life forevermore.
Study notes Dew that cannot get there by weather
Hermon stands far to the north, a high cool slope famous for its heavy dew, while Zion lies dry and to the south. Dew from Hermon cannot actually fall on Zion, for the two mountains are too far apart to share the same weather. The psalm knows this perfectly well, and that is exactly why it chose them: it is picturing a blessing reaching a place it has no natural way to reach, the same way that brothers dwelling in unity never quite happens on its own.
There the LORD has bestowed the blessing of life forevermore. It is not the oil in the end, and not the dew, but a blessing He Himself has commanded, in the one place He chose to set it.
Two pictures, and both of them move the same way: poured out and falling down, always coming from somewhere else. Wherever this unity is actually present among God’s people, we can be sure they did not manufacture it themselves.
How good and pleasant when brothers live together in harmony.