Today’s Passage: Psalm 120
Yesterday’s psalm wore this same heading in passing, one line among many others. Today the heading itself takes center stage: fifteen short psalms, numbered 120 through 134, carry it, a heading no other psalms share, a song of ascents. Israelite pilgrims sang them on the road up to Jerusalem, climbing toward a city built on a hill for the three annual feasts that required every able worshiper to appear before the LORD. Five of the fifteen anchor the days ahead. This is the first of them, and it does not open with the road, the climb, or the destination. It opens with a man who is simply tired of the people around him.
As you read, hold this: notice what the psalm names as the actual trouble. It is not illness, poverty, or physical danger. It is speech, other people’s lying words, and the exhaustion of wanting peace in a place that keeps handing back war.
Word study "A song of ascents" — ma'alah (superscription)
The word behind “ascents” is מַעֲלָה (ma'alah, mah-ah-LAH) — Strong's H4609, built from the verb “to go up.” In the heading over Psalm 120 it appears in its plural, articled form, הַמַּעֲלוֹת (hamma'alot, ham-mah-ah-LOTE), “the goings-up” or “the ascents.” Jerusalem sat on a ridge, so any road toward it was, quite literally, uphill. Fifteen psalms wear this heading, and pilgrims are thought to have sung one on each stage of the approach, or all fifteen together as they neared the city. The word names a physical fact about the terrain and, across these fifteen songs, becomes a picture of the whole journey toward God: it is always, in some sense, a climb.
Psalm 120:1-2 (BSB)
A song of ascents. ¹ In my distress I cried to the LORD, and He answered me. ² Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue.
The psalm’s first movement is already answered before it finishes describing the trouble. “I cried… and He answered me” comes first, a settled fact, and only then does verse 2 spell out what the crying was about: not war, not famine, but “lying lips and a deceitful tongue.” Whatever this pilgrim is leaving behind him, its sharpest edge is other people’s speech.
Psalm 120:3-4 (BSB)
³ What will He do to you, and what will be added to you, O deceitful tongue? ⁴ Sharp arrows will come from the warrior, with burning coals of the broom tree!
Study notes A question the psalm answers itself
Verse 3 turns and speaks directly to the deceitful tongue, asking what will be done to it, and verse 4 answers its own question without waiting for a reply: a warrior’s sharp arrows, and burning coals from the broom tree, a desert shrub whose wood was known for producing an especially fierce, long-lasting fire. The two images match the offense with a kind of poetic precision. A lying tongue wounds from a distance, the way an arrow does. A lying tongue also lingers, smoldering in a hearer’s memory long after the words are spoken, the way broom-wood coals keep burning. The psalmist does not have to take up either weapon himself. He simply names what deceit earns and leaves the arrows and the coals in God’s hand, not his own.
Psalm 120:5-7 (BSB)
⁵ Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! ⁶ Too long have I dwelt among those who hate peace. ⁷ I am in favor of peace; but when I speak, they want war.
Context Meshech and Kedar
Meshech and Kedar were real peoples, one associated with the region south of the Black Sea, the other with nomadic Arabian tribes descended from Ishmael, places about as far apart as two points on Israel’s map could be. No pilgrim actually lived in both at once. That is the point: the psalmist is not filing a travel report. He is reaching for the two most distant, most stereotypically hostile addresses he can name and using them together as shorthand for wherever he currently finds himself, surrounded by people who prize conflict. Verse 5’s woe is a figure for hostile surroundings in general, not a claim about a literal itinerary.
The psalm’s last line is its plainest: “I am in favor of peace; but when I speak, they want war.” No resolution follows. The psalm does not end with the pilgrim’s circumstances fixed, his neighbors converted, or his exhaustion lifted. It ends with him still there, still wanting peace, still met with war whenever he opens his mouth. What has changed is only what verse 1 already said: he has cried out, and the LORD has answered. The road up to Jerusalem, for this pilgrim, begins in a place that offers no peace at all, which is exactly why the road matters.
Personal Application
- The psalmist does not withdraw from wanting peace, even though wanting it seems to cost him something every time he speaks. Where do you find yourself tempted to stop actively wanting peace, simply because peace keeps being met with resistance?
- “Too long have I dwelt among those who hate peace” is the cry of someone who has been in this situation for a while, not a single bad conversation. Does this psalm’s particular exhaustion, the wear of an ongoing relational conflict rather than a single dramatic wound, resonate with anything you are currently carrying?
Pray to Close
The truth to carry from this psalm: crying out to the LORD does not require your circumstances to change first, and wanting peace remains right even when everyone around you keeps choosing war.
Praise: for a God who answers before the pilgrim’s road has even properly begun.
Confess: any place where frustration with a hostile environment has tempted you to stop wanting peace yourself.
Ask: for the same resolve this psalmist shows, to keep speaking peace even into rooms that keep answering with conflict.
Worship for Today
Psalm 120 · Poor Bishop Hooper
Poor Bishop Hooper’s setting, part of their years-long EveryPsalm project of putting every psalm to music, stays close to the text: the distress of verse 1, the plea of verse 2, and the ache of dwelling among those who hate peace all appear nearly word for word, sung rather than paraphrased into something more resolved than the psalm itself is. It is a fitting way to sit with a psalm this plain about its own trouble. Naaman Wood and Bruce Benedict’s “Deliver Me (Psalm 120),” released through Cardiphonia Music’s Songs for the Sojourn project, offers a second, distinct musical setting of the same psalm, built around a sung refrain of “deliver me” for anyone who wants to sit with it further.
Listen: