1A song of ascents.
To the LORD when I was in straits
I called out and He answered me.
2LORD, save my life from lying lips,
from a tongue of deceit.
3What can it give you, what can it add,
a tongue of deceit?
4A warrior’s honed arrows
with broom-wood coals.
5 Woe to me for I have sojourned in Meshech,
dwelled among the tents of Kedar.
6 Long has my whole being dwelled
7 I am for peace, but when I speak,
they are for war.
PSALM 120 NOTES
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1. A song of ascents. This is the first in a sequence of fifteen psalms that bear this heading. Most scholars assume that “ascents” refers to pilgrimages to Jerusalem. (The verb “ascend” or “go up” is the technical term used for pilgrimage.) But among other meanings that have been proposed, it could be a musical term, perhaps referring to an ascent in pitch or a crescendo in the song, or it could refer to the pattern of incremental repetition that is common to many of these poems. There are some linguistic indications that these psalms were composed in the Second Temple period, and one of them, Psalm 126, explicitly invokes the return to Zion.
I called out and He answered me. These words are a formula for the thanksgiving psalm. Because the rest of the poem expresses the anguished plea of a beleaguered person, one must construe what follows as a full quotation of the speaker’s “calling out” to God in his time of distress.
2. lying lips, / . . . tongue of deceit. This emphatic parallelism clearly indicates that the source of distress is that the speaker has been the target of malicious slander.
4. A warrior’s honed arrows / with broom-wood coals. At first glance, this line may seem to be a leap without transition, but in Psalms malicious speech is characteristically represented as a sharp arrow or sword. Broom wood was known to burn hot for a long time, even when the surface of the coals had turned to ash, so the image of intense burning complements the image of piercing arrows.
5. Meshech / . . . Kedar. These are two far-flung locations. Meshech is to the extreme north-west in Asia Minor, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (it is mentioned in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10:2). Kedar is to the southeast, in the Arabian peninsula. One might wonder about the history of peregrinations of the speaker, but because it seems unlikely that a single person would have sojourned in both these places, it may be plausible to understand them as metaphors for living among people who behave like strangers, even if those people were within a stone’s throw of Jerusalem (as someone today might say, I felt as though I were living in Siberia or Timbuktu).
6. those who hate peace. The Masoretic Text shows a singular noun here, but other Hebrew manuscripts, the Septuagint, and the Syriac have the more likely plural.
7. I am for peace. The Hebrew appears to say “I am peace,” but, without emending the text, the most plausible way to understand these two words, ʾani shalom, is that they function as though there were an elided “for” (in the Hebrew not a word but the particle le). This antithesis between peace and war at the end neatly picks up the idea that slander is a harmful weapon—piercing arrows and burning coals.