1A song of ascents.
I lift up my eyes to the mountains:
from where will my help come?
2My help is from the LORD,
maker of heaven and earth.
3 He does not let your foot stumble.
Your guard does not slumber.
4Look, He does not slumber nor does He sleep,
Israel’s guard.
5The LORD is your guard,
the LORD is your shade at your right hand.
6By day the sun does not strike you,
7The LORD guards you from all harm,
He guards your life.
8The LORD guards your going and your coming,
PSALM 121 NOTES
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1. I lift up my eyes to the mountains: / from where will my help come? Those scholars who think that the “songs of ascents” are psalms framed for pilgrims to Jerusalem see here a specific reference to the mountains around Jerusalem and imagine that the going and coming of the last line refer to the pilgrim’s departure from Jerusalem after coming to the Temple, to travel through the potentially dangerous Judahite hill country. All this may be excessively specific. We cannot be sure that these are actually pilgrimage psalms, and the resonant language of the poem is quite general: the speaker, fearful of unspecified dangers—of the sort that any person might encounter in life—looks up at the mountains around him and wonders who or what will help him.
3. He does not let your foot stumble. From here to the end of the psalm, we have what looks like a response to the question and affirmation of the speaker at the beginning. The form of the psalm, then, untypically, would be a dialogue. Adherents of the pilgrimage theory claim that the second speaker is a priest.
4. He does not slumber nor does He sleep. The beautiful simplicity of the language of the psalm turns on cadenced repetition. The key word of assurance, “guard” (shomer), occurs six times in the eight lines of the poem. There is virtually no figurative language here, the sole exception being the lexicalized metaphor (hence a barely visible one) for protection, “shade,” to which perhaps the stumbling of the foot might be added as a synecdoche for falling into danger. Without poetic ornamentation, the psalm becomes a moving expression of trust in God, using traditional language and patterned repetition.
6. By day the sun does not strike you. The dead metaphor of “shade” is resuscitated in this notion of protection from sunstroke, a real danger in the semi-desert climate of the Land of Israel.
nor the moon by night. In all likelihood these words refer to the danger of being moon-struck, evidently thought to be a cause of madness in ancient Israel, as it has been imagined in many cultures.
7. The LORD guards. In a climactic pattern of asserted trust, three of the six repetitions of “guard” occur in the last two lines of the poem.
8. now and forevermore. This concluding reference to the eternality of God’s protection completes an arc begun with the reference to creation at the beginning of the poem in the designation of God as “maker of heaven and earth.”