1A song of ascents.
O dweller in the heavens.
2Look, like the eyes of slaves to their masters,
like the eyes of a slavegirl to her mistress,
so are our eyes to the LORD our God
until He grants us grace.
3Grant us grace, LORD, grant us grace.
for we are sorely sated with scorn.
4Sorely has our being been sated
with the contempt of the smug,
the scorn of the haughty.
PSALM 123 NOTES
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1. To you I lift up my eyes. This initial gesture of prayer of the psalm of supplication is cast in the first-person singular, but, as sometimes happens elsewhere, the psalm glides easily in the next verse from singular to plural, from individual to collective.
2. like the eyes of slaves to their masters. In the affecting simplicity of this compact psalm, virtually the only metaphor (one may exclude the weak metaphoric force of “sated” in verses 3 and 4) is this comparison with the abject dependency of the slave on his master.
like the eyes of a slavegirl to her mistress. It is formulaic in the parallelism of biblical poetry that if ʿeved (“slave” or “servant”) appears in the first verset, shifḥah or ʾamah (“slavegirl” or “handmaiden”) appears in the second verset. Here, however, the extension to the other gender conveys a sense of inclusiveness: everyone in this community, man and woman, looks urgently to God for a sign of grace.
4. the contempt of the smug, / the scorn of the haughty. Unlike other supplications, where the cause of the complaint is specified (slander, illegitimate lawsuits, schemes against the life of the speaker), all we are told here, at the end of the psalm, is that the collective supplicants have been treated with contempt by persons identified only as “the smug,” “the haughty.” A triadic line is used at the end as a marker of closure.