1A song of ascents.
When the LORD restores Zion’s fortunes,
we should be like dreamers.
2Then will our mouth fill with laughter
and our tongue with glad song.
Then will they say in the nations:
“Great things has the LORD done with these.”
3Great things has the LORD done with us.
We shall rejoice.
4Restore, O LORD, our fortunes
5They who sow in tears
in glad song will reap.
6He walks along and weeps,
the bearer of the seed bag.
He will surely come in with glad song
bearing his sheaves.
PSALM 126 NOTES
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1. Zion’s fortunes. The Hebrew shivat (ostensibly, “return,” though in the King James Version and other translations rendered as “captivity”) is a mistake for either shevut or shevit (as in verse 4), both attested to in various Hebrew manuscripts. The term means “previous condition.” Precisely this idiom for the restoration of a previous condition is used at the end of Job (42:10). The English rendering of the term as “fortunes” is adopted from the New Jewish Publication Society translation.
2. Then will our mouth fill with laughter. Given the fluidity of verb tenses in biblical poetry, there is disagreement as to whether the verbs here and in what follows are to be understood as past or future. The prayer for the restoration of national fortunes in verse 4 is a strong argument that the fulfillment indicated here has yet to take place. (The interpretation proposed, among others, by Hans-Joachim Kraus—that the exiles have already returned from Babylonia but are now praying for the full restoration of the national home—seems strained.) The anticipated gladness, then, is imagined to be so intense that it would be like a dream—the realization, we might say, of a wish-fulfillment dream.
4. like freshets in the Negeb. This is a familiar detail of topography and climate invoked elsewhere in biblical poetry. The reference is to wadis, or dry water gulches, that with the onset of the rainy season are filled with streams of water. It is an apt image for restoring the previous condition of a desolate Zion, and the idea of rushing water after aridity prepares the ground for the image of sowing and reaping in the last two verses of the psalm.
5. They who sow in tears / in glad song will reap. The long cycle of the agricultural year, beginning in the labor of planting and concluding with the fulfillment of the harvest, is an eloquent metaphor for a structure of historical time that moves from a difficult present to a happy future. That idea of reversal through time is neatly reinforced by the tight antithetical chiasm of the line: a (“sow”), b (“in tears”), b' (“in glad song”), a' (“reap”). The term rinah, “glad song,” is the thematic thread that ties the psalm together, appearing in verse 2, here, and again in verse 6. It is as though this psalm, a prayer for national restoration that is presumably sung or chanted, were striving to turn into glad song.
6. He walks along . . . / He will surely come in. The effectiveness of these two concluding lines of the poem, with their neat interlinear antithetical parallelism, is in the unadorned directness of the parallel syntactic-semantic structure, and it seems a mistake to convert the lines into explanatory subordinate syntax (for example, by placing a “though” at the beginning of verse 6, as several modern translations do). Rather, we are invited to envisage two coordinate images, separated in time and precisely antithetical in meaning: “He walks along” (halokh yelekh), then “He will surely come in” (boʾ yavoʾ, the same emphatic structure of infinitive followed by imperfective verb). “Come in” refers to coming in from the fields after binding the sheaves of grain.