Psalms 124
Psalm 124 carries the heading A Song of degrees of David - one of fifteen short psalms (120-134) sung by pilgrims climbing the steep roads up to Jerusalem for the great feasts. The word translated degrees means steps or goings-up; these were the songs of the ascent. This one is a community looking back. Something terrible had very nearly happened to them - an enemy had risen up, the danger had closed in like rising water - and they had come through alive. The psalm is what the rescued say afterward, when the shaking has stopped and they finally understand how close it had been.3
It opens by making the whole congregation say a daring thing out loud: If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say; If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us (vv. 1-2). Twice the song begins the sentence and twice leaves it hanging on that one word, If - and then it dares to finish the thought, to picture in detail the disaster that did not come. Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us: Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul: Then the proud waters had gone over our soul (vv. 3-5). The danger is drawn first as a ravenous mouth and then as a drowning flood - a soul on the very edge of going under for the last time. The psalm refuses to pretend the threat was small. It looks straight at how near the end had been.
And then, at verse 6, the whole song turns: Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth (v. 6). The rescue is told in one of the most vivid pictures in the Psalter: Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped (v. 7).1 The trap that had been set on them simply breaks, and they are gone - free, like a bird shooting up out of a torn net. The last verse sets the whole experience down on a single confession, word for word the same as Psalm 121:2: Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth (v. 8). The New Testament will hear in this the deepest rescue of all - the snare of the last enemy broken, and the people of God set free by the One who is for them.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 124:1-5 · A Song of degrees of DavidIf It Had Not Been the LORD Who Was on Our Side
1If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say; 2If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us: 3Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us: 4Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul: 5Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.
The psalm begins by handing the congregation a sentence and asking them to finish it: If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say. Then it starts the same sentence again - If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us - as though the singer cannot say it just once. There is something deliberately unsettling in that repeated If. It is the word of the near miss, the word you say afterward with the colour drained from your face: if that had gone differently, if help had come a moment later. The psalm makes the people relive, out loud and together, the rescue that almost did not happen. And notice where it puts the credit. Not if we had not fought so hard, not if we had not been so clever or so brave - but if it had not been the LORD who was on our side. The whole survival is traced back to one cause: that the LORD was on our side. The phrase is plain and almost startling in its intimacy - God was not neutral, not distant, not merely watching; He was for them, on their side, when the men rose up.3
The danger is named first in human terms: when men rose up against us (v. 2). Before the psalm reaches for its great pictures of teeth and flood, it tells the plain truth - this was an attack by people, real and hostile, who rose up with intent to destroy. The verb carries the sense of rising in opposition, standing up to come against someone. And the next line shows what fuelled it: their wrath was kindled against us (v. 3). This was not a misunderstanding or an accident; it was anger that had caught fire, a hostility burning hot enough to consume. The psalm does not soften the picture or pretend the enemies were less than they were. It lets us feel the weight of being the smaller party when a furious, organized opposition rises up to come against you. And it is precisely into that honest naming of the threat - men, wrath, rising up - that the psalm sets its one decisive counterweight: that the LORD was on their side. The size of the danger is exactly what makes the size of the rescue visible.
Now the psalm reaches for its first picture of what would have happened: Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us (v. 3). The image is a mouth - an open, ravenous mouth - and the word quick here means alive. They would have swallowed them down alive, the way the earth opened and swallowed the rebels in the wilderness, the way a great beast takes its prey whole and still struggling. It is a picture of being consumed utterly, with no remnant left, no survivor to tell of it. This is what kindled wrath intends when it is fully let loose: not to wound but to devour, not to defeat but to erase. The psalm is unflinching about the appetite of the threat - the enemy was not content to push them back; it meant to take them down entirely. Hold that word swallowed in mind. In a few verses the song will answer it with another image of teeth - the prey snatched back from the very mouth that meant to consume it.
The picture now changes from a mouth to a flood, and the danger rises by stages: Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul: Then the proud waters had gone over our soul (vv. 4-5). First the waters overwhelm - they sweep in, more than can be withstood. Then the stream, the torrent in flood, goes over our soul - up over the head, the point at which a drowning person can no longer breathe. And then, the third time, the waters are given a character: the proud waters. The flood is not merely deep; it is arrogant, swollen, surging with the same overbearing force as the enemy's kindled wrath. Across the Old Testament, raging water is the standing image of chaos and of every hostile power that threatens to undo God's people - and the repetition here, gone over our soul… gone over our soul, makes us feel the water still rising, the head going under twice. This is the lowest point of the psalm: a people about to disappear beneath proud, overwhelming water. And it is the very next word - Blessed - that lifts them out of it.3
Psalm 124:6-8Our Help Is in the Name of the LORD
6Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. 7Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. 8Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.
At verse 6 the whole psalm pivots on one word: Blessed. Up to here the song has been all danger - the kindled wrath, the open mouth, the rising flood. Now, without warning, it breaks into praise: Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. And look how the imagery answers itself. Back in verse 3 the enemy meant to swallow them up; here the same picture of teeth returns - but now the people are not given to them. The prey that was as good as caught, already in the jaws, is not handed over after all. The verb is telling: the LORD hath not given them. The deliverance is not framed as the people wriggling free by their own effort, but as something God did or, more precisely, did not allow - He did not give them up. There is a quiet theology of rescue in that phrasing. They were not strong enough to keep themselves out of the teeth; what saved them was that the One on their side would not hand them over. The praise of verse 6 is the sound the prey makes when it discovers it has not been abandoned to the predator after all.
The psalm now gives the rescue its most vivid and lasting image: Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped (v. 7). A fowler is a bird-catcher, and his snare is the hidden trap - the net or the spring-trap concealed in the grass - designed to seize a small bird the instant it lands. Picture the bird caught: tangled, struggling, utterly unable to free itself, held fast by a device built precisely to hold it. That is the helplessness the image insists on. And then the turn comes in four short words: the snare is broken. Notice what is not said - the psalm does not say the bird was clever, or strong, or that it slipped a knot. It says the trap itself broke. The deliverance comes from outside the bird entirely; the very mechanism of capture fails, and in the same instant the bird is gone - and we are escaped. The word escaped frames the whole verse, first and last, so that the freedom rings twice. It is sudden, total, and unearned: one moment held fast in a trap you could never break, the next moment free in open sky. Few pictures in Scripture say rescue so completely.
The psalm ends by setting the whole experience down on one sentence: Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth (v. 8). It is worth pausing on how much weight that line carries. Everything before it - the wrath, the flood, the snare, the rescue - comes to rest here, on a confession of where help is found. And it is, word for word, the very line sung in another Song of degrees: My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth (Ps. 121:2). The pilgrims on the road shared this confession like a refrain. Notice its two halves. Our help is in the name of the LORD - not in alliances, not in walls, not in their own arm, but in the LORD's name, which in Scripture means His revealed character, all that He has shown Himself to be. And then the reach of it: who made heaven and earth. The help of the rescued is grounded in the Maker of everything - the One with power over the proud waters because He made the seas, over every snare because He made the world it is set in. A help that small could fail; a help this large cannot run short. The psalm that began trembling over if ends standing on the firmest ground there is: the name of the Maker of heaven and earth.1
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 124 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the threefold nephesh (vv. 4-5, 7, “soul”), for pach (v. 7, the fowler's “snare”), and for the long Jewish discussion of the repeated opening If it had not been the LORD who was on our side.
- Psalm 124 ↔ Romans 8 · Luke 4 · 1 Corinthians 15Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Psalm 124 to the New Testament rescue - the God who is for us against whom none can stand (Rom. 8:31), the mission to set at liberty them that are bruised (Luke 4:18), and the victory over the last enemy in which death loses its sting (1 Cor. 15:55-57).
- Psalm 124 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 124 - the meaning of A Song of degrees, the force of the doubled opening If it had not been the LORD, the flood imagery of verses 4-5, and the picture of the bird escaped from the broken snare in verse 7.
Where this echoes in Scripture
If It Had Not Been the LORD Who Was on Our Side
- Romans 8:31If God be for us, who can be against us?The psalm’s “on our side” (vv. 1-2) pressed to its furthest point - God for His people against every opposing power.
- Psalm 118:6The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?The same confession of the LORD “on my side” when men rise up - fear answered by who is for us.
- Psalm 18:16-17He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters... he delivered me from my strong enemy.The rescue from overwhelming waters (vv. 4-5) - drawn out of the flood by the hand of God.
- Isaiah 43:2When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.The proud waters that would go over the soul (v. 5) met by the promise that they shall not overflow.
Our Help Is in the Name of the LORD
- Luke 4:18he hath sent me... to preach deliverance to the captives... to set at liberty them that are bruised.The broken snare of verse 7 made the heart of Christ’s mission - sent to set the captive free.
- 1 Corinthians 15:55-57O death, where is thy sting?... thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.The soul nearly swept under (vv. 4-5) rescued from the last enemy - the deepest snare broken.
- Psalm 91:3Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.The same word for the fowler’s snare (pach, v. 7) - the trap the LORD Himself delivers from.
- Psalm 121:2My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.A companion Song of degrees with verse 8’s exact confession - help in the Maker of heaven and earth.
- Matthew 16:18upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.The enemies that rise up and the powers that would swallow - promised never to prevail against His people.