Eight verses in the first person plural, and that is the lesson. Almost every line carries the suffix that means us or our: for us, against us, swallowed us, swept us away, our soul, gave us, we escaped, our help. The psalm describes a disaster that did not happen, using a construction English has to work around: had it not been for the LORD, then. The conditional is opened in verse 1, restarted in verse 2, and never formally closed, because verse 6 breaks off into a blessing instead. Three verses in a row begin with the same word for then, and the danger changes shape at each one, from a mouth to a flood to a trap. One of the fifteen Songs of Ascents, said in many Ashkenazi communities after Minchah on the Shabbatot between Sukkot and Passover, and its last verse ends with the same three words that end verse 2 of Psalm 121.
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A heading, then the start of a sentence that will not be finished, with a stage direction dropped into the middle of it. The psalm is written to be repeated by a crowd, and it says so before it has finished its first clause.
The opening clause again, word for word, now with the danger attached. The attacker is named with the ordinary word for a human being, singular and general, which keeps the enemy unidentified on purpose.
3
אֲזַי חַיִּים בְּלָעוּנוּ
בַּחֲרוֹת אַפָּם בָּנוּ
אֲזַי
a-ZAI
then
חַיִּים
cha-YIM
alive
בְּלָעוּנוּ
bla-u-NU
they would have swallowed us
then they would have swallowed us alive,
בַּחֲרוֹת
ba-cha-ROT
when burned
אַפָּם
a-PAM
their anger
בָּנוּ
ba-NU
against us
when their anger burned against us;
The first of three consequences, and the most physical. Swallowing something alive is what an animal does, and the anger is described as burning, so the picture is a mouth rather than an army.
The second consequence changes element. Water replaces the mouth, and the harm moves from something done to us to something passing over us, which is worse because it does not need to notice us at all.
5
אֲזַי עָבַר עַל נַפְשֵׁנוּ
הַמַּיִם הַזֵּידוֹנִים
אֲזַי
a-ZAI
then
עָבַר
a-VAR
would have passed
עַל
al
over
נַפְשֵׁנוּ
naf-she-NU
our soul
then they would have passed over our soul,
הַמַּיִם
ha-MA-yim
the waters
הַזֵּידוֹנִים
ha-zei-do-NIM
the raging ones
the raging waters.
The third repeats the second with the words in reverse order, so the waters land at the end of the line. The adjective comes from a root used for boiling over and for insolence, which makes the flood arrogant as well as deep.
The unfinished sentence is abandoned and a blessing takes its place. Teeth bring back the mouth of verse 3, and the psalm still has not said whose teeth they are.
Our soul has escaped like a bird from the fowlers' trap;
הַפַּח
ha-PACH
the trap
נִשְׁבָּר
nish-BAR
was broken
וַאֲנַחְנוּ
va-a-nach-NU
and we
נִמְלָטְנוּ
nim-lat-NU
we escaped
the trap was broken, and we escaped.
A third danger, the only one described as actually sprung. The verse repeats its verb at both ends, once for the bird and once for the speakers, with the breaking of the trap set between them as the thing that made both possible.
8
עֶזְרֵנוּ בְּשֵׁם יְהֹוָה
עֹשֵׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ
עֶזְרֵנוּ
ez-re-NU
our help
בְּשֵׁם
be-SHEM
is in the name of
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
Our help is in the name of the LORD,
עֹשֵׂה
o-SE
maker of
שָׁמַיִם
sha-MA-yim
heaven
וָאָרֶץ
va-A-retz
and earth
maker of heaven and earth.
The only verse in the psalm with no danger in it. It is a formula, short enough to be quoted on its own, and it answers the whole poem by naming where the help came from rather than describing what it did.
♦ PARDES analysis: פרדס
The four levels of Jewish reading of the sacred text: פשט Peshat (literal meaning), רמז Remez (symbolic allusion), דרש Drash (midrashic interpretation), סוד Sod (mystical meaning). The word פרדס means "orchard", each level is a fruit.
פשט · Peshat: literal meaning
The shape is a sentence that breaks. Verses 1 and 2 open a counterfactual, verses 3 to 5 give three things that would have followed, and then verse 6 gives up on the syntax and blesses instead, which is more convincing than a completed sentence would have been. The three dangers escalate by changing category rather than by getting bigger: a predator, a flood, a snare. The rescue itself is never described. Nobody fights, no wall holds, no army arrives; the trap simply breaks in verse 7, in the passive, with no agent named, and verse 8 supplies the agent as a name rather than as an action.
רמז · Remez: allusion
The language of this psalm is late, and two markers show it plainly. The relative is written as a prefix in שֶׁהָיָה (she-ha-ya, v.1), שֶׁהָיָה (she-ha-ya, v.2) and שֶׁלֹּא (she-lo, v.6), where classical prose would use the separate word asher, and אֲזַי (a-zai, v.3) is a form of the word for then that belongs to the later stage of the language. Both features run through the Songs of Ascents as a group. Two words are worth checking against a translation. נַחְלָה (nach-la, v.4) is an unusual form, read by some as a noun meaning torrent and by others adverbially, so English versions differ on whether it names the water or describes how it came. הַזֵּידוֹנִים (ha-zei-do-nim, v.5) is built from a root that covers both boiling and presumption, which is why the water is called proud in older translations and raging in newer ones. Neither is wrong; the Hebrew holds both.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
The enemy in this psalm has no name, no nationality and no weapon, and the danger is given only as images: teeth, water, a snare. That is what makes it reusable, and the instruction in verse 1 makes the intention explicit by handing the words to Israel to repeat rather than reporting one man's rescue. Read against the Torah's water crossings, verse 4 inverts them: there the waters go over the pursuers, here they are described as almost going over us. The psalm never claims a specific deliverance, so each generation saying it supplies its own, which is the opposite of how a historical psalm works.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The mystical reading takes the three dangers as three levels of threat to the same thing, since נַפְשֵׁנוּ (naf-she-nu, v.4), נַפְשֵׁנוּ (naf-she-nu, v.5) and נַפְשֵׁנוּ (naf-she-nu, v.7) are one word, our soul, appearing at each stage. What is at risk is never property or life but nefesh, and the bird in verse 7 is that soul seen from outside, small and caught by something it did not see. The breaking of the snare is passive on purpose in this reading: the escape is not an act of the bird, and the bird's own effort is the one thing the verse leaves out. Verse 8 then says where the strength was, in the name, which is the standard way of pointing at an action without describing it.
Hebrew text: Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), after the Aleppo Codex, via Sefaria, CC BY-SA. English: The Holy Scriptures, a New Translation (JPS 1917), via Sefaria, public domain. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).