If Yahweh Had Not Been on Our Side
1 A Song of Ascents. By David. If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, let Israel now say, 2 if it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, when men rose up against us, 3 then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their wrath was kindled against us, 4 then the waters would have overwhelmed us, the stream would have gone over our soul. 5 Then the proud waters would have gone over our soul. 6 Blessed be Yahweh, who has not given us as a prey to their teeth. 7 Our soul has escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare. The snare is broken, and we have escaped. 8 Our help is in Yahweh’s name, who made heaven and earth.
A psalm about what did not happen, and the bird that got out of the trap.
A Song of Ascents. By David. If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, let Israel now say,
The psalm is built on a sentence that is never completed in the ordinary way. It states a condition twice and then describes, in three verses, what would have followed — and the whole poem is about an event that did not occur.
then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their wrath was kindled against us,
Swallowed alive is the psalter's standard image for being consumed by an enemy, and alive makes it worse: not killed and then destroyed, but taken down whole.
4 then the waters would have overwhelmed us, the stream would have gone over our soul. 5 Then the proud waters would have gone over our soul.
The image changes to flash flooding, which in that country arrives in a dry watercourse without warning and takes everything with it. The repetition of gone over our soul is what a person does when describing a near miss.
Blessed be Yahweh, who has not given us as a prey to their teeth.
Our soul has escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare. The snare is broken, and we have escaped.
The finest verse in the psalm. A bird in a fowler's net cannot get out — that is what the net is for — and the psalm is careful about the sequence. The escape did not happen because the bird was clever or strong. The snare is broken, and only then is the escape reported a second time.
Our help is in Yahweh’s name, who made heaven and earth.
The same line the hundred and twenty-first psalm used, and it is the pilgrims' conclusion after a psalm spent imagining what would have happened otherwise. Gratitude here is a matter of counting the disasters that did not arrive, which is a discipline rather than a mood.
settled What this mark means