Biblion Bible Commentary
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Your Children Like Olive Shoots
Psalms 128:1-6
1 A Song of Ascents. Blessed is everyone who fears Yahweh, who walks in his ways. · WEB
The blessing of the previous psalm described at a table, and it is an ordinary evening.
Blessed is everyone who fears Yahweh, who walks in his ways Psalms 128:1.
The companion to the psalm before it. That one said that houses and cities cannot be built by effort; this one describes what a household looks like when the building has been done by somebody else.
For you will eat the labor of your hands. You will be happy, and it will be well with you Psalms 128:2.
Eating what you worked for sounds unremarkable until it is set against the alternative, which the prophets describe repeatedly — sowing a crop and watching an army or a landlord take it. To eat your own labor is to live in a country where that does not happen.
Your wife will be as a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of your house, your children like olive shoots around your table Psalms 128:3.
The scene is a meal. A vine growing against the inside wall of a courtyard and young olive plants around a table — and olive shoots come up around the base of an established tree, which makes the picture one of continuity rather than merely of numbers.
What the psalm calls blessing is a family eating together in a house they are not going to lose.
Behold, this is how the man who fears Yahweh is blessed Psalms 128:4.
The verse insists on it, and the insistence matters. Against every extravagant promise elsewhere in the collection, this is the one the pilgrims sang on the road: ordinary work, ordinary food, and the people you live with.
May Yahweh bless you out of Zion, and may you see the good of Jerusalem all the days of your life Psalms 128:5.
Yes, may you see your children's children. Peace be upon Israel Psalms 128:6.
Grandchildren, and then the nation. The psalm widens from a table to a city to a people in two verses, and the same word closes it as closed the two before.
settled What this mark means