BackgroundThe opening psalm of the fifteen Songs of Ascents, sung by pilgrims setting out on the road UP to Jerusalem for one of the three annual pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot) commanded in Deuteronomy 16:16. The pilgrim begins not yet on the road but in a hostile foreign place, naming Meshech (a remote people far to the north) and the tents of Kedar (Arabian nomads to the south). Together these names span the known world; together they mean "everywhere I have lived has been hostile to peace."
Psalm 120: Distress Among the Warlike
A Song of Ascents.
By Bea Zalel
Psalm 120
A Song of Ascents.
- In my distress I cried to the LORD, and He answered me.
- Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue.
- What will He do to you, and what will be added to you, O deceitful tongue?
- Sharp arrows will come from the warrior, with burning coals of the broom tree!
- Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar!
- Too long have I dwelt among those who hate peace.
- I am in favor of peace; but when I speak, they want war.
Theme
The Songs of Ascents open in the wrong place. A pilgrim heading UP to Zion ought to begin with joy but Psalm 120 begins with a cry from distress and a complaint about lying lips. The very first word of this fifteen-psalm collection is a memory of trouble. That is not a mistake. The Ascents follow the actual emotional arc of pilgrimage: you do not leave home because home is perfect. You leave because home is not enough.
Meshech and Kedar are geographically incompatible. Meshech sits far to the north, Kedar far to the south. No one literally lives in both. The pilgrim is saying something more pointed: wherever I turn, I am surrounded by hostility to peace. Some rabbinic readings treat the pair as code for any Gentile environment that hates the covenant. The Christian reader hears the same note in Hebrews 11: strangers and exiles on the earth, looking for a city.
The hinge of the psalm is the line about peace. The pilgrim is for peace but speech itself has become a weapon in the surrounding culture. This is why the road to Jerusalem matters so much in the next fourteen psalms. Worship is not escape from the world's lying tongues. It is the slow walk toward a place where, at least for a few days at the festival, the speech around you will be praise instead of war.
Discussion questions
- Why might the editors of the Psalter have placed a psalm of distress at the head of a pilgrimage collection rather than at the end?
- What is the geographical impossibility of dwelling in both Meshech and Kedar, and what does that impossibility communicate about the pilgrim's situation?
- How does the deceptive tongue function as a weapon in this psalm, and where else in the Psalter does David name lying speech as a primary form of violence?
- How does the pilgrim's confession "I am for peace" anticipate the messianic role of the Prince of Peace in Isaiah 9:6?
- What does it mean that the Songs of Ascents begin with the pilgrim still NOT in Jerusalem, looking outward from a hostile setting?
- How does Hebrews 11:13-16 illuminate the exile-mood of this opening psalm?
- In what ways does modern public discourse produce a "Meshech and Kedar" experience for those who long for honest speech?
- How might a believer cultivate the inner distance from cultural hostility that pilgrimage symbolizes, even when geographical pilgrimage is impossible?
- What is the relationship between distress (verse 1) and deliverance answered, and how does that pattern recur across the Ascents?
- If you were to name the modern "Meshech and Kedar" in your own daily environment, what would you name, and how would you pray about it?
Read this psalm in another translation
The inline text above is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Open in a new tab to compare with a modern licensed translation: