Had Not the Lord

The Psalm

A Song of degrees of David.

1. If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say;
2. If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us:
3. Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us:
4. Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul:
5. Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.
6. Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.
7. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.
8. Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

Setting and occasion

A Song of degrees of David — שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת לְדָוִד. Fifteen psalms carry the first half of that heading, Psalms 120 to 134, and the Psalm 130 lesson set out what the degrees are likely to be and why the question is not settled; this lesson borrows that rather than repeating it. What is new here is the second half. Four of the fifteen name David and one names Solomon, and this is one of the four. Whatever that attribution is worth — and the ascent collection was assembled long after David — it tells you the compilers thought a psalm about a national escape belonged in a book made for walking.

That is worth a moment before the exposition. The Songs of Ascents are travel songs: short, plain, memorable, nothing in them that needs a choir. Psalm 124 is what people sang on a road, in company, going up to a feast — and what it gives them to sing about is the time they nearly died. Not a creed, not a lament, not a petition. A memory, carried on the journey, with instructions attached.

Because the psalm does something no other psalm in this October set does: it tells the congregation to say it. יֹאמַר־נָא יִשְׂרָאֵל — now may Israel say — stands at the end of verse 1, between the first statement of the conditional and its identical repetition in verse 2. The psalm is not merely available for corporate use. It scripts its own recitation, stops halfway through its opening sentence to hand the line to the room, and then says it again so the room can. There is no I anywhere in the eight verses.

About the occasion the psalm says nothing at all, and the omission is not an oversight. Absalom’s revolt has been proposed, and Sennacherib’s army, and the return from Babylon, and the days of Esther; each fits, and that is the problem with all of them. Look at what the psalm calls the enemy in verse 2: אָדָם. Not the nations, not our enemies, not a name — just man. The same refusal the Psalm 62 and Psalm 130 lessons both found in their own psalms, and for the same reason. A psalm that named its enemy could be sung by the people who had that one. This psalm can be sung by anybody who has been up against somebody, which is everybody, which is why it has lasted.

The shape of the psalm

Psalm 124 is one sentence and then its answer, and the sentence is in the subjunctive. Verses 1 to 5 are a single unreal conditional — if it had not been … then … then … then — describing, in mounting detail, a death that did not occur. Verse 6 is the first indicative verb in the psalm, and it is a blessing. That is the whole architecture, and it hangs on two small words.

Notice what the grammar does to a room. Five verses of subjunctive are five verses in which nothing is reported. The congregation is not being told what happened to it; it is being walked, slowly and in detail, through what did not. Most thanksgiving works the other way round — here is the trouble, here is the rescue — and this psalm withholds the trouble entirely and describes only the outcome it escaped. To sing it is to be made to imagine your own destruction while standing somewhere safe, on purpose, out loud, in company.

And it imagines it four different ways. The psalm reaches for one picture after another, and none of them is repeated.

That last row is the point of the table. Having spent six verses on ways to die, the psalm does not finish with a seventh image. It finishes with a formula — our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth — which is not a picture of anything and is the only line in the psalm a congregation could use tomorrow morning. The imagery was for the memory. The last verse is for the road.

Edinburgh, 1582 — and the votum

The other psalms in this October set are here for a hymn, a slogan or a doctrine. Psalm 124 is here for a street and a sentence: one afternoon in Edinburgh, and one line that Reformed congregations have been saying at the start of worship ever since.

The fourth of September, 1582

John Durie was a minister of Edinburgh who preached against the men around the young king and was ordered out of the town for it in the May of 1582. The order did not hold. By September he had leave to come back, and the burgh went out to meet him.

James Melville, who was there or near enough to it, put the scene in his diary, and the detail everybody remembers is the sound. The crowd met Durie at the Nether Bow and went up the High Street with him — “with bare heads and loud voices” — singing the hundred and twenty-fourth Psalm, “Now Israel may say, and that truly,” till, as Melville has it, heaven and earth resoundit. The accounts put the number near two thousand, and say they sang it in four parts as they walked.

Melville’s Autobiography and Diary is the source, and the Scots spelling varies between editions; check the wording against a printed text — the Wodrow Society edition is the usual one — before reproducing it in an order of service. One detail often attached to this story, that the Earl of Arran was more frightened by the sight than by anything else he had seen in Scotland, is not in the passage as located for this lesson. It may well be sourceable; it is left out here until it is.

Three things about that afternoon are worth saying to a congregation, and none of them is the anecdote itself.

The first is that they were not given the psalm. Two thousand people do not sing anything in four parts, walking uphill, unless they already have it. The Reformation in Scotland had put a metrical psalter into ordinary hands, and what that produced was a town that could raise the right psalm at the right moment without an order of service, a precentor or a rehearsal.

The second is that it was the right psalm, and they knew it was. Durie had been put out and was coming back; Psalm 124 is about a danger that came to nothing. Nobody had to explain the application. The psalm’s refusal to name its enemy — אָדָם, just man, in verse 2 — is exactly what let it be picked up and used by people whose trouble was nothing like the psalmist’s.

The third is the one a lesson can easily walk past. The line they sang, in the old Scottish version, is “Now Israel may say, and that truly” — which is verse 1’s own instruction, יֹאמַר־נָא יִשְׂרָאֵל, now may Israel say. The psalm tells a congregation to say it, and on the fourth of September 1582 a congregation said it, in the street, at the top of its voice. The psalm was not being applied. It was being obeyed.

Covenanters

Psalm 124 belongs to the Scottish Covenanters in the way a tune belongs to a regiment, and that is the reason it is on this October list. The claim is entirely plausible and the evidence is thinner than the Durie story: a psalm this short, this portable and this exactly suited to people being hunted by their own government does not need documentation to have been sung, and the generations that kept the Covenants had a hundred occasions for it. Say what can be said. A congregation is better served by one well-sourced afternoon in 1582 than by four undated ones.

The votum

Verse 8 had a second career, and it is the one most Reformed Christians are already living in without knowing where the words come from.

Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth. Since Calvin’s Geneva, Reformed services have opened with that sentence, and it acquired a name: the votum, from the Latin for a vow or a solemn desire, also called the adjutorium after the first word of the Latin verse. It stands at the head of the Dutch Reformed orders, where the practice of opening with it became general, and at the head of a great many service books since.

Two honest qualifications keep the point from being overstated. The verse was used at the beginning of worship before the Reformation — the medieval Latin rite had it — so the Reformers did not invent the practice so much as keep it and give it weight. And it is not a prayer, or a greeting, or a call to worship in the sense of an invitation. It is a statement of fact made before anything else is done, which is why it works as an opening: a room says where its help comes from first, and everything that follows in the hour is said by people who have already admitted that.

Which is, exactly, what the psalm does. Eight verses of what nearly happened, and then one portable sentence at the end that a congregation can carry off the page and into a Sunday morning. The liturgy did not borrow a convenient line from Psalm 124. It kept the psalm’s own ending and put it at the beginning, and a church that says it every week is being taught the psalm whether it notices or not.

Singing Psalm 124

This is the one psalm in the October set where the tune is part of the history. Everywhere else a leader chooses a setting; here there is a version that a town sang walking uphill in 1582, and it is still in print.

Metre and settings

The warning in this psalm is not about stanza numbering but about metre. The 1650 gives Psalm 124 twice, in two different metres, and the second one belongs to one tune. Print the wrong pairing and a congregation will get four lines into it before the whole thing falls over. Check metre and first line together, in the edition in your hands.

Tunes

• OLD 124TH — for the second version, and really for nothing else. Sing it in parts if the room can; that is how it was sung on the High Street.
• MARTYRDOM — for the common-metre text: minor, weighted, and it suits verses 3 to 5.
• DUNDEE (French) — steady and quickly learned, if the psalm is new to the room.
• STRACATHRO or BANGOR — plainer alternatives; confirm the metre against your own book before printing.

Leading suggestion

Use the psalm’s own instruction, because it is the only psalm in this set that gives one. Verse 1 breaks off at now may Israel say and verse 2 begins the sentence again from the top. So let one voice take verse 1 — read or sung — and bring the congregation in at verse 2, saying the same words. The psalm was built for exactly that and most settings bury it.

Then do not hurry verses 3 to 5. They are the longest stretch in the psalm and they describe nothing that happened, which makes them the easiest to rush. A room that gets through the swallowing, the torrent and the proud waters in fifteen seconds has not had time to imagine any of it, and imagining it is the work the psalm is asking for.

Verse 8 should be said as well as sung. If your church opens worship with our help is in the name of the LORD, this is the Sunday to say where the sentence comes from, and to let the congregation hear it arrive at the end of the psalm it was taken from. If your church does not, this is a good Sunday to try it once.

And if you have the second version and a room that will attempt it, sing it to OLD 124TH and tell them about 1582 first. Not as a history lesson — as an instruction. Two thousand people sang this walking up a hill because they knew it by heart and it fitted the day. That is what a psalter is for.

This is the fifth of the six psalms gathered for October, and they hang together better than a list suggests. Psalm 46 is sung from inside a city that cannot be moved; Psalm 62 by a man being quietly pushed, who finds that only one thing bears weight; Psalm 130 from under the water, by a man whose trouble is himself; Psalm 32 by a man who stopped hiding and found he had been blessed before he opened his mouth; Psalm 119 by a man whose every answer comes from something he was told; and Psalm 124 by a whole people counting what did not happen to them. A fortress, a rock, a debt, a verdict, a lamp and an escape — and all six now have lessons of their own.

The psalm’s own settings, recordings and music sheets are collected on its psalter page, with recordings here, as they are added.