(a song of steps)

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Psalm 123 stands or falls on one gesture. The lifting of eyes, which began Psalm 121 in the imperfect form, half-fear, half-hope, here becomes more complicated still. The gesture that starts this psalm is presented as completed, not “I lift” but “I have lifted,” in the perfective form of the verb. Here, the lifting of eyes is now not a search for rescue, but a prolonged performance to elicit sympathy. The speaker’s upward look, which was figured by mountains in Psalm 121, is in Psalm 123 compared to the socially inequitable look that a servant or slave gives a master. No, not a master: the master’s hand.

That look has so many layers to it, as the psalm goes on to explore. How does a female slave look up at a mistress’s hand? Is it defiance or despair? Is it Stockholm syndrome, shame, or weariness, rage, or expectation, manipulation? And what is that master’s hand going to do? Free? Pat? Point? Strike?

It is possible but dangerous to approach this psalm without such a process of imaginative, questioning identification. PJ Botha’s 2001 essay, “Social Values and the Interpretation of Psalm 123,” which attempts to read the psalm according to its “ancient values,” decides hastily that “servants do not get fed-up with their masters, they get fed-up with the arrogance of those who do not recognise the honour of their masters and as a consequence also dishonour the servants of that master” (195). While the ideology of slavery might whiten its sepulchers with the discourse of “honor,” it takes only a gram of sympathy to see that every servant “gets fed up” with a system of debasement.

It takes an atom of sympathy, not to mention an iota of attention to the second half of the psalm itself. The speaker wails, “feel for us Lord | feel for us” (3a). Then she protests, twice using an expression that literally means “to be greatly filled or surfeited”: “Oh we have had | more than enough shaming / more than enough | up to our necks” (3b-4a). This speaker is fed up, saying nothing about the “honor of their masters.” Instead she shifts to the plural to indicate how far up to here we all have had it with “shaming” (3b, 4c) and “sneering” (4b). She indicts “the easy” (4b) and “the proud” (4c), making no exceptions for the master or for God. This is not a psalm that encourages pasted-on justifications of slavery or servanthood as some kind of honor society. Please. The psalm begins by looking up at “you sitting | in the skies” (1) and ends by being looked down upon, “the sneering | of the easy / the shaming | of the proud” (4).

Comparing reverence with servitude— servility, even— might seem to matter less to societies like ours, who tell ourselves we have eradicated slavery despite ample socioeconomic evidence to the contrary, if Friedrich Schleiermacher had not so consequentially defined piety with this clause: “that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent” (Georg Behrens’s translation of daß wir uns unsrer selbst als shlechthin abhängig… bewußt sind). In popular English translations, the idea that religion is “the feeling of absolute dependence” was deeply influential in systematic theologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It helped shape the modern study of religion. Add to Schleiermacher the corporate language of “servant-leadership,” popularized since the 1970s, which justifies increasingly hierarchical organizational charts by play-acting their inversion. Performing servitude is… unhelpful. Servility and piety don’t have to overlap.

In short, Psalm 123 relies on readers to take on at least two roles. First, we follow its speaker’s taking-on of the role of a servant to wonder what it must be like to look up at a master’s hand. Four times, those eyes (1a, 2a, 2b, 2c). In the middle of the psalm, the imperatives “feel for us Lord | feel for us” guide readers into the position of the Lord and master, insisting that we, too, feel such sympathy ourselves. By the end, we readers are back in the point of view of the servant, but all servants, plural, who are fed more than all the way up by the plural them, those who are seated, and easy, and proud, all of whom enable what shaming does to the eyes, the hands, and to the vital, vulnerable neck.