(a song of steps, of David)

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Each of the first five verses of Psalm 124 begins with a word that marks a logical argument: lulei, “if not” (1, 2), azai, “then” (3, 4, 5). It doesn’t take a degree in philosophy to see that such counterfactual claims are unfalsifiable. The language is logical, but the logic is a circle: we survived, therefore the Lord must have been for us, because we survived. The claim is not rational but providential.

Lovers speak this way all the time. If I hadn’t walked into that bookstore and seen her there, hadn’t left those poems on her table when she stepped away a minute, then where would I be? So does everyone who’s brushed by death. If not for the seatbelt, that woman who happened by the pool, if not that one judge with a change of heart, then…. The catalog of what might have happened persuades because it’s infinite. Anything could have happened. By raising and banishing specters of contingency, counterfactual logic makes the actual seem as necessary as it sometimes feels.

The choice, then, of these particular specters matters. “If not for the Lord | being for us” (1a, 2a), anything might have happened to the plural speakers of Psalm 124, so the images of an avoided flood and an escaped snare have particular resonance. The first image, with its association of “flaring nostrils” and “swallowing” and waters that would have “gone over,” clearly alludes to the waters of the Exodus and its type, the primeval flood. The second image borrows snares from texts like Psalm 69 and Psalm 91. This psalm’s shift from the first figure to the second allows a moment of midrashic delight, the escaped bird seeming like a raven or a dove leaving the ark after the flood, even as it blends the exodus (3-5) with the return from exile (7) and even creation (8b).  

What matters most in this psalm, more than its allusions, more than its replacement of what might have been with providential logic, is its liturgical rhetoric of the first-person plural. The first-person plural repeatedly sounds: lanu (1, 2) `aleinu (2), bela`unu (3), banu (3), shetafunu (4), nafsheinu (4, 5), nitananu (6), nafsheinu (7), va’anachnu nimlatnu (7), `ezreinu (8). Some of these instances are just verbal or nominal suffixes, but the threefold repetition of “our neck” (4, 5, 7) and the emphatic “and we” of verse 7 stand out. Into these expressions, the psalm folds three liturgical formulas. In verse 6, there is the common blessing, “Adored | be the Lord.” In verse 8, a revised quotation of Psalm 121:2, “Our help | in the name of the Lord / maker of sky | and land.” At the start, between the two “if not” statements, lies the most obvious stage direction, which makes the second “if not” antiphonal and collective, “let Israel | now say” (1b). Those paired “if not” statements are less logical propositions than statements of loyalty to the Lord, whom they name. The three “then” statements, then, are less conclusions than inventions that look like memories that look like providence. The three explicitly liturgical moments, all linked to the psalm’s fourfold naming of the Lord, reveal its rhetorical purpose, to secure the community in the necessary.