With Psalm 121 we enter into the "Songs of Ascent." Each of the Psalms from 121 through 134 begins with the Hebrew description shir hama‘alot, which is translated as "Song of Ascent" or "Song of Steps." These Psalms were believed to be songs used by pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. And given that Jerusalem was set on a hill in the hill country of Judea, no matter your approach you always traveled "up" to Jerusalem. As pilgrims made their climb toward the city they would sing the Songs of Ascent.
It would seem, then, that the hills of the opening line of Psalm 121 are a reference to the hills surrounding Jerusalem. The pilgrim looked up to the hills in anticipation of meeting the Lord in the temple. However, some scholars view the mention of hills as an ominous sign, as a location of danger. Enemies lurked in the hills. In this view, the singer is surrounded by threats and cries out, "From where does my help come?"
This view, the hills hiding threats, fits the song well. The theme is one of protection. The Hebrew word šmr, meaning guard, protect, and keep, is used six times in the short song. The Lord is described as "your Keeper" and "your Protector." As Protector, the Lord is vigilant and watchful: "the Protector of Israel
does not slumber or sleep."
One of the more delightful descriptions of this protection, in my opinion, comes from these lines:
The Lord is your keeper;Living as I do in West Texas, I appreciate the petition for shade to avoid getting struck by the sun. But notice there's also a petition for protection from being moonstruck. As I expect you know, in the ancient imagination the full moon could cause mental derangement. It's where we get the legend of the werewolf transforming at the full moon. It's also where we get the words lunatic and lunacy. Visit with police and ER staff who work the nightshift. They talk about the effects of the full moon. I worked in an inpatient psychiatric hospital for four years. In the morning we'd come in to find that the patient board had filled up to overflowing with new admissions. "What happened last night!?" one of us would ask the nightshift crew. And an old nurse would say, "It was a full moon last night."
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day
nor the moon by night.
In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes how the self was once experienced as "porous" but that today we experience it as "buffered." As Taylor has described the change over the last 500 years:
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.He goes on to describe this in more detail:
Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here...
And so the boundary between agents and forces is fuzzy in the enchanted world; and the boundary between mind and world is porous...[A] similar point can be made about the relation to spirits. The porousness of the boundary emerges here in various kinds of “possession”—all the way from a full taking over of the person, as with a medium, to various kinds of domination by or partial fusion with a spirit or God. Here again, the boundary between self and other is fuzzy, porous. And this has to be seen as a fact of experience, not a matter of “theory” or “belief.”
To return to Psalm 121 and the worry over being "moonstruck." When the ancients walked at night under the gaze of the full moon they experienced vulnerability. There were powers all around that could assail them. We moderns, by contrast, don't fear being moonstruck. The moon is just a big rock. Dead and inert. The self becomes psychically buffered from, walled off from, external powers and realities.
Now, I don't think we need to start fearing the moon. But the psychic enfoldment and enclosure of the self has had consequences. In Hunting Magic Eels I describe the spiritual impacts of this enclosement. In The Shape of Joy I describe the mental health impacts. In this, I think Hunting Magic Eels and The Shape of Joy are companion books, telling the same story from two different perspective, the spiritual and the psychological.
Here's the point for reading Psalm 121. The experience of the self in Psalm 121 is porous and therefore vulnerable. Threats loom. So the singer cries out, "Where will my help come?" And the answer comes:
My help comes from the Lord.
