The pilgrim collection pauses here — and looks back.
Five psalms into the ascent, the journey turns its face toward what was survived to begin the journey at all. Psalm 124 is testimony, not instruction. It does not tell the pilgrim what to do or where to look. It summons the community to remember together what they almost didn't survive — and to say it out loud.
Let Israel say. The communal summons at the opening is not incidental. This is not a private recollection. It is a liturgical act — the congregation called to own the testimony together, to speak the near-catastrophe in public, to let the relief be shared rather than hoarded. What was almost lost belongs to everyone. So does the account of being delivered.
There is a spiritual discipline embedded in that summons that is easily missed. Before the pilgrim arrives at the temple, before the great acts of worship and sacrifice, the collection requires this: stop. Turn around. Look at what was behind you on that road. Name it. Say what would have happened if God had not been on your side.
The almost is the beginning of gratitude.
The psalm's opening move is arrestingly unusual. The Hebrew word lûlê — if it had not been — is one of the most loaded conditional particles in the language. It appears in Scripture at moments of near-catastrophe narrowly averted: in the Joseph story, when his brothers pause on the edge of violence; in Abigail's intervention before David's rage reaches Nabal. It forces the reader to inhabit the counterfactual — to stand inside the near-miss and feel its weight — before the relief is allowed to arrive.
The psalm repeats the conditional twice: if it had not been the LORD who was on our side... if it had not been the LORD who was on our side. The repetition mimics the catching of breath. It is a rhetorical device that makes the congregation hold the almost in their lungs before they exhale into the deliverance. You cannot rush past the lûlê. The psalm will not permit it.
Then comes a cascade of three images, each capturing a different texture of what was nearly endured.
Swallowed alive — the verb is bala', the gullet of the enemy, chaos as a devouring mouth. This is the language of Sheol, of the deep, of Leviathan. The threat is not merely physical danger but annihilation — being taken down into the place where there is no return.
The flood, the torrent, the raging waters — mayim, nachal, zêdônim. The waters swell, the torrent rushes, and then — most significantly — the waters are described as zêdônim, insolent, proud. These are not merely dangerous waters. They are arrogant waters. This connects the psalm to the great creation and exodus traditions of the Hebrew canon — the same waters that threatened at the Reed Sea, the same depths that swallowed Pharaoh's armies, the same chaos that God held back at creation. The pilgrim is not simply recounting a personal danger. They are locating their survival within the largest story Israel knows.
The bird escaping the snare — and here the imagery shifts register entirely. After the cosmic scale of flood and chaos-waters, the psalmist reaches for something small and particular: a bird, a trap, a fowler. What is remarkable is the precision of the deliverance: the snare is broken. Not that the bird slipped through, not that the bird found a gap. The trap itself is destroyed. The freedom is not provisional.
The psalm closes with eight words that function as the theological grammar of the entire Ascent collection: Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth. The one who set the boundaries of the deep is the one who said: not this one. Not today.
The communal summons — let Israel say — has stayed with me longer than almost anything else in this collection.
There is a reticence, I think, among many people who have survived something significant, about claiming the survival as testimony. It can feel presumptuous. Why me and not another? What does my deliverance say about those who were not delivered? These are honest questions and they deserve honest sitting-with, not dismissal.
But the psalm's own structure answers them. The reason the bird escaped is not because it was a better bird — more deserving, more favoured, more carefully tended than the ones still caught. The answer lies in the communal summons at the psalm's opening: let Israel say. The testimony is required not for the sake of the one who survived but for the sake of those who have not yet escaped. The living witness keeps hope alive for those still in the snare. Survival, on these terms, is not a badge of individual favour. It is a stewardship. The testimony is offered outward, for the companions.
I have seen this happen in the work I do alongside people carrying the weight of fractured histories. When a person carrying shame hears another say — simply, plainly, without performance — the snare is broken, and I escaped, something shifts. Not because the words are magical, but because they make the unimaginable imaginable. If that trap could snap, perhaps this one can too.
After the cardiac event, I was slow to claim the language of survival testimony. It felt self-aggrandising. But Psalm 124 challenged that reticence. The summons is not boast about your deliverance. It is let Israel say. The testimony is offered to the community, not as self-promotion but as contribution — adding your voice to the long chorus of those who have stood on the far side of the flood and said: the snare is broken, and we have escaped.
Sit with this:
What is your lûlê — your "if it had not been"? And have you said it out loud, in the company of even one other person, as an act of gratitude rather than grievance?
The snare is broken. That is worth saying.
Psalm 124 is one of the fifteen Songs of Ascent. The whole pilgrim road is Songs for the Road.