Psalms 120 KJV
A Prayer for Deliverance
About This Psalm
The first 'Song of Ascents' - sung while traveling to Jerusalem. Living among hostile people who love lies. Longing for peace.
1n my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me.
2 Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue.
3 What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue?
4 Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.
5 Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!
6 My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace.
7 I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.
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Did You Know?
Psalm 120 opens the Songs of Ascents by locating the speaker in Meshech and Kedar, two remote, non-Israelite regions whose pairing functions less as literal geography than as a symbolic map of cultural and spiritual alienation from Zion.
The imprecation invokes 'coals of juniper,' whose resinous wood was prized in the ancient Near East for producing an especially hot, slow-burning fire, thereby intensifying the request that deceitful speech receive an unquenchable punishment.
Unlike most ascent psalms that presuppose arrival in Jerusalem, this one is framed entirely from the perspective of departure and distress, establishing the collection's movement from exile-like conditions toward cultic presence.
The psalm's complaint centers exclusively on verbal treachery ('lying lips' and 'deceitful tongue'), a motif that echoes ancient Near Eastern treaty curses and legal proceedings in which false testimony could sever communal bonds.
Its terse structure deliberately omits any vow of praise or thanksgiving, leaving the resolution of the crisis suspended and thereby linking it thematically to the subsequent ascent psalms that gradually supply the missing liturgical response.