My Help Cometh From the LORD

This is the verse of the day in half the Bible apps on earth, and it is usually printed over a photograph of mountains. That is worth pausing on, because later readers divided over whether the hills are where the help comes from or exactly the wrong place to look — and the older church, which had the psalm for a thousand years before either side of that argument existed, held both at once.

What the older church heard in the first line

Long before anyone split over this, Augustine had an answer that is neither of the later ones, and he preached it more than once. The mountains are the great ones who receive the light first and pass it down.

"The great Preachers are the mountains of God. And as when the sun riseth, he first clothes the mountains with light, and thence the light descends to the lowest parts of the earth: so our Lord Jesus Christ, when He came, first irradiated the height of the Apostles, first enlightened the mountains, and so His Light descended to the valley of the world."

— St. Augustine, on the Psalms

Elsewhere he names them: "lofty mountains, preachers of truth, whether Angels, or Apostles, or Prophets. They stand around Jerusalem... because in this life we have help from the holy Scriptures." So the hills are real help, and looking to them is right.

And then, in the same breath, he shuts the door the later men were worried about: "But think not that the mountains themselves will give thee help: for they receive what they may give, give not of their own." And again, pastorally: "do not so raise your eyes to the mountain as to think that your hope should be placed in man; and so say, 'I have lifted up mine eyes to the mountains, from whence shall come my help,' that you immediately add, 'My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.'"

That is both halves at once, eleven hundred years before the argument. Look to the mountains. Do not trust the mountains. Say the first line only in a way that makes you say the second.

Jerome, meanwhile, will not claim the verse for himself at all. Writing of a friend further along than he is, he says the man "can scale already that ladder of which the psalms of degrees are a type; whilst I, still weeping on its first step, hardly know whether I shall ever be able to say: 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.'" The man who translated the whole Bible into Latin treats the opening line as something to grow into.

The later split, and what it split

The later commentators divide, and each takes up one half of what Augustine had held together.

Gill takes the hills as the right direction. Not hills scanned for an approaching army, but "the hills of Moriah and Zion, where the ark of God, the symbol of his presence, was, and to whom he looked for assistance and deliverance: or to heaven, the holy hill of the Lord." He adds that lifting the eyes "is a prayer gesture."

Matthew Henry reads it as a question expecting no. "We must not rely upon creatures, upon men and means, instruments and second causes, nor make flesh our arm: 'Shall I lift up my eyes to the hills?' — so some read it. 'Does my help come thence? Shall I depend upon the powers of the earth, upon the strength of the hills, upon princes and great men, who, like hills, fill the earth, and hold up their heads towards heaven? No.'"

Calvin goes further, hearing the opening as a voice not yet settled: the writer "seems, in the opening of the Psalm, to speak in the person of an unbelieving man."

Keil and Delitzsch keep the geography. The mountains of Israel, the direction the exile faces to pray, "his kibla, i.e., the sight-point of his prayer."

Each is defensible and none of them is wrong about the second verse. But the poster over the mountain photograph takes Gill's half, and a reader who has only ever heard Henry takes the other, and Augustine had already said you need both or you will misuse the psalm in one direction or the other.

What the rest of it actually promises

Almost nobody quotes past verse two, and the rest is where the psalm gets specific and strange. "He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:3-4).

Six times in eight verses the psalm uses one word: keep. The LORD is thy keeper. He shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in. It is a psalm about a guard who does not doze on the watch, which is a promise aimed at the hour when you are not able to keep yourself.

And it does not promise the absence of trouble. "The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night" (Psalm 121:6) is protection through the exposure, not exemption from the road. This is one of the Songs of Ascents, sung by people who were actually walking, uphill, in the open, toward Jerusalem.

Where this stands among the traditions

Nobody divides over this psalm, which is worth saying plainly on a site that spends most of its time on the places where people do. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant all pray it, and the Jewish people who wrote it and kept it pray it still. It sits in the Songs of Ascents, and the church took it up without argument.

The only real disagreement is the one above, about the first line, and it is a disagreement between men who agree entirely about the second.

Related: Hope, Suffering, Providence, Prayer. St. Augustine and St. Jerome from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; John Gill, Matthew Henry, John Calvin and Keil & Delitzsch from the commentators. All public domain. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.