Psalm 120

This is the first of fifteen psalms headed a Song of Ascents. Two settings are attached to them by long practice, and both may be true: they were sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem for the yearly feasts, and Jewish tradition records that the Levites sang them on the fifteen steps that climbed from the outer court of the temple to the inner one — fifteen steps, fifteen songs.

The collection is arranged as a journey, and this psalm is the departure point. The singer says he lives in Meshech and among the tents of Kedar. Meshech lay far to the north in the mountains of Asia Minor; Kedar was an Arab tent-dwelling people in the desert to the southeast. Nobody lived in both. Naming them together is a way of saying he is stuck among foreigners, as far from Jerusalem as a man can be in any direction.

The weapon he complains about is a lying tongue, and the punishment fits it exactly: a warrior's sharpened arrows and burning coals of the broom bush. That desert shrub makes the hottest, longest-lasting charcoal in the region — embers from it can be raked out of the ash and still be alive the next day. A slander works the same way.

The tents in the last lines are literal. Kedar's people lived in black goat-hair tents, and a man among them was a guest with no city wall, no gate, and no court to appeal to.