Psalm 84

Israelite men were to appear before the LORD three times a year, so the roads to Jerusalem filled up at the feasts. People travelled in family and village companies for safety, camped along the way, and sang as they climbed the last hills. The journey was part of the worship, not a delay before it.

Birds nested in the temple stonework — a sparrow finding a house and a swallow a nest for her young near the altars. The poet is envying them, and the joke has an edge: the birds live there full time, and he gets a few days a year.

The valley of Baca is a dry valley on a pilgrim route, its name tied either to weeping or to a shrub that grows in arid ground. Making it a well describes what travellers actually did — dug down into a wadi bed for seepage — and the psalm adds that the early rain fills the pools. The autumn rains and the autumn feast arrived together.

The sons of Korah, whose name is on this psalm, were the descendants of the man swallowed up in the wilderness rebellion; the record notes that his children did not die with him. Their line served as gatekeepers and singers in the sanctuary. So when the psalm says it would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than dwell in the tents of wickedness, that is a gatekeeper naming his own trade with pride.