Catholic Commentary
The Antiphonal Opening: Israel's Confession of Divine Dependence
1A Song of Ascents. By David. If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, let Israel now say,2if it had not been Yahweh who was on our side, when men rose up against us,
Psalms 124:1–2 presents a doubled confession in which an Israelite community expresses gratitude that Yahweh stood as their advocate and protector. The deliberate repetition of the opening conditional statement functioned liturgically as antiphonal call-and-response during pilgrimage worship, transforming individual confession into collective testimony of divine deliverance.
Israel's survival was never their achievement—Psalm 124 opens by forcing the whole congregation to say it twice: everything we are exists because God chose to be for us.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the allegorical sense, the "side" of Yahweh prefigures the side of Christ, from which blood and water flowed on Calvary (John 19:34) — the ultimate act of God being "for us." The Church Fathers read the Psalms christologically; Psalm 124's confession of divine advocacy finds its supreme fulfillment in Romans 8:31: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" The conditional lûlê of the psalmist becomes the triumphant rhetorical question of Paul, because the condition has now been definitively answered in the Incarnation and Passion.
In the anagogical sense, the antiphonal opening models the posture of every soul before God: radical contingency. The twice-spoken confession trains the worshipper to rehearse their creaturely dependence not as an afterthought but as the beginning of prayer.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates these verses through the lens of prevenient grace — the teaching that God's action always precedes and makes possible any human response or achievement. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God's free initiative demands man's free response" (CCC 2002), but it is always God's initiative that comes first. The doubled lûlê of Psalm 124 is, in effect, a liturgical catechesis in prevenient grace: Israel does not celebrate its own resilience, courage, or military strength. It confesses that every act of survival was, at its root, the act of Yahweh.
St. Augustine, in his Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), reads the psalm's communal voice as the voice of the whole Christ (totus Christus) — Head and members together — confessing their dependence on the Father. This is a distinctively Catholic insight: the "we" of the psalm is not merely historical Israel but the Church in every age, gathered in the liturgy to make the same confession.
St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the psalms of ascent, notes that the repetition in such psalms reflects the gradual ascent of the soul toward God: each step upward requires a renewed acknowledgment that the movement itself is gift. The Council of Trent's teaching on grace (Session VI, Decree on Justification) resonates here: no one can "turn himself toward God" without God's grace preparing and assisting the will. The antiphonal opening of Psalm 124 enacts exactly this truth in worship.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini (2010), emphasized that the Psalms are "the school of prayer" in which the Church learns to speak with God using words that God himself has given. These opening verses teach that authentic Christian prayer begins not with petition but with confession of dependence — a truth as relevant to the individual soul as to the gathered assembly.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with a culture of self-sufficiency and measurable achievement. The parish strategic plan, the diocesan capital campaign, the personal spiritual discipline — all carry the subtle temptation to locate the source of progress in human effort. Psalm 124:1–2 offers a direct liturgical corrective. The antiphonal repetition is not merely an ancient performance practice; it is a spiritual exercise in which the worshipper is asked to say the same thing twice before moving on. This is the psalm's first instruction to us: slow down, and say it again.
A practical application for the contemporary Catholic: before beginning any significant endeavor — a difficult conversation, a family crisis, a discernment about vocation, a moment of evangelization — pray these two verses aloud, slowly and twice, as the original pilgrims did. Let the conditional clause do its work on the imagination: What would this look like if Yahweh were not on our side? The question, honestly faced, dispels both presumption and despair. It does not make the threat smaller; it makes the Deliverer larger. The repeated divine name — YHWH, "I AM WHO I AM" — is the anchor that holds when everything else is in motion.
Commentary
Verse 1: "If it had not been Yahweh who was on our side"
The opening conditional — in Hebrew lûlê YHWH shehāyāh lānû — is one of the most rhetorically charged openings in the Psalter. The word lûlê ("if not," "were it not that") introduces a contrary-to-fact condition: the speaker is evoking a catastrophe that did not happen precisely because God intervened. The divine name YHWH is placed emphatically in the center of the clause — it is not merely "God" or "the Almighty" in the abstract, but the personal, covenantal name revealed to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14). To say YHWH was on our side is to invoke the entire history of Israel's covenantal relationship: election, exodus, Sinai, the promised land.
The phrase lānû ("on our side," literally "for us") carries enormous theological freight. It does not say Yahweh was present, or nearby, or watching — but for us, as an ally, a champion, a protector actively engaged in the community's defense. This language of divine advocacy would have resonated profoundly with pilgrims who had just made the dangerous journey to Jerusalem, subject to bandits, hostile neighbors, and the vulnerability of travel.
Verse 2: "if it had not been Yahweh who was on our side"
The deliberate repetition of the entire clause in verse 2 is not scribal accident. In Hebrew poetry, repetition functions as intensification and, in liturgical settings, as antiphonal call-and-response. The superscription of the psalm (shir hama'alot, "a song of ascents") places it among the fifteen pilgrim psalms (Psalms 120–134) sung as worshippers climbed toward the Temple. Rabbinic tradition and many modern scholars hold that such repetitions were sung between two groups — a cantor or small choir presenting the first line, the full congregation answering with the same words.
This antiphonal structure is theologically significant in its own right: the repetition is a communal act. The confession is not the insight of an individual mystic but the corporate acknowledgment of an entire people. Note that the psalm uses the first-person plural throughout ("our side," not "my side"). This is the voice of Israel — the ekklesia before the ekklesia — gathered in worship to confess what they could not have achieved alone.
Structurally, these two verses form a dramatic suspension — the psalm holds its breath before naming the threat in verses 3–5 (the enemies who would have swallowed them alive). The repetition creates tension and anticipation, drawing the worshipper into the memory of peril before revealing its resolution in God's deliverance. This is a masterful liturgical pedagogy: before you hear what happened, you must first confess made the difference.