Catholic Commentary
Blessed Be Yahweh: The Cry of Gratitude and the Freed Bird
6Blessed be Yahweh, who has not given us as a prey to their teeth.7Our soul has escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare. The snare is broken, and we have escaped.
Psalms 124:6–7 celebrates God's deliverance of Israel from hidden threats, comparing the rescue to a bird escaping from a fowler's snare. The passage emphasizes that God intervened at the moment of greatest peril, saving the people from dangers they did not even perceive, warranting blessing and gratitude.
When the snare breaks, the only honest response is to name the God who broke it — not claim you flew free on your own strength.
The perfect tense — "has escaped" — is crucial. This is not a hoped-for future deliverance but a completed, historic act. The soul looks back from the far side of the trap. The snare is not merely open; it is broken ("the snare is broken, and we have escaped" — the full verse, with the final clause completing the picture). Liberation is not a gradual loosening but a decisive rupture.
Spiritual Sense
The bird released from the snare becomes, in the typological reading of the Fathers, a figure of the soul delivered from sin and death. Origen reads the "fowler" throughout the Psalter as a figure for the devil, who sets hidden traps of temptation and pride. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, hears in the escaped bird a foreshadowing of the Resurrection — Christ, who "could not be held" by death (Acts 2:24), and in him all who belong to him. The Church's exultant cry of Blessed be God at Easter is the liturgical fulfillment of this verse's impulse. The nepeš that has escaped is ultimately the humanity of Christ, and in him, the entire Church.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to these verses.
First, the Benediction Formula and Liturgical Theology: The bārûk YHWH of verse 6 stands at the root of what the Catechism calls the "movement of adoration" that characterizes authentic prayer (CCC 2626). The Church's entire Liturgy of the Hours, her Mass, her sacramental rites, are structured around this impulse — blessing God not as an abstraction but in response to specific saving acts in history. This Psalm of Ascents was sung by pilgrims ascending to Jerusalem; it is a reminder that Catholic liturgical prayer is always historically rooted thanksgiving, not generic religiosity.
Second, the Theology of Grace in the Snare Image: The bird cannot free itself. The snare is broken by an external power. This is a scriptural icon of the Catholic doctrine of grace: salvation is God's initiative, not a cooperative achievement the soul pulls off with divine assistance. The Council of Trent, while affirming the role of human cooperation, is unambiguous that the beginning of justification is entirely God's work (Session VI, Ch. 5). Augustine, who wrestled most deeply with this mystery, saw the Psalms as the supreme school of grace precisely because they consistently portray the human person as helpless and God as the one who acts.
Third, the Devil as Fowler: St. Peter Chrysologus, St. Ambrose, and later St. Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on the Psalms identify the fowler with the adversary — the one who "prowls like a roaring lion" (1 Pet 5:8). Aquinas notes that the snare's hiddenness corresponds to the devil's characteristic mode of operation: sub specie boni, under the appearance of good. The soul that has escaped gives God the glory precisely because it recognizes it could not have seen the trap on its own.
Fourth, the image resonates with Baptismal Theology: the breaking of the snare is a fitting figure for Baptism's liberation from original sin and the dominion of death. The Exsultet of the Easter Vigil breathes this same air of astonished, specific praise for a rescue that cost the Rescuer everything.
For a contemporary Catholic, these two verses offer a corrective to a subtle spiritual error: the tendency to take deliverance for granted, or to attribute it — implicitly — to one's own resilience, therapy, support networks, or good decisions. The psalmist's reflex is instinctive and immediate: Blessed be Yahweh. Not "I'm grateful things worked out," but a directed, named act of praise to a personal God who broke the snare.
Practically, this passage invites Catholics to cultivate what the tradition calls the examen — the daily review of conscience practiced by St. Ignatius of Loyola — not primarily as a search for sins, but as a deliberate looking-back over the day to name the moments of rescue: the conversation that did not destroy a friendship, the temptation that loosened its grip, the anxiety that did not swallow you whole. The examen is the daily practice of bārûk YHWH — finding the specific snares God broke today and naming them aloud.
The bird image is also a word to those in recovery from addiction, abuse, or spiritual desolation: you did not fly out of the trap. The trap was broken. Say so. Let that truth re-center your gratitude in its proper object.
Commentary
Psalms 124:6 — "Blessed be Yahweh"
The Hebrew bārûk YHWH is one of Scripture's most elemental doxological formulas, appearing throughout the Psalter and across the Old Testament (Gen 24:27; Ps 28:6; 31:21; 66:20). It is not a wish that God become blessed — God's blessedness is intrinsic and eternal — but rather an act of human acknowledgment and proclamation of a blessedness that already and always is. The formula functions as a hinge: it looks backward over the danger just described (the enemies who nearly swallowed Israel alive, Ps 124:1–5) and forward to the image of the freed bird. Blessing God is the only adequate response to such a rescue. In the Hebrew liturgical context, the congregation would have heard this as a cue for communal assent — a spoken or sung affirmation that Yahweh, and no other power, has intervened.
The clause that follows — "who has not given us as prey to their teeth" — grammatically explains why God is to be blessed. This structure (bārûk + relative clause) is a standard benediction form; the relative clause specifies the saving act being praised. The "teeth" echo the devouring imagery of verses 3–5 (the flood, the torrent, the raging waters) and also the predatory image that launches verse 7. The enemies are portrayed as bestial: not merely human antagonists but forces of chaos and destruction aligned against the people of God.
Psalms 124:7 — "Our soul has escaped like a bird out of the fowler's snare"
The transition from teeth to snare is seamless. The Hebrew nepeš (translated "soul") here carries its full Hebraic weight: it is not merely the spiritual component of the human person but the whole self, the living being in its totality — breath, desire, life-force. It is us, entirely, that has been caught and now freed. The nepeš cannot save itself; it is the passive subject of the escape.
The fowler (yāqûš) is a professional bird-catcher who sets concealed traps. The snare (pah) is specifically a spring-trap, often a net on a pivot that snaps shut when the bird steps on the trigger. The trap's defining characteristic is its invisibility to the quarry: the bird does not know it is in danger until the moment of capture. This lends the image a particular theological edge — the threats against Israel (or the soul) may not be perceived until they have already closed around us. The rescue, then, is all the more miraculous: God intervenes at precisely the moment of greatest vulnerability, even when the soul is unaware of its peril.