Psalm 121: I Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills

Psalm 121 carries a one-line heading in the Bible: “A Song of Ascents.” Fifteen psalms in a row, Psalms 120 to 134, share it. They are short, they are full of the images of a road and a city on a hill, and they were sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem. The Law asked every Israelite man to go up three times a year: “in the feast of unleavened bread, in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of booths” (Deuteronomy 16:16). Jerusalem stands high in the hills of Judea, so every route there climbs. The Catechism describes the psalms as having “nourished and expressed the prayer of the People of God gathered during the great feasts at Jerusalem” (CCC 2586).

Jewish tradition kept a memory of how these songs were used at the Temple. The Mishnah (Sukkah 5:4) describes Levites standing with their instruments on fifteen steps between two of the Temple courts, “corresponding to the fifteen Songs of the Ascents.” Whether or not the psalms were written for those steps, the picture has stayed with them.

Luke records that the Holy Family made this journey every year for Passover, and that when Jesus was twelve “they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast” (Luke 2:42). The road Psalm 121 was sung on is a road he walked.

The order of the psalms tells a small story. Psalm 120 begins far from home, among people who “are for war.” Psalm 121 is on the road, looking up at the hills. Psalm 122 arrives at the Temple, singing “I was glad when they said to me” as it goes in.

Verses 1–2: the question and the answer

“I will lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?” In the World English Bible, as in the Hebrew, verse 1 ends with a question. Older English Bibles such as the King James printed it as one statement, which can make it sound as though help comes from the hills themselves. The psalm means the opposite. The hills were where the old shrines stood, and a lonely road through them was no safe place for a traveller. Verse 2 answers: “My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” Not the hills, but the one who made them. Saint Augustine, preaching on this psalm, put it plainly: your help is from him “of whose fullness the hills received, not from the hills” (Exposition on Psalm 120, in his numbering).

Verses 3–4: the keeper who does not sleep

From verse 3 the voice changes from “my” to “your.” Someone is now speaking to the pilgrim, as if answering a prayer or blessing a traveller at the start of the road. Augustine heard it as a dialogue: the pilgrim asks that his foot not slip, “and it is as if God answered.” The answer is that the one who keeps you will not slumber, and then, more strongly, that the keeper of Israel “will neither slumber nor sleep.” Augustine’s advice: “Choose for yourself Him, who will neither sleep nor slumber.”

Verses 5–6: shade by day and by night

“The LORD is your keeper. The LORD is your shade on your right hand.” On an exposed road in the Judean sun, shade was survival, and this shade walks at your right hand, as close as a companion. “The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.” The day’s heat was real, and so were the cold and dark of a night on the road. Augustine read both figuratively, as the things that wound us in bright times and in dark ones.

Verses 7–8: all evil, your soul, your going out and your coming in

“The LORD will keep you from all evil. He will keep your soul.” The word keep, in one form or another, appears six times in eight verses. The last verse widens the promise to the whole of life: “The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in, from this time forward, and forever more.” Going out and coming in is the Hebrew way of saying everything: every departure and every return, every day’s work and every homecoming, and, as Christians have read it, the last going out of all.

Psalm 121 is powerful because of whom it names, not because of the words themselves. It is not a charm, and saying it does not oblige God to anything. It is a pilgrim’s act of trust, and its strength is that it keeps turning the eyes away from every lesser help, the hills, the shrines, our own vigilance, to the Maker of heaven and earth.

Does “The LORD will keep you from all evil” mean nothing bad will happen? The psalm’s own next line narrows it: “He will keep your soul.” Pilgrims who prayed it were still robbed and still fell ill. Saint Augustine, preaching on the feast of a martyr, Saint Crispina, faced the question directly: “Not your body; for the Martyrs were consumed in the body: but the Lord preserve your soul.” The Christian reading is the one Saint Paul gives: nothing “will be able to separate us from God’s love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39). The keeping is real and daily, and its deepest promise is the one death cannot break.

Psalm 121 was written for the road, and it is still the psalm most Christians reach for before a journey: a flight, a long drive, a child leaving for college, a move to a new city. Pray the whole psalm before you set out, then this prayer, which is built from its lines. It asks God for protection; it does not claim to guarantee it.

“Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” is a verse for the moment you turn out the light. You can sleep because someone else is keeping watch. Psalm 121 is not one of the Night Prayer psalms in the Liturgy of the Hours, but it sits well beside them: Psalm 4, “In peace I will both lay myself down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me live in safety” (Psalm 4:8), and Psalm 91, the psalm of Sunday Night Prayer. For a short prayer before sleep, pray verses 3 to 8 slowly, then the night protection prayer.

Psalm 121 — numbered Psalm 120 in the Vulgate and Douay-Rheims — is one of the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120–134), the pilgrim songs sung by Israel as they climbed the road up to Jerusalem for the great feasts. It opens with a pilgrim lifting his eyes to the hills and asking a question — where does my help come from? — and the rest of the psalm answers it: not from the hills themselves, nor from the shrines that once crowded their heights, but from the LORD who made heaven and earth.

The heart of the psalm is a single title for God, repeated six times: he is the Keeper, the shomer, the one who guards. And this Keeper, the psalm insists twice over, will neither slumber nor sleep. To an ancient world full of gods who were thought to doze, tire, or need waking, this is a quiet polemic and an immense comfort: the God of Israel keeps watch through every hour a person cannot. Saint Augustine, preaching on it, told his people that their help comes “not from the hills” but from the one from whose fullness the hills themselves received — to look beyond every creaturely help to the Creator himself. The protection promised is total and daily: shade against the sun, safety by night, the guarding of the soul, and the keeping of “your going out and your coming in” — an ancient way of saying the whole of ordinary life, every departure and every return, held in God’s unsleeping care.

As one of the Songs of Ascents, Psalm 121 has always been a psalm of the journeying people of God, and the Church keeps it in that spirit. In the Liturgy of the Hours it is prayed at Evening Prayer on Friday of Week II, as the day closes, and it is one of the psalms of the complementary psalmody for midmorning prayer. At Mass it is the responsorial psalm of the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year C, with the refrain “Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Because it entrusts “your going out and your coming in” to God, it is a natural prayer for travellers and for times of transition, and pilgrims still pray it on the road today, as Israel did on the ascent to Jerusalem.

Pray Psalm 121 as a traveller’s prayer — at the start of a journey, at the threshold of your door, or at any moment you are “going out” into something uncertain. Begin with its question, lifting your eyes from whatever you have been staring at in worry, and answer it with verse 2: “My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” It is also a gentle psalm for the night: let the promise that God “will neither slumber nor sleep” carry you into rest, knowing the watch is kept even while you cannot keep it. Pray it over children, travellers, and the sick, asking God to guard their going out and their coming in. One line is enough to carry all day: “The LORD is your keeper.”