Psalm 126:3

“The captivity of Zion” points to the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed in 586 BC, and the people of Judah were carried off to Babylon. Jeremiah had foretold seventy years of exile and a return afterwards (Jeremiah 29:10–14), and Isaiah had spoken of God gathering his scattered people home (Isaiah 43:5–6). The return began with the decree of Cyrus around 538 BC (Ezra 1). It came gradually, and the people who went back faced a hard journey and a ruined land, yet those who lived through it knew it as an act of God’s grace that reversed decades of humiliation and kept his promises.

Zion here means the city of Jerusalem, and with it the people themselves, their identity as God’s covenant people and their life with him. That is why its restoration mattered to the whole nation.

The one who does the turning is named first. “The LORD” stands for Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of God, which Strong’s explains as “the Self-Existent or Eternal One.” The return was the work of the God who had bound himself to Israel by covenant, and he was in control of the history of the nations all along. “Turned again the captivity” joins the verb shûwb, to turn back or return, with the noun shîybâh, a return or captivity. Together they make a Hebrew phrase that many translations render “restored the fortunes” or “brought back the captives.” The LORD is the subject of the verb, so the turning is his doing from start to finish.

The first thing the restored people do is laugh. The word is sᵉchôwq, laughter or mirth, and here it is the glad laughter of relief after long sorrow. A mouth “filled” with it is a mouth that cannot hold it in. The second line says the same thing again in another way, as Hebrew poetry often does: the tongue is filled with rinnâh, a raised voice, a shout or ringing cry of joy. Laughter and song together give the sound of a whole people delivered.

The exile had been a time of weeping, and its grief is heard in Psalm 137. Here that grief has turned to laughter. Scripture speaks of God filling a mouth with laughter in Job 8:21 as well, and Isaiah calls Jerusalem to break into joy because the LORD has redeemed it (Isaiah 52:9).

The “heathen” are the nations, the goyim, the peoples around Israel who had watched its fall and now watched its return. Their words are the centre of verse 2: “The LORD hath done great things for them.” The verb is gâdal, to be great or large, and here it has its causative sense, to make great, in the form higdil, “hath done great things.” The nations name the God of Israel as the one who did it, and they speak of the size of what he did.

Verse 3 takes the nations’ words and makes them the people’s own. “For them” becomes “for us.” What the outsiders said about Israel, Israel now says to God and about him, as its own confession.

“Hath done” translates ʻâsâh, the broad Hebrew word for doing or making. The “great things” are again gâdal: bringing the exiles back from Babylon, setting them in their land again, and keeping his covenant promises. “Whereof” points back to those great things as the reason for the joy. The word for glad, sâmêach, means joyful, blithe or gleeful. Their gladness has a cause, and the cause is what the LORD has done.

The same God acted for his people at the Red Sea (Exodus 14) and in the return from exile. Scripture praises him in the same terms elsewhere. Moses tells Israel that the LORD is the one who has done great things for them (Deuteronomy 10:21), the psalmist asks who is like the God who has done great things (Psalm 71:19), and Isaiah calls the people to sing to the LORD for the excellent things he has done (Isaiah 12:5). Remembering his works is part of how his people hold on to him (Psalm 77:11), and the joy that comes from him is their strength (Nehemiah 8:10).

The Babylonian exile came as a consequence of Israel’s sin, and the return was a real but partial restoration. It points ahead to a greater one. Jesus, reading from Isaiah, said that he had come to preach deliverance to the captives and to set at liberty those who are bruised (Luke 4:18–19). The captivity he ends is the captivity of sin and death. God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13–14). Christ is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and through him eternal life is God’s gift (Romans 6:23). Anyone who is in him is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The joy of the returning exiles foreshadows the joy of salvation. Isaiah promised beauty for ashes and “the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61:3), and Peter speaks of believers rejoicing in Christ “with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8). The nations saw what God did for Israel, and now the gospel goes out to all nations, so that people from every tribe and tongue can say, “The LORD hath done great things for us.”

The Zion that believers come to in Christ is the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22–24), and their citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). The full restoration is still ahead, in the new heaven and new earth, where God will dwell with his people and wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:1–4). On that day the redeemed will be filled with laughter and singing for ever.

These verses give us a memory to stand on. The LORD once brought his people home when they had almost stopped hoping, and he did it so completely that they were like dreamers and the nations around them gave him the credit. Their laughter and their song were the right answer to what he had done.

The same God has done greater things still in Christ. When we look back on his deliverance, in Scripture and in our own lives, we have every reason to say with Israel, “The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.” And the God who did great things then is the same God the rest of this psalm turns to in prayer.