Psalms 121:6

"The sun shall not smite thee by day,

Nor the moon by night."

The simple meaning of this is that the soul under God's protection is protected alike, "from the dangers of the day and of the night."[9] God's protection should not be understood merely as protection from sunstroke and from being moonstruck.

This mention of dangers from the moon at night is doubtless related to the almost "universal superstition,"[10] as Dummelow called it, that moonlight can be dangerous. This writer has no information about such "danger," but it cannot be denied that for countless generations the human family has accepted the proposition that, under certain circumstances, moonlight can be dangerous. Our word lunacy, meaning insanity, comes from the word lunar, `pertaining to the moon.'

There are well-attested traditions that such alleged lunar damage to men is a reality; but we find nothing in our text here which confirms any such thing. There is entirely too much that men do not know to justify the common designation of such ancient traditions as "merely superstition."