Psalm 137

¹ By the rivers of Babylon—
  there we sat down, and there we wept
  when we remembered Zion.
² On the willows there
  we hung up our harps.
³ For there our captors
  asked us for songs,
 and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
  “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How could we sing the LORD’s song
  in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
  let my right hand wither![1]
⁶ Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
  if I do not remember you,
 if I do not set Jerusalem
  above my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
  the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
 how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
  Down to its foundations!”
⁸ O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
  Happy shall they be who pay you back
  what you have done to us!
⁹ Happy shall they be who take your little ones
  and dash them against the rock!

The deportation to Babylon is one of the pivotal events in the story of the Jewish people. The Deuteronomic history (Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings) ends with exile as does the retelling of the story of Israel and Judah by the author of 1&2 Chronicles. Two of the three major prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, have their ministries in the time immediately before and after the final deportation.[2] The Gospel of Matthew when it organizes the genealogy of Jesus breaks the second and third groups of generations at the deportation to Babylon. There are pre-exilic experiences of Judaism and post-exilic experiences and scholars often divide texts into pre-exilic and post-exilic texts. The loss of the Davidic king, the city of Jerusalem, the temple destroys many of the central features of Jewish life and requires a reorganization for the people of their identity and their faith. Psalm 137 taps into the grief, confusion, anger, and desire for revenge of the refugees of Jerusalem arriving at the rivers of Babylon crying out their jagged words to God through their tears.

Zion, the destination of the Songs of Ascent (Psalms 120-134), is a smoldering ruin. The songs of Zion, like Psalm 46 and 48, were full of a confidence that God was in the midst of the city and would defend it from harm by breaking bows, shattering spears, and burning shields (Psalm 46: 9). Yet the prophet Ezekiel declared that God has departed the temple and the city because of the idolatry of the people (Ezekiel 10). The city of peace (Yeru-shalom) has become the casualty of war, and the survivors of the siege and deportation sit as strangers in the land of their enemy grieving their loss, questioning their future, resisting their captor’s taunts, and shedding tears as they remember their lost home. There are no songs of mirth that can come from the heavy hearts of these grieving and shattered people. Their captors may taunt them desiring to hear their songs of Zion where the God of Israel promised to defend the city so they can mock the absence of their God, and so they hang their harps on the willow trees and no songs of joy and praise are able to emerge from the broken hearts of the captive people.

The people are committing themselves to ‘never forget’ the city and what occurred there. They may eventually have to settle down and make their home by the rivers of Babylon, but they can no more forget Jerusalem than their right hand. If they forget Jerusalem, they ask to lose their power to act and speak. Looking at this poem through the lens of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief the first six verses rest within the space of depression but in verse seven they turn to anger.

Psalm 137 is an imprecatory psalm, like Psalm 58 and 109, and it will probably not make its way into the worship bulletins or the sermons of many churches, but it has something to teach us. This is the language of the broken heart crying out in its pain against those who have wounded it. There is a reason that Jeremiah and Ezekiel spend so much ink crying for revenge against those who participated in the destruction of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 46-51, Ezekiel 24-32). Jeremiah’s harshest words are directed to Babylon (Jeremiah 50-51) while Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Obadiah (Jeremiah 49: 7-11; Ezekiel 25: 8-11; 35; Obadiah 10-14) bear witness to the betrayal of Edom.[3]

Nancy deClaissé-Walford speaks about revenge by saying:

The basic human desire for revenge when we or those we love have been wronged. God does not ask us to suppress these emotions, but rather to speak about them in plain and heartfelt terms. (Nancy deClaisse-Walford, 2014, p. 957)

Yet I suspect that many people of faith would be troubled by the graphic and violent language that the people call for against their enemies. It is only in this psalm that the Hebrew asre (NRSVue ‘happy’), so often an indicator of wisdom literature, is deployed to call for violence against one’s enemies. It is easy for those who have lived in peace to find the language of killing the children of one’s enemies repulsive but it is likely that these survivors saw their own children die of starvation during the siege, brutality during the conquest of the city, or abused and killed on their journey to Babylon. Their red-hot anger is an honest if uncomfortable emotion. A traumatized people call for their oppressors to experience what they have experienced, and rather than suppressing those feelings they exclaim them to God in plain and heartfelt terms. They may wonder if God hears their cries any longer but they have no other place to direct their raw rage about a world that no longer makes sense, where their children endured starvation, death, brutality, and trauma.

Miroslav Volf relates a story recorded by Željko Vukovic from the conflict between the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia.

I am a Muslim, and I am thirty five years old. To my second son who was just born, I gave the name “Jihad.” So he would not forget the testament of his mother—revenge. The first time I put my baby at the breast I told him, “May this milk choke you if you forget.” So be it. The Serbs taught me to hate. For the last two months there was nothing in me. No pain, no bitterness. Only hatred. I taught these children to love. I did. I am a teacher of literature. I was born in Ilijaś and I almost died there. My student, Zoran, the only son of my neighbor, urinated into my mouth. As the bearded hooligans standing around laughed, he told me: “You are good for nothing else, you stinking Muslim woman…” I do not know whether I first heard the cry of felt the blow. My former colleague, a teacher of physics, was yelling like mad, “Ustasha, ustasha…”And kept hitting me. Wherever he could. I have become insensitive to pain. But my soul it hurts. I taught them to love and all the while they were making preparations to destroy everything that is not of the Orthodox faith. Jihad—war. This is the only way… ” (Volf, 1996, p. 111)

Thankfully most of us have never experienced the level of degradation and dehumanization expressed by this Muslim woman or by these Jewish survivors, but the rage and the anger will go somewhere. It can be handed on as an inheritance over the generations, as is done by this mother who names her son Jihad and continues among the Jewish people in their desire to never again find themselves enduring another Holocaust, or it can be lifted up in imprecatory cries to God like in this psalm.

Ellen Davis’s chapter on the cursing psalms in Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Davis, 2001, pp. 23-29) has been influential on my thinking about the imprecatory psalms, like this one. She proposes three possible uses for psalms like this one when we are angry, and one, if we have the courage to encounter these words when we are not. First, they can give us words to wrap around our anger when we are not able to find adequate words on our own. She shares the advice a professor once gave her after a betrayal, “Go into the chapel when no one else is around and shout these at the top of your lungs.” This practice allowed her to both vent and release the anger but hearing herself speak these words she also could hear the self-righteousness and pettiness in her petitions. Secondly, the psalms function as divinely given ‘counselors’ and teach us that vengeful anger is one mode of access to God. We can come to know that God who created us for life together is also outraged by those who destroy community or deny justice. Thirdly, the cry is a cry for God to act which allows the petitioner to bypass acting personally against the one who harmed us. We demand our enemy be driven into God’s hands, but we are not in control of what happens there or how God brings about this justice and reconciliation. Finally, she suggests if we are reading when we feel none of the feelings in the psalm to turn it around and to ask if there is anyone in the community or among God’s people who may want to pray these words about me? (Davis 2001, 26-29)

My prayer is that no one reading these words ever encounters the dehumanizing experiences which call into question their identity and their faith like these refugees remembering Zion by the rivers of Babylon, mourning the loss of their homes, their neighbors, their society, and likely their children. Yet at some point we all know the desire for revenge on those who have wounded us and those we love. Many will encounter events which reshape their identity and may challenge their faith. Others will long for a home and a safety that no longer exist. They may not be able to sing the songs of their God with a heavy heart, at least not the ones full of praise and joy. At that point the jagged words of Psalm 58, 109, and 137 may be closer to the words their hearts need to speak as they grieve, question, and wrestle. They may need to know that this space of heartbrokenness and rage where they wish for vengeance on those who caused the pain is not a space they need to hide from God, but instead people of faith for millennia have voiced these words calling for judgment but entrusting vengeance to the Lord. They can no more forget the object of their grief than their right hand nor may they be able to speak of anything else in this moment of pain. Yet God’s people trust that God hears the words of these refugees from the world they knew, when they were safe and loved before that world collapsed around them and that God can lead them beyond this moment. They may long with Isaiah for a time when the tears of this moment are wiped away and the death causing action on this world cease:

And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the covering that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. Isaiah 25: 7-8

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[1] Hebrew literally: “If I forget Jerusalem, forget my right (hand).”

[2] There are two deportations under Babylon. The initial deportation (598/597 BCE) takes the king (Jehoiakim) and many of the leaders, artisans, priests, and other elites of the land. The prophet Ezekiel is one of those taken into exile with this initial group and his declarations come from this space in the exile. The prophet Jeremiah is still with the remnant in Jerusalem. Those left behind rebel against Babylon and in 586 BCE after a crippling siege the city wall is broken down, the temple and city destroyed, and much of the remnant is taken into exile in Babylon. For more detail see my post on the Babylonian Empire.

[3] Edom is one of the nations who met with King Zedekiah in Jerusalem (Jeremiah 27:3). It is likely that these kings were negotiating a defensive alliance against Babylon, but when Babylon besieges Jerusalem Edom seizes the opportunity to participate in the destruction and pillaging of their neighbor.