Psalms 137: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Exiles from Judah sit by the rivers of Babylon and weep as they remember Zion. They hang up their harps because their captors demand that they sing songs of Jerusalem, and they ask how they can sing the LORD's song in a foreign land. The singer swears never to forget Jerusalem, asks the LORD to remember what the Edomites said on the day the city fell, and calls the one who repays Babylon in kind blessed, down to the killing of Babylon's children.

Claim by Claim

1. 137:1
   • The speakers sat down by the rivers of Babylon.
   • The speakers wept there.
   • The speakers wept when they remembered Zion.
2. 137:2
   • The speakers hung up their lyres.
   • They hung them on the poplars (or willows) in the midst of that place.
3. 137:3
   • Those who had taken the speakers captive asked them there for the words of a song.
   • Those who tormented (or mocked) the speakers demanded mirth from them.
   • The captors said: Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4. 137:4
   • The speakers ask how they can sing the LORD's song on foreign soil.
5. 137:5
   • The speaker addresses Jerusalem.
   • The speaker says: if I forget you, let my right hand forget.
   • The Hebrew leaves unstated what the right hand is to forget; the King James supplies that it forgets its skill.
6. 137:6
   • The speaker says: let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you.
   • The speaker says: let this happen if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
7. 137:7
   • The speaker asks the LORD to remember the sons of Edom.
   • The thing to be remembered is the day of Jerusalem.
   • The sons of Edom said: Strip it bare, strip it bare.
   • The sons of Edom said the stripping should go down to its foundation.
8. 137:8
   • The speaker addresses the daughter of Babylon.
   • The daughter of Babylon is one marked for devastation.
   • Happy is the one who repays her the recompense she dealt to the speakers.
9. 137:9
   • Happy is the one who seizes her little ones.
   • Happy is the one who dashes her little ones against the rock.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

137:1

Babylon was the empire that captured Jerusalem in 586 BC and deported much of its population; the "rivers" are the Euphrates and the canal system of southern Mesopotamia, flat irrigated country utterly unlike the hills of Judah. Zion was originally the ridge Jerusalem was built on, and came to stand for the city as a whole, and especially for its temple.

137:2

Harps here are the lyres used by temple singers and at feasts, instruments of public celebration, not private music. Hanging them on the trees is putting them out of use. The tree named is a species that grows along Mesopotamian watercourses; "willow" is the traditional English guess, and it may in fact be the Euphrates poplar.

137:3

"Songs of Zion" were the temple songs of Jerusalem, sung about the city and at its festivals, so the captors are asking the prisoners to perform the music of the place they have just lost. The King James "required" means demanded, not requested, and "they that wasted us" means those who laid our country waste.

137:4

"The LORD's song" means the temple music, tied by custom to one sanctuary and one city. "A strange land" in the King James means a foreign land, not an odd one.

137:5

The Hebrew says simply "let my right hand forget" and leaves the object out; translators supply "her cunning," which in 1611 English meant skill, not trickery, the skill in question being the harp-playing of the previous verses. Other readings take it as the hand withering or going limp. The ambiguity is in the original.

137:6

A tongue stuck to the palate cannot sing or speak, the singer calls down on himself the loss of the very ability he is being asked to use. This verse and the one before it have the form of a self-curse, the standard ancient way of swearing an oath: may this happen to me if I break my word.

137:7

Edom was the neighboring kingdom southeast of Judah, whose people were traditionally reckoned as descendants of Esau, Jacob's brother, so a kindred nation, which is why their conduct is singled out. "The day of Jerusalem" is an idiom for the day of its downfall, when the city was taken and burned. "Rase" (one s) is the old spelling of raze, to level to the ground; the Hebrew word is a shout, roughly "Strip it bare!"

137:8

"Daughter of Babylon" is a standard Hebrew way of personifying a city and its people as a woman: it does not mean anyone's daughter. "Who art to be destroyed" translates a form that can mean either the one already doomed or the one who is herself the destroyer; both senses have been read here. "Rewardeth thee as thou hast served us" means pays you back in the same coin, the ordinary legal principle of an exactly matching penalty.

137:9

Killing the children of a captured city was a recognized practice of ancient warfare, described elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible as something done to Israelite towns; the line asks that Babylon receive precisely what Babylon inflicted. "Happy shall he be" is not a comment on the man's mood: it is the fixed opening formula of a blessing, the same phrase that begins Psalm 1, and would be better heard as "blessed is the one who."