We can follow the example of those who have gone before us. This is how we can pray Psalm 137 today. We call on and plead with God to be faithful to his promises. And we know that all of God’s promises find their Yes and Amen in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). The exiles by the waters of Babylon appealed to God’s Word revealed in Scripture and we do the same today. And we have so much more – we have the Word himself who has revealed the glory of the Father (John 1).

Where were you on May 2, 2011? I was at an Usher concert with a few friends. It was a great concert, and I enjoyed hearing Usher perform several hits from his newest album, Raymond v. Raymond. The concert, though, is not the reason I remember that day. I remember May 2, 2011 because of what happened after the concert. As my friends and I left the venue, we noticed a lot of people excitedly looking at their phones. We assumed they were just reliving the concert we all just experienced. Until, that is, a pick-up truck with a huge American flag in the back drove by and a man shouted from the window, “Osama’s dead! We got him!” On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces, and people halfway around the world broke out in jubilant shouts.

What was behind that? How did the killing of a stranger thousands of miles away provoke joy and excitement in the parking lot of an Usher concert? To state it succinctly, celebration broke out in that parking lot because the death of bin Laden represented the satisfaction of a communal grief and rage that was occasioned by an act of true evil.

What about Psalm 137? How could a group of people unflinchingly state, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” and then have the audacity to write such a statement down? More to the point, how does a psalm that celebrates little ones dashed against rocks (Ps. 137:9) belong in the same Bible where Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14)? In Psalm 137, the Bible confronts our modern sensibilities and gives us significant pause. The goal of this article is not to sanitize the passage by reading it allegorically, nor is the goal to assert that this passage is an aberration from the biblical witness. Instead, a careful and faithful reading of Psalm 137 leads us to Christ and, in so doing, provides us with the means by which we can engage with evil and suffering in our world today.

The Bible is a strange book. It’s okay to admit that. Psalm 137 was likely written in the 6^th century BC in ancient Hebrew. The cultural and historical setting in which Psalm 137 was expressed is far removed from the United States in 2021. And yet, Christians recognize that presiding over the cultural and personal diversity that led to the Bible is a sovereign, powerful, and single Author. When we encounter passages that highlight cultural distance, our first reaction ought to be a humble curiosity.

Where does Psalm 137 fit in the story of history? The first question a humble curiosity asks is one of context. Indeed, context will provide the key to understanding Psalm 137. Where does Psalm 137 sit in history, in the literary story, and in the redemptive story of Scripture? The historical setting of the psalm is apparent in the very first verse:

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.

Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, writes of Psalm 137 that, “This psalm was almost certainly composed shortly after the deportation of the Judahites by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.”[1] Psalm 137 is one of the few psalms which makes clear its own historical context. The psalmist writes of the community of exiles sitting down by the waters of Babylon to weep. The city of Babylon and the surrounding country was known at that time for its extensive system of canals. The Jewish exiles likely retreated to different places of this system in order to gather as a community and, as this psalm makes clear, give voice to their grief.

But why grief? These original Jewish singers of this psalm lived through the capture of Jerusalem, the looting and destruction of the Temple, and their forced exile to Babylon. 2 Kings 25 describes the siege of Jerusalem lasting for two years. The siege resulted in a famine so severe that it led to mothers boiling their children for food (Lam. 4:9-10). The king at that time, Zedekiah, was captured. The Babylonians killed his sons in front of him and then put his eyes out so that the last thing he ever saw was the murder of his sons. The Temple was looted and burned down, along with the palace and all the houses of Jerusalem.

Psalm 137, then, is a song of lament. It is a communal expression of grief, an opportunity for the Jewish people to gather and tell the truth of their oppression. Their lament is further occasioned, however, by a more immediate context. In the midst of their weeping, their Babylonian captors goad them on, “Sing us one of your Zion songs.” These Zion songs are scattered throughout the Psalter and scholars have identified several of them. One of them is Psalm 48, which opens with, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within her citadels God has made himself known as a fortress.”

Can you imagine the scene Psalm 137 depicts? The people of Judah are gathered along the canals of Babylon, lamenting the death and destruction visited upon them. And then, like taunting schoolboys, their captors jeer at them: “Sing us one of your songs! How about that one that says Zion is the city of the great king? The one that says God has made himself known as a fortress?” A hermeneutic of humble curiosity necessarily entails empathy, particularly since Christians are grafted into the story of Israel. The story of these Jewish exiles in the 6^th century BC is our story. We weep with them.

Where does Psalm 137 fit in the literary story of Scripture? History is not the only important context we must examine. The Bible is a book written by one Author through many individual authors. Where does Psalm 137 fit within that picture? Here it is helpful to introduce the idea of a canonical reading of Scripture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became popular among scholars to attempt to trace the various sources of the Bible to disparate authors. Instead of recognizing the unity of Scripture, scholars sought to dissect Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. A professor of Old Testament at Yale University changed this with the introduction of the “canonical reading” of the Bible. Brevard Childs asserted that it was most helpful to approach the Bible as it is received by faith communities. In other words, rather than dissecting Scripture into many individual parts, Childs recognized the Bible as a united literary document which deserved study as such. A canonical reading of the Psalms, then, considers questions such as the arrangement of the psalms and how the book functions as a literary whole.

Scholars have generally identified five ‘books’ within the Psalms. Psalm 137 is located in Book V of the Psalter. This final section of the Psalter consists of Psalms 107-150. O. Palmer Robertson describes Book V as “the climactic praises of the consummation of the kingdom” (emphasis in original).[2] Interestingly, the Psalm itself sits within a trio of Psalms that serve as a hinge between two larger collections within the book. Psalms 120-134 are known collectively as the Songs of Ascent.

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