Today’s Passage: Psalm 137
This is a psalm sung by people carried far from home. By the rivers of Babylon they sat down and wept, and when their captors asked them for one of the old songs of Zion, they could not bring themselves to sing it. Out of that grief the prayer rises: Remember, O LORD. The psalm ends in words so dark that many readers would rather look away from them, an outright cry for vengeance on the enemy. Those verses belong to the psalm, and we will not cut them out. We will teach the whole of it, without baptizing revenge and without turning the hardest line into a gentle picture so that no one has to hear what it actually says.
As you read, hold this: We sat and wept. Remember, O LORD.
Psalm 137:1-3 (BSB)
¹ By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. ² There on the willows we hung our harps, ³ for there our captors requested a song; our tormentors demanded songs of joy: “Sing us a song of Zion.”
Context After the city fell
This psalm carries no heading and no author’s name. It simply begins where its people are. The account that stands behind the first line is 2 Kings 25. Nebuchadnezzar’s army broke through the wall of Jerusalem and burned the temple, the palace, and the houses, and then tore the walls down and carried the survivors off to Babylon. Zedekiah, the last king, watched his own sons killed before his eyes, and then he was blinded and led away in bronze chains. The book of Lamentations keeps the children of that siege on the page, the infants fainting in the streets and the little ones begging for bread that no one had left to give. This is a real exile that really happened, not a passing mood and not a slogan for some later quarrel.
They sat down, and they wept, and they hung their harps in the willow branches. Then the men who held them captive wanted a show, songs of joy sung by prisoners, about the very city those same armies had burned to the ground. This was no polite request for a little music. Stay with the grief of it, and do not let verse 3 become an argument about which songs belong in worship.
Psalm 137:4 (BSB)
⁴ How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?
It is a real question, not a figure of speech. The songs of Zion were bound to a place, to an altar and a temple and a city where God had chosen to put His name, and that city was now a heap of rubble. To sing those songs on Babylonian ground, for the men who had ruined it, would have felt like telling a lie. Yet the question itself survived. It was asked out loud, set to music, and kept in the book for us to read.
Psalm 137:5-6 (BSB)
⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand cease to function. ⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem as my greatest joy!
Word study "Remember" and "forget" — zakar and shakach (Psalm 137:1, 5–7)
Hebrew: זָכַר (zakar), pronounced zah-KHAR. Strong’s H2142. To remember. And שָׁכַח (shakach), pronounced shah-KAKH. Strong’s H7911. To forget.
The word zakar appears three times in the psalm. In verse 1 it is the remembering that starts the weeping, when they remembered Zion. In verse 6 it becomes a vow, if I do not remember you. In verse 7 it is turned toward God as a plea, Remember, O LORD. Against it stands shakach, to forget, twice over in verse 5. The Hebrew there says, quite literally, “may my right hand forget,” and then it stops, leaving the sentence open, and BSB fills the gap with “cease to function.” A hand that has forgotten what it once knew can no longer play. Let the hand forget, the singer says, if ever I forget you.
Here the voice shifts from we to I. A musician now stakes his playing hand and his singing tongue on never once letting Jerusalem slip from memory. The city lies in rubble, and it is still counted the highest joy he has.
Psalm 137:7 (BSB)
⁷ Remember, O LORD, the sons of Edom on the day Jerusalem fell: “Destroy it,” they said, “tear it down to its foundations!”
Edom was descended from Esau, which made these people relatives of Israel, and there they stood at the edge of the disaster, cheering the demolition on. The prophet Obadiah is a whole oracle spoken against Edom for exactly this. But notice who the psalm speaks to. It does not tell Israel to march out and settle the score. It says, Remember, O LORD, and that address still governs everything that follows.
Psalm 137:8-9 (BSB)
⁸ O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, blessed is he who repays you as you have done to us. ⁹ Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
Study notes Teach the last lines. Do not sand them.
There is no gentler reading of verse 9, and we should not go looking to invent one. The line names infants, and it names the rocks, and a family that reads this psalm together has to hear what the words actually say.
Verse 8 has already named the measure it prays by: as you have done to us. What verse 9 asks for is not some horror the exiles dreamed up on their own. It is a horror they had watched with their own eyes, carried out by the very army that had dragged them to Babylon. They are asking only that it come back the other way, upon the ones who did it. That is as ugly as it sounds, and Scripture lets it stand without softening it.
This is not a command to go and do such a thing. God does not speak a single line in this psalm, and no one in the poem takes a step toward Babylon’s children. What we have is prisoners sitting by a canal, telling God the very worst that is in them. Verse 7 is still holding the whole prayer in place: Remember, O LORD. The doing is handed over to Him, and the wanting is laid bare rather than dressed up as something prettier.
The church has never settled on a single way of praying lines like these. Some believers will not take the last verses onto their own lips at all. Others pray them as a case handed over to the Judge who alone has the right to repay. This house will not force one method on anyone, and it will not cut the psalm to make it easier. It will not baptize revenge, and it will not tell anyone that the infants are only a picture of something else.
The cry for vengeance is in the book, and so is the grief that gave rise to it. We sat and wept. Remember, O LORD.
We sat and wept. Remember, O LORD.