World English Bible
- By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
- On the willows in that land, we hung up our harps.
- For there, those who led us captive asked us for songs. Those who tormented us demanded songs of joy: “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
- How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?
- If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.
- Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I don’t remember you, if I don’t prefer Jerusalem above my chief joy.
- Remember, LORD, against the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem, who said, “Raze it! Raze it even to its foundation!”
- Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, he will be happy who repays you, as you have done to us.
- Happy shall he be, who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock.
After the bright refrain of the previous psalm—God remembering his people in their low estate—Psalm 137 answers from inside that low estate. This is what covenant faith sounds like when the temple is ash.
“By the rivers of Babylon” is not vague poetry. It likely points to the canals of Mesopotamia. The Al-Yahudu tablets, found in modern Iraq, even preserve traces of Judean exiles settled in Babylonian lands. The sorrow here is not abstract. And Babylon’s request for “songs of Zion” was not friendly curiosity. It was conquest asking the conquered to perform. Sing for us. Make your holiness entertain our power.
So the hanging of the harps is not unbelief. It is reverence. Calvin noted that they refused to let holy things be turned into mockery. There are moments when cheerful religion becomes surrender. Sometimes the most faithful worship is a silence that refuses to flatter empire.
The psalm turns on one repeated burden: remember. They remembered Zion; they vowed not to forget Jerusalem; then they asked the Lord to remember Edom. Memory is the battlefield. Exile always works by slow forgetting—new habits, new comforts, new definitions of “normal.” The singer resists with a fierce oath: let my right hand fail, let my tongue cling, before I lose holy memory. “Above my chief joy” is, in Hebrew, almost “at the head of my joy.” Let Jerusalem sit enthroned above every lesser happiness.
Augustine heard in Babylon and Jerusalem the two cities that run through all Scripture—the city of man and the city of God. He was right, as long as we do not lose the actual history. Every age pressures the church to sing Zion’s songs in Babylon’s accent: keep the music, lose the holiness; keep the vocabulary, lose the longing.
Then comes the terrible end. Western readers often miss that Edom was kin—brother-betrayal added to imperial violence. And the final verse is not polished ethics. It is trauma given speech before God. The shocking word “happy” is the Hebrew ashrei—“blessed,” “fortunate”—a dark beatitude showing how deeply the wounded long for justice. Only a Bible more committed to truth than respectability would preserve such a cry. Scripture is not teaching the saints to become butchers. It is teaching the violated to bring even their most dangerous anger into prayer, where God hears it, judges it, and keeps human hands from claiming his office (Romans 12:19).
The early church also heard a severe inward warning here: Babylon’s “little ones” are the first small movements of pride, hatred, and revenge. Dash them against the Rock while they are still small. That does not erase history; it lets history expose us. Empire is not only out there. It recruits the heart.
Christ entered our exile, suffered outside the city, and was mocked by the powers without becoming like them. He leads us toward the heavenly Jerusalem, and he will judge Babylon at last.
Suggested cross-references: 2 Kings 25:8–12; Obadiah
10–14; Jeremiah 29:4–7; Romans 12:19; Hebrews 13:14; Revelation
18:2–8.
Hymn: Jerusalem the Golden or a metrical
setting of Psalm 137, By the Waters of Babylon.
Prayer: Lord, keep me from singing your song on the world’s terms. Teach me holy grief, stubborn memory, and clean-handed trust in your justice. Dash the first seeds of Babylon within me against Christ the Rock, and fix my heart on the city whose builder and maker is God. Amen.