1 By the streams of Babylon, there we sat, yea, wept,
When we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows in the midst thereof
We hung our harps.
3 For there our captors required of us words of song,
And our plunderers [required of us] mirth;
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
4 How can we sing Jehovah's songs
In a strange land?
5 If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
May my right hand forget!
6 May my tongue cleave to my palate,
If I remember thee not,
If I set not Jerusalem
Above the summit of my joy!
7 Remember, Jehovah, to the children of Edom
The day of Jerusalem,
Who said, "Lay bare, lay bare,
To the foundation therein."
8 Daughter of Babylon, thou that art laid waste,
Happy he that requites thee
Thy doing which thou hast done to us!
9 Happy he that seizes and dashes thy little ones
Against the rock!
The Captivity is past, as the tenses in vv. 1-3 show, and as is
manifest from the very fact that its miseries have become themes
for a psalm. Grief must be somewhat removed before it can be sung.
But the strains of triumph heard in other psalms are wanting in
this, which breathes passionate love for Jerusalem, tinged with
sadness still. The date of the psalm is apparently the early days
of the Return, when true-hearted patriots still felt the smart of
recent bondage and sadly gazed on the dear ruins of the city. The
singer passes in brief compass from tender music breathing plaintive
remembrance of the captives' lot, to passionate devotion, and at last
to an outburst of vehement imprecation, magnificent in its fiery
rush, amply explicable by Israel's wrongs and Babylon's crimes,
and yet to be frankly acknowledged as moving on a lower plane of
sentiment than is permissible to those who have learned to repay
scorn with gentleness, hate with love, and injuries with desires for
the injurer's highest good. The coals of fire which this psalmist
scatters among Israel's foes are not those which Christ's servants
are bidden to heap on their enemies' heads.
Nothing sweeter or sadder was ever written than that delicate,
deeply felt picture of the exiles in the early verses of the psalm.
We see them sitting, as too heavy-hearted for activity, and half
noting, as adding to their grief, the unfamiliar landscape round
them, with its innumerable canals, and the monotonous "willows"
(rather, a species of poplar) stretching along their banks. How
unlike this flat, tame fertility to the dear home-land, with its
hills and glens and rushing streams! The psalmist was probably a
Temple singer, but he did not find solace even in "the harp, his
sole remaining joy." No doubt many of the exiles made themselves at
home in captivity, but there were some more keenly sensitive or more
devout, who found that it was better to remember Zion and weep than
to enjoy Babylon. "Alas, alas! how much less it is to hold converse
with others than to remember thee!" So they sat, like Michael
Angelo's brooding figure of Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel, silent,
motionless, lost in bitter-sweet memories.
But there was another reason than their own sadness for hanging
their idle harps upon the willows. Their coarse oppressors bade them
sing to make mirth. They wished entertainment from the odd sounds of
foreign music, or they were petulantly angry that such dumb hang-dog
people should keep sullen faces, like unilluminated windows, when
their masters were pleased to be merry. So, like tipsy revellers,
they called out "Sing!" The request drove the iron deeper into sad
hearts, for it came from those who had made the misery. They had led
away the captives, and now they bid them make sport.
The word rendered _plunderers_ is difficult. The translation adopted
here is that of the LXX. and others. It requires a slight alteration
of reading, which is approved by Hupfeld (as an alternative),
Perowne, Baethgen, Graetz, etc. Cheyne follows Halevy in preferring
another conjectural alteration which gives "dancers" ("and of our
dancers, festive glee"), but admits that the other view is "somewhat
more natural." The roystering Babylonians did not care what kind of
songs their slaves sang--Temple music would do as well as any other;
but the devout psalmist and his fellows shrank from profaning the
sacred songs that praised Jehovah by making them parts of a heathen
banquet. Such sacrilege would have been like Belshazzar's using the
Temple vessels for his orgy. "Give not that which is holy to dogs."
And the singers were not influenced by superstition, but by reverence
and by sadness, when they could not sing these songs in that strange
land. No doubt it was a fact that the Temple music fell into
desuetude during the Captivity. There are moods and there are scenes
in which it is profanation to utter the deep music which may be
sounding on perpetually in the heart. "Songs unheard" are sometimes
not only "sweetest," but the truest worship.
The psalmist's remembrances of Babylon are suddenly broken off. His
heart burns as he broods on that past, and then lifts his eyes to see
how forlorn and forgotten-like Jerusalem stands, as if appealing to
her sons for help. A rush of emotion sweeps over him, and he breaks
into a passion of vowed loyalty to the mother city. He has Jerusalem
written on his heart. It is noteworthy that her remembrance _was_
the exiles' crown of sorrow; it now becomes the apex of the singer's
joy. No private occasion for gladness so moves the depths of a soul,
smitten with the noble and ennobling love of the city of God, as does
its prosperity. Alas that the so-called citizens of the true city of
God should have so tepid interest in its welfare, and be so much more
keenly touched by individual than by public prosperity or adversity!
Alas that so often they should neither weep when they remember its
bondage nor exult in its advancement!
Ver. 5_b_ is emphatic by its incompleteness. "May my right hand
forget!" What? Some word like "power," "cunning," or "movement" may
be supplied. It would be as impossibly unnatural for the poet to
forget Jerusalem as for his hand to forget to move or cease to be
conscious of its connection with his body.
Ver. 6_d_ reads literally "Above the head of my joy": an expression
which may either mean the summit of my joy--_i.e._, my greatest
joy; or the sum of my joy--_i.e._, my whole joy. In either case the
well-being of Jerusalem is the psalmist's climax of gladness; and so
utterly does he lose himself in the community founded by God, that
all his springs of felicity are in her. He had chosen the better
part. Unselfish gladness is the only lasting bliss; and only they
drink of an unfailing river of pleasures whose chiefest delight lies
in beholding and sharing in the rebuilding of God's city on earth.
The lightning flashes of the last part of the psalm need little
commenting. The desire for the destruction of Zion's enemies, which
they express, is not the highest mood of the loyal citizen of God's
city, and is to be fully recognised as not in accordance with
Christian morality. But it has been most unfairly judged, as if it
were nothing nobler than ferocious thirsting for vengeance. It is a
great deal more. It is desire for retribution, heavy as the count of
crimes which demands it is heavy. It is a solemn appeal to God to
sweep away the enemies of Zion, who, in hating her, rebelled against
Him. First, the psalmist turns to the treacherous kinsmen of Israel,
the Edomites, who had, as Obadiah says, "rejoiced over the children
of Judah in the days of their destruction" (Obad. 12), and stimulated
the work of rasing the city. Then the singer turns to Babylon, and
salutes her as already laid waste; for he is a seer as well as a
singer, and is so sure of the judgment to be accomplished that it is
as good as done. The most repellent part of the imprecation, that
which contemplates the dreadful destruction of tender infants, has
its harshness somewhat softened by the fact that it is the echo of
Isaiah's prophecy concerning Babylon (Isa. xiii. 16-18), and still
further by the consideration that the purpose of the apparently
barbarous cruelty was to make an end of a "seed of evil-doers," whose
continuance meant misery for wide lands.
Undoubtedly, the words are stern, and the temper they embody is
harsh discord, when compared with the Christian spirit. But they are
not the utterances of mere ferocious revenge. Rather they proclaim
God's judgments, not with the impassiveness, indeed, which best
befits the executors of such terrible sentences, but still less with
the malignant gratification of sanguinary vengeance which has been
often attributed to them. Perhaps, if some of their modern critics
had been under the yoke from which this psalmist has been delivered,
they would have understood a little better how a good man of that age
could rejoice that Babylon was fallen and all its race extirpated.
Perhaps, it would do modern tender-heartedness no harm to have a
little more iron infused into its gentleness, and to lay to heart
that the King of Peace must first be King of Righteousness, and that
Destruction of evil is the complement of Preservation of Good.