How fortunate is the
one who seizes and dashes
your children against the rocks. (Psa 137:9 [translation by Leslie C. Allen])
This barbarous
practice was a feature of ancient Near Eastern warfare: cf. the statements of
Nah. 3:10; the oracles of Isa. 13:16 (against Babylon); Hos 14:1 (13:16) and
Nah 3:10. It effected total destruction by making war upon the next generation.
Though not uncommon, it aroused shock and horror (cf. 2 kgs 8:2), and so the psalm
here reaches an emotional climax. The note of retaliation obviously carries
over from v 8: “The imprecation holds up a mirror to the Babylonian atrocities
against Jerusalem and flashes the scene back onto the perpetrators as their
coming recompense” (Eaton, Psalms, 299). (Leslie C. Allen, Psalms
101-150 [Word Biblical Commentary 21; Milton Keynes: Word Publishing,
1987], 237)
However, the joy has
sought through pain, and it is pain that drives him to articulate the closing
portion of the psalm, vv 7-9, in which the participants of vv 1-4 largely reappear,
but now with new roles, as if rearranged in a shaken kaleidoscope. The implicit
contrast between the sure foundation of the city of God normally celebrated in
the Song of Zion, and its present ruined state, prompts a prayer for
punishment. Yahweh will surely not stay in the background as hero of a dead
tradition, but must come to the fore. His declared will in establishing
Jerusalem as the legitimate channel of access to him encourages the psalmist to
intercede on its behalf. The human memories of vv 1, 5 must surely have a
divine counterpart—not leaving such an outrage in the limbo of unpunished sin
but remembering and acting in retaliation upon the Edomite collaborators (cf.
Obad 11-14). An even greater measure of guilt attaches itself to the Babylonian
invaders. Borrowing the beatitude form from the Song of Zion, the psalmist uses
it ironically in commendation of dire reprisal. In the light of v 8 Judah had
evidently suffered the fate of v 9, and it is for this cultural expression of
total warfare that demand is made. For the sake of divine justice their turn
must come.
Perhaps the citizen
of a European country who has experienced its invasion and destruction would be
the best exegete of such a psalm. The passion and throbs in every line is the
fruit of suffering. It is ignoble? Certainly not if one takes seriously the
religious framework of the psalmist. It is difficult to detach from the
concepts of a chosen nation, a territory possessed by divine right and a holy
city, such valid corollaries as holy war and a divine crusade against the
violators of such concepts. The issues of national liability and forfeiture of
the covenant gifts, which are stressed in prophetic and Deuteronomic literature,
do present a different perspective upon Judah’s experience from the one
espoused by the psalmist, evidently of cultic provenance. But Isaiah could hold
together in tension the paradox of Assyria as agent of the divine will and yet
culpable transgressor (Isa 10:5-15); and the psalm is in line with exilic and
post-exilic prophecies which promise the heavies of reprisals (cf. Isa 13:16;
14:22). Jeremiah’s acceptance of Babylonian sovereignty (Jer 29:4-7) could never
be God’s final word to the OT believer (cf. Jer 50-51).
The Christian faith
teaches a new way, the pursuit of forgiveness and a call to love. Both its intrinsic
non-nationalism and its facility to fall back upon an eschatological final reckoning,
the Last Judgement, aid such a course. Yet is there forgiveness for a Judas
(cf. John 17:12) or for the Antichrist? Psalm 137:9 forms part of the OT
backdrop to the new Babylon of Rev 17-18, and there, too, fierce, unsentimental
joy is inculcated upon saint and angel (Rev 18:20). The psalmist’s passion is
not simply an expression to a kind of religious virtue: it is a measure of his sense
of an ultimate sin committed against God. The meaning of Jerusalem to him, its
sacramental role in God’s revealed purposes as reflection of the divine, could
permit no lesser retribution. IT is his love for God that makes him curse: his God
is not mocked. (Ibid., 242-43)
