Happy who seizes and smashes /
your infants against the rock. No moral justification can be offered for
this notorious concluding line. All one can do is to recall the background of
outraged feeling that triggers the conclusion: the Babylonians have laid waste
to Jerusalem, exiled much of its population, looted and massacred; the
powerless captives, ordered— perhaps mockingly—to sing their Zion songs,
respond instead with a lament that is not really a song and ends with this
bloodcurdling curse pronounced on their captors, who, fortunately, do not
understand the Hebrew in which it is pronounced. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew
Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:314)
