This psalm captures the raw grief of the Babylonian exile with a precision few other passages in Scripture match — and it closes with lines fierce enough that many readers have wondered whether they belong in a book of worship at all. Both things are true about it at once, and neither should be softened past recognition.
A study in Psalm 137 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 11 min read
By The Rivers Of Babylon
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.”
Psalm 137:1-2
Hanging the harps, rather than simply setting them down, is a deliberate image — instruments meant for regular use, silenced and put out of reach on purpose, an active refusal to make music rather than a passive absence of it.
How Shall We Sing The LORD’s Song In A Strange Land?
“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?”
Psalm 137:3-4
The captors’ request is its own particular cruelty — not satisfied with victory alone, they wanted the defeated to perform their own worship songs for entertainment, turning genuine praise into a demanded spectacle.
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.”
Psalm 137:5-6
“My chief joy” names exactly what this vow refuses to let exile erase — not merely nostalgia for a lost home, but a deliberate act of loyalty, memory itself treated as something worth actively protecting rather than allowing to simply fade with time and distance.
A Grief Handed To God, Not Acted On
“Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.”
Psalm 137:7
Edom, Israel’s own distant relative through Esau, had actively cheered Jerusalem’s destruction rather than simply staying neutral — a betrayal by kin that this psalm asks God, specifically, to remember and judge.
“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”
Psalm 137:8-9
These are among the most severe lines in the entire Bible, and this study will not soften them into something more comfortable than they actually are. Like Verily He Is A God That Judgeth In The Earth and They Have Rewarded Me Evil For Good, this belongs to Scripture’s imprecatory psalms, a category with a specific function: rage over genuine atrocity handed entirely over to God’s own judgment, rather than carried out by the one who feels it.
The exiled writer of this psalm had almost certainly witnessed Babylonian soldiers commit exactly this violence against Jerusalem’s own children during the city’s fall. The horror in these final verses is not invented cruelty; it is grief so total that its only remaining outlet was a prayer, not a weapon — asking God to do, someday, to Babylon exactly what Babylon had already done to Zion, and asking rather than acting is precisely the point. The psalm ends here, unresolved and unsoftened, because some griefs genuinely do not resolve on the same page where they are first written down.
