Psalm 137

“Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.”

We reach what is, perhaps, the most notorious line in the Psalms, perhaps in all of Scripture. We’ve arrived at Psalm 137, the (in)famous imprecatory psalm.

We’ve encountered imprecatory psalms before in this series. And what I said before still stands. The context of Psalm 137 is victimization. The poet has witnessed and experienced murder, torture, sexual assault, and enslavement. And then, on top of all that, the taunting:

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There we hung up our lyres
on the poplar trees,
for our captors there asked us for songs,
and our tormentors, for rejoicing:
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

“Sing us a song of Zion!” You can imagine the smug and jeering faces of the abusers asking the singer to sing a song about home. In my imagination it’s like a scene out of Schindler’s List. In response, the poet pens a vicious line: “Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.”

This is not moral guidance. It is the tormented and tortured cry of a victim. And as dark as it is, it is also one of the most human moments in all of Scripture.

Listen, I get why critics of Scripture grab ahold of this line in Psalm 137 to undermine the Bible’s moral authority. But failing to attend to this moment of human anguish is also a monumental failure of human empathy.

There is moral guidance in the Bible. And for Christians we believe that vision comes precisely and definitively into focus in the life and teachings of Jesus. And what makes Jesus’ moral witness so challenging and revolutionary is that it takes place in a world where the cry of Psalm 137, that desire for revenge and retaliation, is alive and real.

But we don’t need to jump ahead to Jesus. The Old Testament itself raises these moral concerns.

This May my newest book is coming out. The Book of Love: A Better Way to Read the Bible is available for pre-order now. I’ll have more to share about the book as we get closer to its publication date, but the goal of the book is to show how to read the entire Bible cover to cover--Genesis to Revelation--as a book of love. Obviously, one of the challenges you face in that task are some of the darker moment in Scripture, from the cherem passages in Joshua to the imprecations of the Psalms. As I discuss in The Book of Love, we tend to approach these texts, like I did above, by quickly jumping to Jesus. Which is totally appropriate. But one problem with this move is that it tends to pit the Old Testament against the New Testament. A lot of Christians, progressive Christians especially, are Marcionites. Progressive Christians, given how they tend to handle “problematic” Old Testament texts like Psalm 137, implicitly frame Judaism as morally backward. A whiff of antisemitism hovers around how many progressive Christians treat the Hebrew Scriptures.

But this is unnecessary. As I point out in The Book of Love, the Old Testament, on its own terms, calls texts like Psalm 137 into question.