Bashing Babies' Heads Against Rocks, Part Two

Psalm 137:9 as a prayer for justice

Psalm 137:9: Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks (NRSVUE).

Last week, we read Psalm 137:9 as a visceral response to trauma—as permission to come to God when we’re raw and raging, even before we’ve found a way past our worst impulses.

This week, we’re going to look at a second possibility for this text: The Babylonian babies envisioned in this verse may not be literal babies at all—this line may be a metaphor for the Babylonian oppressors who destroyed Jerusalem. Psalm 137:9 sings not of unbridled vengeance but of the justice God has already promised.

Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash

Why Two Readings?

As we interpret the Bible, we must learn how to weigh competing readings. Often, there are multiple plausible interpretations of a passage. We get to sort through the evidence in community, considering the perspectives of other interpreters as we figure out which reading (or readings) we find most plausible.

Why am I doing two readings of Psalm 137:9, specifically? Well, my degree is in New Testament, which means I want to be extra careful when playing in the Old Testament sandbox. So, after I developed my first draft, I asked Old Testament scholar extraordinaire Brittany Kim to check one of my paragraphs for nuance.¹ (Sale alert: As of today, Brittany’s book Understanding Old Testament Methodology: Mapping the Terrain of Recent Approaches is 60% off on Amazon!)

Brittany told me that her study suggests that the babies of Psalm 137:9 aren’t literal babies but the Babylonian oppressors—the metaphorical children of Lady Babylon. And I knew immediately that I wanted to walk through both readings with you.

Skeptical of the idea that it’s a metaphor? Suspicious that this is taking the easy way out? Well, Brittany was also kind enough to send me a copy of the paper she presented on the subject at ETS 2015 so that I could cite her work for you. So let’s dig into the evidence so you can weigh it for yourself.

The Story of Psalm 137

A quick refresher: Even though Psalm 137 is a poem and a prayer, it’s also a story. The Babylonians have sacked Jerusalem, unleashing unspeakable violence on the city’s inhabitants and dragging the survivors into exile, far from home.

The speaker of the poem—last week, we named him Jonathan—sings “a haunting lament over the destruction of Jerusalem.”² In their all-consuming grief, Jonathan and his fellow musicians put away their instruments.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there
we hung up our harps.

Yet, their Babylonian captors mock them—and God!—by demanding entertainment:

For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

Jonathan and his friends will not sing one of the Lord’s songs to amuse their oppressors—but neither can they forget Jerusalem, the city of the Lord.

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!

And so they begin singing a prayer that God would bring justice.

Lady Zion, Lady Babylon

The Old Testament prophets often personify cities as women.³ But this motif isn’t limited to the Prophets—Brittany Kim identifies cities-as-women imagery in a number of places in the Psalms. Psalm 137:8 evokes this image explicitly, referring to Babylon as “Daughter Babylon.” But this is not the first such moment in this psalm. Consider Psalm 137:7:

Brittany Kim’s translation

Here, the psalmist calls God to judge the Edomites—“the children of Edom”—for their support of Babylon’s campaign against Jerusalem. The children of Edom call for Jerusalem’s destruction using language that accentuates the emotional devastation of the scene by evoking an exposed, vulnerable woman.

The personification of Jerusalem as a woman is strengthened by the psalmist’s direct address to her two verses earlier: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!” He speaks to the city imagined as a person—as Lady Zion.

Then, in Psalm 137:8, the psalmist addresses Daughter Babylon:

Brittany Kim’s translation

In this verse, the psalmist uses language that suggests familiarity with Jeremiah’s oracle against Babylon (Jeremiah 50-51): Jeremiah refers to the city as “daughter” (50:42, 51:33), speaks of God repaying Babylon (Jeremiah 51:6), and describes God destroying her (51:55). “Thus,” Brittany Kim writes, this verse “conveys the psalmist’s trust that YHWH will do what he has said by bringing judgment against Babylon.”⁴ The psalmist need not take his own vengeance—God will judge Lady Babylon for the violence she has visited on his people.

Then we reach our problem verse: Psalm 137:9.

Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

We have already seen that Babylon is personified as a woman. We’ve seen the Edomites described as “the children of Edom.” Now, we have to dig into a little bit of Hebrew grammar, but I’ll try my best to do the “explain it to me like I’m 5” version.

“Your little ones” is one word in Hebrew. The part of the word that we translate as “your” is feminine singular. That means that the “you” in this verse is a single “person,” not a group of people. We’re talking about one parent, not many parents. If this verse were talking about the little ones of many Babylonian parents, that “you” would be plural (and masculine), to show that there is more than one parent being addressed.

But it’s singular and feminine, which means that there is one “parent” in view—the city of Babylon. The “little ones” are the children of (Lady) Babylon, not the children of the Babylonians.

Other Old Testament passages mention the children of Lady Zion (the term used when Jerusalem is personified as a woman). Scholars agree that these passages aren’t referring to literal children. Rather, the inhabitants of Jerusalem are the metaphorical children of Lady Zion (see, for example, Isaiah 49:22-23; Lamentations 1:5).

So, putting this all together: the “little ones” are the Babylonian oppressors—the rulers who spread their empire with vicious violence, the soldiers who conquered and burned Jerusalem using the brutal tactics of ancient warfare, the captors who torment and mock the war captives, and the people who benefit from the exploitation of Jerusalem’s former residents. Seen in this light, Psalm 137 is not an outlier among the imprecatory psalms (the psalms that call for judgment and justice). It anticipates not the deaths of the young and innocent specifically, but the shattering of the oppressor who defies God by enacting injustice.

In short, the psalmist longs for the justice God has already promised. When this oppressive empire falls—and empires always fall—the children of Lady Babylon will be repaid for their callous brutality.

The Songbook of Israel

In the end, God tempered his judgment of Babylon with mercy. The fall of Jerusalem was still in living memory when the Persians conquered the Babylonian Empire. Babylon fell almost anticlimactically. The sources are sparse, and ambiguous on how much blood was shed in the battle(s), but it seems to be less than we’d expect from our knowledge of ancient warfare—and concentrated among soldiers rather than civilians.⁵ After a rout of her army on the field of battle, Babylon herself surrendered peacefully to Cyrus the Great, who allowed the exiles of Judah to return home to rebuild Jerusalem.

It was in this period of time, after the return from exile, that the song we now know as Psalm 137 was compiled into the Psalms—the songbook of Israel. So the Jews sang this song communally after the fall of the Babylonian Empire. They sang it in times of freedom, when they ruled their own land, and (more often) in times of oppression by other empires, passing down the psalmist’s words through the generations. In this way, their children prayed—remembering the exile and its end, praying for the deliverance of the oppressed, singing the world toward justice.

Let Justice Flow Like Waters

So, how might this reading of Psalm 137 teach us how to pray?

We, too, can sing the world toward justice. We lift our voices in prayer—for our own lives, for those we love, for the world—that God would bring the deliverance, restoration, and justice he has promised in this life and the life to come. We pray for true peace among and within the nations. We pray that the Lord will defend the vulnerable who suffer at the hands of the strong. We pray that all will be made well.

For an example of what that can look like: In my own church, we prayed The Great Litany every Monday in Lent. I leave you with a selection of these prayers, but I commend it—or a similar form from your own tradition—to you in whole:

To make wars to cease in all the world, and to give to all nations unity, peace, and concord,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please you to show mercy on all prisoners and captives; refugees, the homeless, and the hungry; and all those who are desolate and oppressed,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
…
To forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,

We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.

To strengthen those who stand; to encourage the faint-hearted; to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet,

We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.

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ICYMI

1. Full disclosure: Brittany and I are sisters. I’m also a big fan of hers.

2. Brittany Kim, “Cities as Daughters and Mothers: Neglected Feminine Imagery in the Psalms,” presented in the Psalms and Hebrew Poetry section at the Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting 2015, Atlanta, GA.

3. Ibid. Further, I owe absolutely everything in this section to Brittany Kim’s “Cities as Daughters and Mothers: Neglected Feminine Imagery in the Psalms.”

4. Ibid.

5. Here, I prefer local sources (the Nabodinus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder) to Greek sources. There may have been a massacre in the city of Opis, but it is unclear if the targets were the inhabitants of the city or the Babylonian army. If the inhabitants of the city were targeted, it is unclear whether the aggressors were even the Persians, or if the Babylonians were punishing rebels who had taken the Persians’ side.