Bashing Babies' Heads Against Rocks, Part One

Psalm 137:9 as a model for praying through trauma

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

Whaaaaat is happening here? For most of my life, I winced when reading this verse—and then quickly moved on. Do you resonate with that?

We aren’t alone. Some lectionaries, such as the Revised Common Lectionary, skip this verse altogether, especially in the readings for Sunday morning worship. Most Christians just avoid it.

But Psalm 137:9 is in the Bible for a reason—and it’s not because God condones bashing babies’ heads against rocks.¹

When we encounter a difficult passage, we might want to turn the page and move on to something that feels simpler, less fraught, more in line with the character of Jesus. But this week and next, I’d like to invite you to lean into this text with me, sitting with its weight, discovering what we might learn from it.

The Gates of Babylon. Photo by Corbin Mathias on Unsplash

Difficult Psalms and How to Find Them

The Psalms are, of course, poetry. But they’re a particular kind of poetry. They were the songbook of ancient Israel, used in public worship, designed to teach the people of God how to pray together. Today, we are far removed from the world of the Psalms in both time and culture, but these ancient prayers still shape our own. Many of the poems in the Psalms feel evergreen, always appropriate for our use. With the songwriters, we yearn for God’s presence, praise his goodness and mercy, and plead for the innocent. But some of these songs feel like they haven’t aged well.

Chief among these is Psalm 137. It has inspired many an anti-theist to wax poetic on the bloodthirsty vindictiveness of the Old Testament and its God. Even C.S. Lewis called Psalm 137:9 a “devilish” response.²

But I believe that we can find the goodness of God in this text, if we look for it.

We’re going to wrestle with Psalm 137 over the course of two weeks, looking at two possible readings, both of which show us a way toward God’s goodness. Both readings are plausible, and elements of both readings can coexist as true at the same time, although there will be some points of incompatibility between them.

Today’s reading: Psalm 137 gives us permission to be brutally honest with God about our pain in the aftermath of trauma.

As we explore the text, let’s frame our thought process with two questions: What is happening in this psalm in its ancient context? And how can this psalm teach us how to pray?

(Content warning: This post is not intended for young children and includes graphic descriptions of war violence, including mentions of sexual violence. If you’re worried that you might find that difficult, feel free to skip ahead to part two, which is much tamer in content.)

The Psalm in Context

Even though Psalm 137 is a poem and a prayer, it’s also a story. Let’s look at the beginning of the psalm to get a little more context.

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.

These lines orient us in the biblical story. Here’s what’s happening.

The Kingdom of Judah has been conquered by Babylon, many of its inhabitants slaughtered, and most of the rest dragged away into exile, far from home. The vividness of the language suggests that this psalm was likely written in Babylon during the exile—though it may be a later composition based on the memories of the community.³ This means that the psalmist has survived an intense trauma. (Or they’re recounting the memories of their parents and grandparents.) They are also writing this song for a people who have survived an intense trauma.

We don’t have much information about the writer (or writers) of this psalm, but to humanize them, to help us see them, let’s enter into the story. Let’s imagine a name for one of the poem’s speakers (main characters)—Jonathan.⁴

In reaction to this unhealed trauma, Jonathan and his fellow musicians put away their harps. He can’t play music while his grief is this fresh (Psalm 137:2). Perhaps he still has nightmares, forced to relive the trauma every night in his dreams—seeing his father killed and his mother and sisters gang-raped, smelling the smoke of burning wood and flesh, hearing the screams of the neighbor girl as her pregnant mother is torn open by a sword. Perhaps he was raped alongside his sisters, and his injuries never fully healed—and the ongoing pain reminds him of the all-consuming powerlessness and shame every single day. Perhaps one of the Babylonian soldiers snatched his baby brother by the leg and, laughing, hurled the baby headfirst against a pile of rubble in front of his wailing mother.

We can’t reconstruct exactly what happened to Jonathan when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, but we know that scenes like this played out across the city. These were the realities of ancient warfare. The survivors arrived in Babylon profoundly traumatized. If we don’t sit with the weight of their experiences, we will be unprepared to navigate the bitter honesty of 137:9.

The psalm continues:

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

How could we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?

Now Jonathan’s captors—the same people who burned his city and devastated his family and friends—are, at best, demanding that he entertain them by performing a cheery song from back home (Psalm 137:3). Most scholars argue that it’s even worse than that—the Babylonians are taunting their captives, akin to asking, “Where is your God?”⁵

Jonathan and his fellow musicians refuse. To sing one of the songs of Zion would be to mock God.⁶ Instead, Jonathan sings of his unwillingness to forget Jerusalem and his desire that God pay back Edom for its betrayal and Babylon for her brutality. He concludes with the infamous verses:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us.

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

The structure of the psalm suggests that these lines may even be part of the song that Jonathan and his fellow musicians sing to their captors—in Hebrew—in response to the Babylonians’ demand for entertainment. They take the opportunity to pray for justice—or vengeance—right under the noses of their captors.⁷

A Trauma Response

Is it any wonder that the psalmist feels such overpowering rage? He wants the Babylonians to pay in kind for what their army has done to his people, for them to feel the same loss that they have inflicted on him. But the dealing out of this vengeance is left to the hand of God. He does not take his own revenge.

And his cry of agony and anger was compiled in the songbook of Israel as sacred Scripture.

Here, genre matters. The Psalms are poetry, not prescription. God never commanded Israel to bash Babylonian babies’ heads on rocks. This poem was preserved not to teach Israel what to do but to show them how to pray. They bring their unvarnished anger to God. And then they step back and leave the work of justice in God’s hands.

So, how might this psalm shape the way we pray, now, after thousands of years?

First, I want to say that Psalm 137 doesn’t give us license to celebrate war, especially if—as is true of me and most of my readers—we have not experienced the brutality of war in our own homelands. If your story includes the destruction of your hometown at the hands of armies or warlords, I am so very sorry for your losses. For you, this is a fraught, complicated conversation, and I lament the grief you carry. May God bring justice. For the rest of us, who do not share the experience of ancient Jerusalem, let us remember that Psalm 137 was written in response to the horrors of war.

To celebrate war is to celebrate the atrocities that make laments like Psalm 137:9 thinkable.

How does this psalm teach us to pray, then?

Psalm 137:9 gives us permission to pray when we’re raw and raging. It tells us that we don’t have to hide the dark parts of ourselves from God or wait until we’ve found a way through the pain. God meets us in the darkness. He can handle our trauma responses and our wounded words. He sees our suffering. And he has given us a model of what it looks like to pray through our most visceral anger even as we refrain from taking vengeance.

There are some wounds so gaping that, in the immediate aftermath, only the imprecatory psalms seem like honest responses. In the face of the devastation wrought by murder, or rape, or the kind of gut-wrenching betrayal that brings us to our knees, tamer prayers can feel as thin as platitudes. Psalm 137 doesn’t encourage us to put on shiny, plastic smiles while we’re still in the anger phase of grief. It provides a way for us to approach God until we can manage other, better prayers.

We don’t want to stay there, in that rage. But sometimes, in the face of catastrophic pain, we have nowhere else to start.

So, we begin with prayer, grasping with trembling fingers for the God who seeks us in our desolation, until we can dare to hope that the night will somehow give way to dawn.

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Remember to come back next Wednesday for part two! Next week, we’ll examine a second possible reading of Psalm 137:9: Could the babies be metaphorical? Does it matter that Psalm 137 was sung communally by those who had not experienced the trauma of exile? And how should we ask God to bring justice in the wake of violence?

Do you have a question or another insight into this passage? Do you agree or disagree with something I’ve said here? Is there another passage that you’d like me to wrestle with in an upcoming post? Click through to leave me a comment—I’d love to hear from you!

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ICYMI

1. I owe a debt to Mark Glanville for getting me started on many of these ideas and introducing me to the idea of Psalm 137 as a trauma response in his IBR Unscripted 2025 presentation, “Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Neighborhoods.”

2. C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1998), 17.

3. Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger Jr., Psalms, NCBC, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 573.

4. Interpretation always involves imagination. I know of no reason to conclude that the author of Psalm 137 has to be a man—this is a best guess on my part, rooted in James Luther Mays’s suggestion that the psalmist was part of a guild of Levitical singers. See James Luther Mays, Psalms, IBC, (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1994), 421.

I should also note here that we don’t know to what degree we should conflate the writer(s) of the poem and the speaker of the poem. The writer is, on one level, describing the experience of the community as a whole. Is the writer also narrating their own experience specifically? Perhaps—the speakers of the poem are musicians and perhaps songwriters. But I don’t think that, in the end, this distinction matters a whole lot for the interpretation of this psalm.

5. For a sampling of this argument, see Daniel J. Estes, Psalms 73-150, NAC, Nashville: B&H, 2019, 539 and Daniel Simango, “A Comprehensive Reading of Psalm 137,” Old Testament Society of South Africa 31.1, (2018), 221-223.

6. Simango, “A Comprehensive Reading of Psalm 137,” 225.

7. Estes, Psalms 73-150, 541.