Psalm 137 was written by people who had just lost everything
Did you know one psalm names the exact moment of its own writing?
Most psalms are nearly impossible to date. Psalm 137 carries its setting in its first line: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept." The rivers are Babylon’s canals, and the singers are deportees, fresh from the catastrophe, being asked by their captors to perform "one of the songs of Zion" as entertainment.
The psalm is what it feels like when singing is impossible. "How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?" is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the whole predicament of the exile in one question, from people whose worship had always lived in a temple that no longer existed.
And then the ending: the final verse is a cry for vengeance so raw that most hymnals stop singing at verse 6. The people who assembled the psalter kept it anyway. Whatever else the collection is, it is honest about what loss does to people, and its editors refused to sand that down.
Where to see it: Psalm 137, nine verses, one sitting. Notice the geography of verse 1, the captors' demand in verse 3, and the fact that the last verse is still on the page even where the hymnals go quiet.
Sources
- Psalm 137the setting is internal to the psalm itself; exilic or early post-exilic dating is standard in the field
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