Psalms 137

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1By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.2We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.3For 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.4How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?5If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.6If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.7Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.8O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.9Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

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Notes for this chapter

Historical Background

Psalm 137 stands as one of the most emotionally raw and theologically complex poems in all of Scripture. It was composed in the shadow of one of the most devastating events in Israel's history, the Babylonian exile that followed the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC under Nebuchadnezzar. The opening scene is geographical and deeply symbolic. The rivers of Babylon likely refer to the great canal systems of Mesopotamia, including the Chebar and Euphrates, along which Jewish exiles were settled in communities such as Tel Abib.

These waterways would have been utterly foreign to a people who sang of Zion's streams and the holy city set on her hills. Sitting down in the ancient world carried the weight of mourning, and weeping was not merely emotional expression but a formal act of lamentation. The willows of Babylon, possibly the weeping willow or the poplar trees common along those riverbanks, became the haunting resting place for harps that could no longer sing. Music in Israelite worship was not entertainment but sacred offering, and to silence the harp was to declare that the conditions for holy song no longer existed.

The cruelty embedded in verse three should not be missed. The Babylonian captors demanded that the exiles perform their sacred songs as a kind of entertainment, perhaps mocking them, perhaps curious, but in either case treating the worship of God as a spectacle. The Hebrew word for “wasted” carries the sense of those who tormented and oppressed. Adam Clarke observes that this request was not an innocent appreciation of Hebrew music but an act of humiliation, pressing the conquered to celebrate the God who had apparently failed them.

The exiles' response in verse four, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" is not simply a practical question but a theological one. The Psalms of Zion, those songs celebrating God's dwelling place and His covenant protection, felt impossible to voice amid the evidence of divine judgment and foreign captivity. Barnes notes that the question reflects genuine spiritual anguish rather than mere stubbornness, a people wrestling honestly with how faith and worship survive catastrophe.

Core Teaching

Verses five and six shift from communal lament to intensely personal vow. The poet speaks in the first person with language that is almost oath-like in its gravity. To let the right hand lose its skill and the tongue cleave to the roof of the mouth were curses one called down upon oneself, a literary form of the most serious self-binding promise. Jerusalem was not merely a city to these exiles; she was the meeting place between heaven and earth, the location of the temple where God's name dwelt.

Matthew Henry points out that the psalmist does not simply promise to remember Jerusalem but to prefer her above his chief joy, the Hebrew phrase suggesting the highest personal delight. In Christian reading, this fierce loyalty to a physical city becomes a picture of the soul's attachment to God Himself. Ellen White draws on this exile experience in her writings to illustrate the condition of God's people in any age who find themselves in spiritual Babylon, far from the life and worship that reflects their true identity, and whose deepest longing must remain fixed on the heavenly Jerusalem above all earthly comfort.

Commentary Insights

The closing verses have troubled readers across centuries, and honest study requires engaging with that difficulty rather than softening it. Verse seven calls on God to remember Edom's treachery, and historical records including Obadiah and Lamentations confirm that the Edomites, the descendants of Esau and therefore kin to Israel, celebrated Jerusalem's fall and urged the Babylonians toward complete destruction. The cry for divine remembrance here is not personal revenge but an appeal to the God of covenant justice to take account of what was witnessed. Verses eight and nine, however, contain the most jarring language, the anticipated destruction of Babylon including the dashing of infants against stones.

This image, while horrifying to modern sensibility, was in the ancient world a recognized way of describing the total devastation of a conquering force, and it appears in other prophetic texts as well, including Isaiah 13, which itself prophesies Babylon's fall. The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary notes that the psalmist is not commanding an individual act but is reflecting the prophetic certainty that Babylon would receive in kind what she had inflicted, recalling precisely how Babylonian warfare had treated the children of Judah.

Reflection & Application

Reading Psalm 137 through a Great Controversy lens, it becomes a chapter about displacement, identity, and the cost of belonging to God in a world that mocks holy things. The exile was in one sense a consequence of Israel's unfaithfulness, yet the Psalms do not let that become a reason to abandon the memory of what God had promised. The grief expressed here is not godless despair but the anguish of people who believed deeply enough that the silence of their harps was itself a form of protest and faithfulness. Ellen White writes in Prophets and Kings of how even in Babylon, faithful Israelites maintained their spiritual integrity and kept the fires of covenant memory burning.

The psalm ends in a place of unresolved tension, not a neat resolution of pain but an honest casting of judgment and longing before God. This is precisely why the Psalms remain so vital for the life of faith, they do not pretend that worship is easy, that suffering produces quick answers, or that the people of God are exempt from grief.

Go deeper — references Classic commentaries on this chapter

Matthew Henry's Commentary Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Adam Clarke's Commentary Adam Clarke (1760–1832) Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Jamieson, Fausset & Brown (1871) Barnes' Notes on the Bible Albert Barnes (1798–1870) EGW Writings Ellen G. White Blue Letter Bible Study tools and lexicon

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