Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 9, 2016

Making Sense of Psalm 137’s Disturbing Coda

It’s a poem, not an instruction manual.

Psalm 137 famously depicts Israelite exiles sitting “by the rivers of Babylon” mourning their lost homeland. Required by their captors to “sing . . . one of the songs of Zion,” they begin with the oft-quoted “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” But the less well-known final verses of the psalm strike a very different note:

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