Psalms 137 - Introduction

Israel's minstrels were silent in the land of exile, when they were tauntingly bidden to display their skill for the amusement of their captors (Psalms 137:1-3). How could they sing Jehovah's songs in a heathen land? how forget Jerusalem (Psalms 137:4-6)? Perish the enemies that had wrought her ruin and rejoiced at her fall (Psalms 137:7-9)!

The tender pathos of the opening verses enlists our sympathy; the crash of bitter denunciation in the closing stanza shocks and repels. But implacable hatred of Zion's foes was in those days the inevitable correlative to intense love for her. The new law, "Thou shalt love thine enemy," had not yet taken the place of the old maxim, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy." The law of stern retribution for cruel wrong seems to the Psalmist only just, and the peculiarly barbarous form in which he expresses his desire for the extermination of the destroyer of his country is only such as was familiar to his age.

The Psalm is generally thought to have been written soon after the Return from Babylon in b.c. 537, while Babylon, though it had lost its independence, still enjoyed a large measure of prosperity under the mild rule of Cyrus. The past tenses of Psalms 137:1 seem to imply that the writer and his companions are no longer in exile, while from Psalms 137:7 it appears that the wrongs of Israel have not yet been fully avenged on Babylon.

A date before the close of the Exile is not indeed impossible. At first sight Psalms 137:4 read like the words of those who are still in exile; Psalms 137:7 seem to anticipate a judgement still wholly future; the tenses in Psalms 137:1 might be taken as perfects (-have we sat down" &c.), describing a state of things still existing; and the denunciation of Babylon in Jeremiah 51, which probably belongs to the closing years of the Exile (Driver, Lit. of O.T.6, p. 268), breathes a very similar spirit to that of the Psalm.

These reasons, however, are not conclusive. Psalms 137:4 can be understood as dramatically expressing the feelings of the exiles in the actual words which they might have used at the time; Babylon was not destroyed by Cyrus, and its capture must have seemed a very imperfect measure of retribution; therein Psalms 137:1; Psalms 137:3points decidedly to Babylon from a distance; and a date immediately after the return from Babylon is the most probable. The first sight of the ruins of the city and Temple might well have moved the Psalmist to recall his faithfulness to Zion in the distant land of exile, and to give utterance to his longing for vengeance upon those who had wrought this havoc and rejoiced at the sight of it. The author may have been a Levite, who had taken part or looked forward to taking part in the Temple music, and returned in extreme old age to Jerusalem; one possibly of those whose regrets for past glories overwhelmed them at the laying of the foundation of the Temple (Ezra 3:12).

That the Psalm is, as Professor Cheyne thinks (Origin of the Psalter, p. 69 f.), "a dramatic lyric," written in the time of Simon the Maccabee, four hundred years after the Return, is in the highest degree unlikely.

The title in the LXX, τῷ Δαυὶδ Ἱερεμίου or διὰ Ἱ. (- Of David; Jeremiah's, or - by Jeremiah"), appears to represent two views as to its origin. In style it may have been thought to resemble Davidic Psalms, and in tone the writings of Jeremiah; but as Jeremiah never was in Babylon the ascription of the Psalm to him is out of the question.