How can we pray Psalm 137?
Psa 137:7 Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
They said, “Tear it down, tear it down,
right to its very foundation!”
137:8 O daughter Babylon, soon to be devastated!
How blessed will be the one who repays you
for what you dished out to us!
137:9 How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies
and smashes them on a rock!
These sentiments seem far removed from the ethics of Christ’s kingdom. Indeed, they are a stumbling block to many an unbeliever and an embarassment to many a believer.
But, writes Trevor Laurence, there are many ways in which the Christian can pray and proclaim the truth of this psalm.
1. We Pray for Proportionate Justice
The longing of v. 8 is explicitly framed as a specific application of the lex talionis (cf. Exod 21:23–25; Lev 24:17–22; Deut 19:21), yearning that Babylon receive a judgment that matches what the empire delivered to Israel.
The principle of proportionate retribution in Israel’s law prohibited two possible abuses of justice: a penalty could not harshly exceed what was fitting, but neither could it grant a leniency that might minimize the seriousness of an offense or permit nepotistic treatment of powerful offenders at the expense of their victims. The lex talionis placed a limit on judgment while simultaneously mandating a public administration of justice that vindicated the innocent and validated their suffering.
When Psalm 137 cries for Babylon to be repaid with what she has done, it joins a chorus of psalmic prayers (e.g., 28:4; 94:2; 109:1–20) that ask for proportionate recompense according to the standard of justice given by God.
2. We Pray for the Actualization of Divine Promises
Through several prophets, God had already declared in quite precise terms the judgment he would bring upon the nations who participated in desecrating his temple, slaughtering his people, and carrying them into exile.
Obadiah indicted Edom for her violence during the Babylonian invasion (vv. 10–14) and prophesied talionic justice (v. 15) that would leave Edom without survivor (v. 18; cf. Ezek 25:12–13; Jer 49:12–13). The Lord promised by the mouth of Isaiah that Babylon’s infants would be dashed in pieces before their eyes (13:16) and that he would cut off Babylon’s name and descendants from the earth (14:22; cf. 47:1–15). And in Jeremiah 50–51, God announced that he would repay to Babylon as she had done (50:15; 51:56), that her little ones would be dragged away (50:45), that the great empire would be made desolate forever (51:62).
Psalm 137’s requests are not the creatively barbarous whims of an especially imaginative sufferer. They are pleas for God to keep his promises, pleas that self-consciously employ the very language of God’s promises. They are prayers that ask nothing more than that God do the justice to which he has committed himself.
3. We Pray for the Definitive End of the Wicked
The presence and persistence of the wicked is a preoccupation of the Psalter. The psalmists look forward to a covenantally ensured future in which God inherits the nations (82:8), expels the wicked from his presence (1:4–5), and fills up the whole creation with his glory as a holy temple (72:19; cf. Num 14:21) even as they lament over a present in which the predation of the ungodly and violent threatens the life and peace of God’s people and wages war against God’s reign upon the earth.
Accordingly, several psalms rehearse the divine guarantee that Yahweh will one day bring an end to the line of the wicked, stopping the seemingly perpetual generational cycle of violence that assaults his kingdom community and corrupts his world with idolatry and bloodshed. [See Psa 21:8-10; 37:28f)
…In Psalm 137, the psalmist turns the promise into a prayer. Having experienced the horrors of invasion, the destruction of Yahweh’s house, and exile at the hands of Babylon, the psalmist reaches for the day when the line of the wicked will be cut off forever so that those who trust in the Lord might flourish before his face in unimpeded worship and joy.
4. We Pray for the Advent of the Messianic King
The collection opens in Psalm 2 with the Lord’s decree to his anointed that this royal son will rule over the nations, possess the ends of the earth, and “dash” (v. 9) his enemies like a potter’s vessel. At the Psalter’s center, Psalm 72 begs for a Davidic king who will enact justice, crush oppressors, and have dominion “from the River [that is, from the Euphrates in Babylon] to the ends of the earth” (v. 8).1
By the time we arrive at Psalm 137, the Psalter has primed us to recognize that the blessed one who will “dash” the offspring of wicked Babylon in a consummate exercise of divine justice is the anticipated anointed of Psalms 2 and 72. That Ps 2:9 and Ps 137:9 are the only two uses of the Hebrew verb rendered “dash” (npṣ) in the entire Psalter only underscores this royal association.
It is unsurprising, then, that the longing benediction of Ps 137:9 is immediately answered by the Psalter’s final collection of Davidic psalms (Pss 138–145), a group of prayers that culminates with a royal voice celebrating God’s victorious deliverance, the certain destruction of the wicked, and Yahweh’s everlasting kingdom.
The Psalter as a whole is eschatologically oriented toward the advent of a messianic son of David, and the climactic plea of Psalm 137 falls firmly within that trajectory.
5. We Pray for the Justice Jesus Will Accomplish
In line with the messianic and eschatological framing of Psalm 137 within the Psalter itself, the New Testament alludes to the judgment prayer of Ps 137:8 when narrating the eschatological judgment Jesus will exercise when the Davidic Son of God returns in glory to cleanse the world of wickedness, consummate his kingdom, and renew the cosmos as the temple of Yahweh.
Paul declares in 2 Thess 1:6–7 that God “considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you . . . when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels,” echoing the psalm’s expectation of one who repays Babylon with what she has done to Israel…
Jesus, the seed of David, will administer perfect justice and drive out all unrighteousness when he comes to renew the world as the holy—and wholly joyful—dwelling place of God with his people. Every prayer that whispers “Come quickly, Lord Jesus” pleads for the same basic reality for which Psalm 137 yearns.