Psalm 137:4

The psalm belongs to the Babylonian exile. Nebuchadnezzar’s forces destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BC (2 Kings 25, Jeremiah 52), and thousands of the people of Judah were taken from their homeland and resettled in Babylon. Jeremiah had foretold that the nations would serve the king of Babylon seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11), and the exile lasted until 538 BC, when Cyrus decreed that the people could return (Ezra 1). The “we” of the psalm are those captives, and they speak together, as one grieving people.

The name Babylon, Bâbel, is the same name as Babel, and Strong’s gives its meaning as confusion. It covers the city, the land of Babylonia and the whole Babylonian empire. The word for rivers, nâhâr, is a stream or river, used of great rivers such as the Nile and the Euphrates. In Babylon it points to the Euphrates with its tributaries and the many canals that watered the plain of Shinar and carried its farming, its trade and its defence. Those waters made Babylon rich, and to the exiles they were the waters of the land that held them captive. Jerusalem had its own song of a river: “There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4). Now God’s people sat beside their conquerors’ rivers.

“There we sat down” uses yâshab, to sit down, which also means to dwell or remain. They sat as mourners sit. The elders of Zion sit on the ground in their grief (Lamentations 2:10), and Job’s friends sat down with him on the ground in his sorrow (Job 2:13). The word’s second sense fits their situation as well, because they had been made to settle in a land that was never their home.

“Yea, we wept” adds weight to the sitting. The verb bâkâh means to weep, to bemoan and to make lamentation, the outward weeping of people in mourning. They wept for everything that was gone: their land, the Temple, their freedom, and the place where God had set his presence among them. The book of Lamentations mourns the same loss over the ruined city (Lamentations 1), and another psalm speaks of tears that have been the psalmist’s food while he longs for God (Psalm 42:3).

“We hanged our harps” uses tâlâh, to hang up or suspend, the word Strong’s notes is used especially of hanging on a gibbet. The harp, kinnôwr, is a stringed instrument, a lyre or harp, from a root meaning to twang. It belonged to Israel’s worship and celebration. A psalm calls for the LORD to be praised with the harp (Psalm 33:2), and a band of prophets came down prophesying to the sound of harp and other instruments (1 Samuel 10:5). When the exiles hung their harps on the trees, they put away the instruments of praise because grief had silenced their songs. Job says the same of his own sorrow, that his harp is turned to mourning (Job 30:31), and Lamentations pictures Jerusalem desolate and her people gone into exile (Lamentations 1:1–3).

The willow, ʻârâb, takes its name in Strong’s from the use of its shoots, osiers, woven into wattles. Willows grow beside water, and so they lined the rivers of verse 1. “In the midst thereof” uses tâvek, the middle or centre, also rendered “among”, and it places the silent harps in the heart of Babylon, among the trees by its rivers, in the very land of their captivity.

Hanging the harps up was a deliberate act. The exiles kept their instruments, and they would not play them there. God had promised through Isaiah that his anointed one would give “the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61:1–3), and the harps on the willows wait for that day.

“For there” means there in Babylon, by those rivers. The askers are “they that carried us away captive”, from shâbâh, to carry away into captivity. They “required” a song, and the verb shâʼal means to ask, inquire, request or require. Its force in this verse comes from the people asking, the conquerors who held the exiles in their power, so that what they asked for was a demand. Behind the English “a song” stand dâbâr, a word or matter, and shîyr, a song, so the captors asked for the words of a song.

The second half of the verse says the same thing more sharply. The askers are now “they that wasted us”, from tôwlâl, which Strong’s explains as one causing to howl, an oppressor, the people who had brought ruin on Judah. What they want is “mirth”, simchâh, joy, gladness and mirth. Then they name the song they want: “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” The word for “songs” here is the same shîyr as “a song” earlier in the verse.

The songs of Zion were the psalms Israel sang in Jerusalem, often at the Temple, celebrating the LORD as King, his faithfulness to his covenant and the beauty of his city, such as Psalm 48 and Psalm 84. They were bound up with Israel’s covenant with God and with who they were as his people. The demand may have come from idle curiosity about a conquered people’s music, but the psalm names the askers as the ones who wasted them, and their request reads as a taunt. To demand gladness from people sitting in mourning is cruel, rather like asking a bereaved family to sing at the funeral. To ask for the songs of the LORD’s own city, from the people whose city and Temple they had destroyed, made the cruelty sharper still. Nehemiah’s grief for Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:3–4) shows how deeply the ruin of the city wounded God’s people, and Isaiah’s call to sing a new song to the LORD from the ends of the earth (Isaiah 42:10–12) shows the kind of singing God himself would one day bring.

The exiles’ answer is a question that needs no reply. “Sing” is shîyr, the verb to sing, and “song” is again shîyr, the noun of verse 3. The song is “the LORD’S”, Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant name of Israel’s God, the self-existent and eternal One. The captors had asked for songs of Zion, and the exiles call them what they are, the songs that belong to the LORD himself. “A strange land” joins ʼădâmâh, land, soil or country, with nêkâr, foreign, the land of a foreign people and their gods.

The question carries both grief and resolve. Their sorrow was too heavy for joyful singing, and they would also keep the songs of the LORD from becoming a show for the people who had destroyed his house and mocked his name. Their worship was bound up with Jerusalem and the Temple, the place God had chosen, so the request asked them to sing in the land of their captivity the very songs that celebrated his presence in Zion (Psalm 48:1–2). Another psalm remembers going up with the crowd to the house of God and longs for it again (Psalm 42:4). By keeping silent, the exiles stayed faithful to the LORD and kept their identity as his people in the middle of a hostile land.

The psalm goes on from here. The singer vows never to forget Jerusalem (Psalm 137:5–6) and then prays for justice against Edom and Babylon (Psalm 137:7–9). Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29) and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1) spoke God’s word to these same exiles, and the return they longed for came, as Ezra and Nehemiah record (Ezra 1, Nehemiah 1).

The exile of Israel pictures a deeper exile, the separation of fallen people from the life-giving presence of God because of sin. Jesus, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), entered that brokenness. Isaiah foretold that he would be “cut off out of the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8), and he wept over Jerusalem as the exiles had wept over Zion, grieving for a people blind to the things that belonged to their peace (Luke 19:41–44).

The captors in Babylon mocked a grieving people, and Jesus was mocked by soldiers before his crucifixion (Matthew 27:27–31). On the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), bearing the separation from God that our sin had earned. Through his death and resurrection he gives rest to the weary (Matthew 11:28) and a joy that no one can take away (John 16:22).

In Christ, those who were strangers are made “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God”, built together into a dwelling place for God (Ephesians 2:19–22). Believers still live in this world as strangers and pilgrims (1 Peter 2:11), and we have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22–24). Through Christ we offer the sacrifice of praise continually (Hebrews 13:15). The redeemed from every nation sing a new song to the Lamb (Revelation 5:9–10), and at the end God will dwell with his people and wipe away every tear, with no more sorrow or pain (Revelation 21:3–4). The harps hung on the willows of Babylon look forward to that song.

These verses give God’s people words for grief. The exiles sat, wept and remembered, and the Holy Spirit kept their lament in Scripture, which shows that God hears the sorrow of his people and makes room for it in their worship. Their silence shows how holy the LORD’s songs were to them, too precious to be sung on demand for those who mocked him. Their tears over Zion show that they still loved the place of his presence, even in a foreign land.

God did not forget these captives. He brought them home, and in Christ he has opened a better city to all who trust him, where his people will sing the LORD’s song with nothing to silence it.