Psalms 137
Psalms 137 — Commentary and Meaning
The short answer
Psalm 137 begins with one of the most haunting images in the Bible: exiles sitting "by the rivers of Babylon," weeping when they remember Zion. These are people who watched Jerusalem fall, who were marched away from everything they knew, and who now face a cruel twist—their captors demand entertainment, asking for "one of the songs of Zion." The psalmist's answer is a question that has echoed for centuries: how can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? The exiles hang their harps on the willows. Some songs cannot be performed on demand for the people who destroyed your home.
The middle of the psalm turns from grief to fierce loyalty. The psalmist vows never to forget Jerusalem—may my hand forget its skill, may my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I fail to remember. Memory here is not nostalgia; it is an act of resistance, a refusal to let captivity erase identity.
Then comes the ending that shocks every reader: a blessing on the one who repays Babylon, even the one who dashes its infants against the rock. The psalm does not soften this, and neither should we pretend it isn't there. But notice what the psalmist actually does with the rage. It is not acted on; it is spoken—handed over to God with the plea "Remember, Yahweh." The psalm gives voice to trauma at its most unfiltered and then places the demand for justice in God's hands, not the psalmist's. That is why this brief, brutal poem has endured: it insists that no feeling is too raw to bring into prayer, and that even in a strange land, the story of who you are can be kept alive.
What scholars say
Elizabeth Liebert asks what we are meant to do with the psalm's terrible rage, and finds in "Remember, O LORD" a radical move: bringing even our darkest feelings before God and handing the work of justice over to God. Harvey Cox and Stephanie Paulsell then trace the psalm's afterlife among enslaved African Americans, who loved and paraphrased it—and who, in learning to sing in a strange land, created the spirituals and the blues.
“What Psalm 137 does, though, is actually far more radical than simply naming the rage the captives felt. The psalmist puts all those feelings right out there before God, and gives over to God the responsibility for making things right, for bringing justice: “Remember, O LORD …” From this psalm we learn that not only can we have such powerful emotions, we can bring them to God—and we can attend to them as part of our discernment.”
“No people, in either North or South America at least, have been more gripped by the cosmic myth of exile as have the African people whose forebears were kidnapped and hauled here to toil as slaves. Psalm 137 was one of their favorite texts, even though they did eventually find it possible to “sing the Lord’s song” in the strange lands in which they found themselves, and in so doing created two of the most distinctive forms of American poetry and music, the spirituals and the blues. As Allen Callahan, a historian of black American readings of the Bible, points out, the slaves could not cling to a hope of “return.” “They would learn to sing their song in a strange land or not at all.” 50 Still they loved Psalm 137 and often paraphrased it.”
What it means for you
Psalm 137 gives you permission to pray honestly. Most of us instinctively clean up our feelings before bringing them to God—we edit out the anger, the bitterness, the desire to see someone pay. This psalm suggests the opposite move: say it all, out loud, before God, and then leave the settling of accounts in God's hands. That is different from acting on rage, and different from pretending it isn't there. If you are grieving a loss, living far from what feels like home, or carrying anger you don't know what to do with, this psalm is an invitation to bring the whole of yourself into prayer—and to trust that God can hear it.
Psalms 137 in context
Psalm 137 sits near the end of the Psalter, in the collection scholars call Book V. It is a communal lament rooted in a specific catastrophe: the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the forced deportation that followed. Unusually for the Psalms, it names its setting directly—Babylon's rivers, Edom's betrayal, Zion's ruin. It stands in striking contrast to the psalms of praise that surround it, a reminder that Israel's songbook holds anguish and celebration side by side. Psalm 138, immediately after, returns to thanksgiving.
Passages we cover in this chapter