Aren’t we doing that today with Abortion??? God Bless, Memawen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_137
Psalm 137 (Greek numbering: Psalm 136) is one of the best known of the Biblical psalms. Its opening lines, “By the rivers of Babylon…” (Septuagint: “By the waters of Babylon…”) have been set to music on several occasions.
The psalm is a hymn expressing the yearnings of the Jewish people in exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 607 BCE. The rivers of Babylon are the Euphrates river, its tributaries, and the Tigris river (possibly the river Habor, the Chaboras, or modern Khabur, which joins the Euphrates at Circesium).[1] In its whole form, the psalm reflects the yearning for Jerusalem as well as hatred for the Holy City’s enemies with sometimes violent imagery. Rabbinical sources attributed the poem to the prophet Jeremiah,[2] and the Septuagint version of the psalm bears the superscription: “For David. By Jeremias, in the Captivity.”[3]
The early lines of the poem are very well known, as they describe the sadness of the Israelites, asked to “sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land”. This they refuse to do, leaving their harps hanging on trees. The poem then turns into self-exhortation to remember Jerusalem. It ends with violent fantasies of revenge, telling a “Daughter of Babylon” of the delight of “he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
Also, its best not to read every verse in the Bible as if it were a commandment.
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Even worse…it’s in the millions. God has held back His wrath from the U.S. How long will He continue?Aren’t we doing that today with Abortion??? God Bless, Memaw
A commentary from Augustine:Anyone mind explaining this barbaric passage:
“Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock” (Psalms 137:9).
The Fathers and the Saints have attached spiritual senses to this passage, such that “infants” represent our sins in their early stages and that they should be “smashed”, i.e. overcome before they become deep-rooted. It’s a good interpretation.Anyone mind explaining this barbaric passage:
“Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock” (Psalms 137:9).
How can you’re taking this to mean smashing babies be an occasion to meditate on Jesus’s commands about love? they are both about the Bible.The Fathers and the Saints have attached spiritual senses to this passage, such that “infants” represent our sins in their early stages and that they should be “smashed”, i.e. overcome before they become deep-rooted. It’s a good interpretation.
However, that’s a spiritual sense, specifically, the moral. As such, it is a secondary, an extended interpretation. The primary sense of Scripture is always the literal, and we always start there. In that primary sense, this “barbaric” passage says exactly what it says: blessed is the Jew who seizes Babylonian children and bashes their heads against rocks.
Part of the beauty of the Psalms is that they express the whole spectrum of human emotion, including the desire for revenge and retribution. For the devout captive Jew in Babylon, there was no greater pain than to see Jerusalem and the Temple laid waste by Nebuchadnezzar, and this desire to see Babylonian kids bashed in was the Psalmist’s way of saying he wanted to see a similar pain inflicted on his Babylonian captors.
It is not to be taken as a command, or a justification to murder Iraqi children. It simply tells us how the Psalmist feels, how deep his pain runs and how he wants the Babylonians to experience the same pain he feels. This Psalm tells us something about each of us. If someone were to tell me he had never, at least once in his life, experienced a desire for revenge, to hurt someone who had hurt him with the same or greater pain that that someone had inflicted, I’d call that person a liar to his face. Every one of us has had a desire for revenge, and the Psalmist captures this in the literal sense. The Temple was the most precious possession of the Israelite people, so much so that they consider punishing Babylonians with the death of their children the equivalent of their own national loss.
Of course, in reality, that likely never happened. Wholesale murder of Babylonian children would easily have resulted in the suppression or extermination of the captives.
When praying this Psalm in Christian prayer, when meditating on its literal sense, we are well reminded of Jesus’ commands regarding revenge and love of enemies, how he upheld the Law and brought it up to perfection. This is one reason I regret that the Church has dropped this last verse from Psalm 137 in the Liturgy of the Hours, because although violent, it challenges us to think deeply on the Gospel message regarding sin, revenge and love of enemies.
Anyone mind explaining this barbaric passage:
You have to take the quote in context. It’s basically an Israelite prisoner that has been placed in exile stating how much he hates his Babylonian captors. It is quite graphic, but the prisoner was hardly in a position to act against his captors at the time. In modern language, it would be the equivalent of cursing against one’s enemies.“Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock” (Psalms 137:9).
Read Numbers 31.There is no proof that “children” included infants. Only those who had sinned are executed by God’s people
Yes, because many people, Catholics included, seem to think that God, the Author and Owner of all life, is somehow bound to the same moral law he laid out for his creatures. As if he isn’t sovereign or that he isn’t Absolute Good.Read Numbers 31.
15 Moses said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? 16 These women here, on Balaam’s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. 17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. 18 But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.
There are so many people today that ignore completely God’s willingness to destroy all life, including infants. Were there no infants when he destroyed cities? Flooded the earth? Or should we begin to selectively interpret the histories of the Old Covenant to be complete myth? King David was real, Jerusalem was real, his kingdom was real, but when he burned cities to the ground and left no one alive, that was a metaphor. My goodness, the mental gymnastics involved would get a gold medal.
It says ‘every male among the little ones.’ Nowhere does it qualify it with ‘that are above the age of reason.’ The case is far from ‘closed.’ You have performed what is called eisegesis, in which you read a meaning into the text that is not explicitly mentioned. It says all the males among the little ones. They killed all the males. All of them.To some of us it does seem scandalous for God to tell people to kill infants, and those Bible verses are just referring to children over the age of reason (sinners). Case closed
That’s really awfulIt says ‘every male among the little ones.’ Nowhere does it qualify it with ‘that are above the age of reason.’ The case is far from ‘closed.’ You have performed what is called eisegesis, in which you read a meaning into the text that is not explicitly mentioned. It says all the males among the little ones. They killed all the males. All of them.