Dashing Her Little Ones: Psalm 137 – Part 2

Instead of a sevenfold “song of ascent” for his captors, the Levite musician composed a sixfold imprecation calling on God to come down and judge Babel. As in Eden and Egypt, the rivers of water would become rivers of blood.

Read Part 1 here.

The psalm not only works through the first six days of Creation but also through Israel’s annual calendar. The clocks stop before the final feast, Booths, with a Day of Atonement for the crimes of the great city and her co-conspirators against the sons of Jacob.

Sacred architecture was a form of promise. Its construction was a re-enactment of the Creation Week, picturing a better world to come through the union of heaven and earth. But the liturgy performed within the house was also a promise, a “pre-enactment” of the judgment which begins at the house of God. The blood splashed against the four-horned altar promised the blood of godless kings and their hosts flowing across the “four-cornered” Land if they rejected His mercy.

The priests of God responded to the taunts of their captors with a song of holy war. Those who had destroyed the true “Babel” (“gate of God”), the Temple in Jerusalem, would suffer the same fate. Psalm 137 is thus an ironic act of holy voodoo, a liturgical “doll” world constructed of literary architecture presented as a blueprint to the court of heaven that it might “become flesh.” Just as the prophet Ezekiel had constructed a model of the siege of Jerusalem as a sign to the exiles (Ezekiel 4:1-8), so the Levites gave them a song whose biting use of covenant theology reminded its hearers that the God of heaven and earth was also the Lord of armies.

As a song of hope sung within the belly of the beast, the psalm is like the prayer of Jonah, whose watery prison prefigured the “flood” of Assyrian and Babylonian troops that would be summoned against Israel by God. The ridicule of the Levites by their captors would culminate in Belshazzar’s abuse of the holy vessels plundered from the Temple, an act in which he unwittingly called down the judgment of God upon his own dynasty. Like the Ark of the Testimony in the Temple of Dagon, and the powdered calf drunk by the Israelites at Sinai, the tears of these Levite musicians trapped within the belly of Babylon began a “jealous inspection,” a judgment from within, a cup that would cause her bitter pain and bring about her downfall.

And when he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself and has broken faith with her husband, the water that brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall swell, and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become a curse among her people. But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive children. (Numbers 5:27)

Like the later curses upon the Pharisees, Jesus’ use of the word “blessed” in the beatitudes is covenantal. It describes those who mourn for sin on the Day of Atonement and will thus be forgiven by God and enter into His joy. The tears of Jeremiah were those of a “Son of God,” the faithful man who intercedes for others. When he says “Oh that my head were waters,” his words allude to the Hebrew words for “beginning” and the face of the “waters” in Genesis 1. The burden of the prophet is to initiate the launch sequence of a new creation, a process that necessarily washes away the old.

The psalm has two parts, both of which work through the threefold Garden-Land-World theoscape established in Genesis 1-3. The first three stanzas give us Word, Sacrament, and Government in the priestly realm, ending with the sword of the cherubim in the right hand of the faithful priest, much like the visionary “high priest” and his angelic avengers in Ezekiel.

Then he cried in my ears with a loud voice, saying, “Bring near the executioners of the city, each with his destroying weapon in his hand.” And behold, six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his weapon for slaughter in his hand, and with them was a man clothed in linen, with a writing case at his waist. And they went in and stood beside the bronze altar. (Ezekiel 9:1-2)

Stanzas 4-6 repeat the pattern but in kingly terms, beginning with Jerusalem (Garden: Adam), then judging the false brothers of Edom who exulted in the disinheritance of Jacob (Land: Cain), and concluding with the destruction of the city of men under the guise of “daughter Babylon” (World: Noah).

Thus, the psalm constructs a “heavenly city” prepared to descend upon the holy mountain as the cloud upon Sinai (Exodus 40:34-38). Since vengeance belongs to God, its rest is omitted, leaving a deliberate silence that waits for His response. Just as the Creation Week forms and fills and offers a future, this liturgy deforms (Days 1 to 3), then it de-fills (Days 4 to 6), and thus denies Babel its future (Day 7).

Analysis

TRANSCENDENCE: Ark of the Testimony
(Initiation – Genesis – Sabbath)
The priests weep in the makeshift Sanctuary

• The Levites mourn the destruction of Israel’s “Edenic” mountain under the tyranny of serpent-kings. Instead of standing to wait upon God, guard His Sanctuary, and offer sacrifices of praise, like Job they sit and mourn His absence.
• Their weeping and the willow trees whose silvery leaves “flow” in the wind comprise a “head” and a “body.”

Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! (Jeremiah 9:1)

• Their ministry of “living waters” to heal the nations is now a tributary of tears. Albert Barnes notes:

It is probable that the weeping willow—the willow with long pendulous branches—is here referred to. Trees in desert lands spring up along the courses of the streams, and appear, in the wide desolation, as long and waving lines of green wherever the rivers wind along. The course of a stream can thus be marked by the prolonged line of meandering green in the desert as far as the eye can reach.

• Step 5 is often the location of “bridal” silver including the trumpets that summoned Israel’s hosts. These silvery, “weeping” trees served as a Sanctuary for the displaced priests, a grove like that purchased by Abraham with silver shekels in mourning for his bride (Genesis 23:1-20).
• “In the midst” in the Atonement line alludes to Aaron’s mediation in the open veil. Babylon was constructed upon the Euphrates, divided in equal parts along its left and right banks, with great spiked gates upon its steep slopes, and a network of canals. These priests, as “stolen vessels,” were sitting as judges in the gates of the city of their captors. The sign of their judicial determination was the hanging up of their harps. As in Revelation 8:1, there would be silence in heaven before the ultimate, bitter, atoning judgment upon the “rivers and springs” of the great city (Revelation 8:10).

HIERARCHY: Veil
(Delegation – Exodus – Passover)
Their captors mock them

• The Exodus stanza ironically inverts Pharaoh’s repeated denial of Moses’ request to take God’s people from the “Garden” of Goshen into the wilderness to worship.
• The imperative replaces the authority of God in line 1, the captors stand between God and the Levites in line 2, and the sacrifice of praise is placed in line 3. The mirth they were to mimic appears in line 5 as an artificial Tabernacle of David, and the captors and their captive priests sit at line 6 as the vessels of God in the hands of the “strong man.” Zion sits in line 7 as the House for God’s Name, atop His holy mountain.

ETHICS: Priesthood – Bronze Altar & Table
(Presentation – Leviticus – Firstfruits)
Strange fire in a strange land

• Stanza 3 alludes to the Land (represented by the Bronze Altar) and its fruit bearers (represented by the Golden Table).
• The Land (Day 3) appears in line 3, but it is a strange land. “Strange” is not the word used to describe the “strange fire” offered by the disobedient sons of Aaron in Leviticus 10:1-2, but the idea is the same. Both words are used to describe foreign things and foreign people. As Levites, to sing Yahweh’s songs for their captors would be to partake at the table of demons, like a plundered vessel at Belshazzar’s feast. Moreover, how could the Levites not only sing for their idolatrous tormentors but also sing the joyful songs they sang in a Temple and city that no longer exist?
• The Ethical center is the call to remember Jerusalem, whose only covenant memorial now was the estranged and makeshift worship of the exiles. Jerusalem appears in line 5 as the bridal city, and the mention of the psalmist’s right hand aligns his instrument with the sword of the avenger.

ETHICS: Kingdom – Lampstand
(Purification – Numbers – Pentecost)
The testimony of Jerusalem

• The central stanza takes the priestly theme of stanza 3 (a sacred memorial) and expands it into priest-kingdom. The tongue here is not merely the physical tongue of the Levite, nor even the Hebrew tongue in which the Scriptures were written. The word also denotes a religious confession, a testimony before kings. In the Pentecost stanza, this tongue is not only an ironic swipe at the confusion of tongues at Babel, but also hints at the ultimate overturning of the empires of men by the fellowship of the Spirit of Christ.
• “Forget” was central in the previous stanza, and “remember” is central in this one. As an official song, this remembrance would become an eternal memorial for all of God’s people, a holy duty like that commanded by Jesus.
• “Lift up” is related to olah, the word for the ascension offering. Jerusalem perished in columns of smoke, but those were now replaced with the “incense” of prayer. Once the sinners have filled up their sins, the Sanctuary is filled with the smoke from the kindled nostrils of God as the true devouring dragon (Revelation 15:8), and vengeance finally falls.
• Jerusalem now appears at Conquest, the city that was destroyed like Jericho but would yet be avenged by God.
• The word “chief” is kingly, alluding to the joy of the Davidic Kingdom, the fruit of the Spirit.

ETHICS: Prophecy – Incense Altar
(Transformation – Deuteronomy – Trumpets)
A witness against Edomite brothers

• Israel was to treat Edom (Esau) as a brother (Deuteronomy 23:7), but like the brothers of Joseph who united against him as an unholy “host,” Edom denied Israel passage (Numbers 20:21) and rejoiced in the plundering of Jerusalem (Obadiah 1:10-11). Likewise, the Trumpets section of Revelation presents the followers of Jesus and Herod as rival armies.
• The stanza is patterned after the Ten Commandments as an expression of poetic justice at God’s hand. The seven-sealed scroll opened by the ascended Christ in Revelation served the same purpose, but in that case it was an Edomite-ruled Jerusalem, a spiritual Babylon, that would be razed to the ground in the final conflict between Jacob and Esau.

Priesthood (Submission)		Priest-Kingdom (Dominion)
I Remember	TRANSCENDENCE Servants	II Yahweh,
III against the sons	HIERARCHY Priesthood	IV of Edom
V in the day	ETHICS Kingdom	VI of Jerusalem,
VII who said,	OATH/SANCTIONS Prophecy	VIII ‘Raze!
IX Raze	SUCCESSION Sons	X to the foundation!’

OATH/SANCTIONS – Laver & Mediators
(Vindication – Joshua – Atonement)
The cutting off of Babylon

• The psalm is cut off after stanza 6, alluding to the intended cutting off of Adam (and thus his future offspring) on Day 6, and also the cutting off of “all flesh” in two great Atonement events, the Flood and the destruction of Jericho. Thus, the stanza runs through the Heptateuch in order to repossess the dry land (or Promised Land) and restore it to the meek.
• Babel, “the gate of God,” is used here as an allusion to the true gate of God, the entry to Eden as represented by the veil of the Temple, another reference to Atonement.
• The call for covenant Sanctions to fall upon the enemies of Israel is based upon God’s promise to curse those who dishonored Abraham (Genesis 12:3), rejoicing in Jacob’s misfortune instead of mourning for the loss to the world of the ministry of the Temple. Thus, Israel would not be a “ram in the thicket” for the sons of Edom or Babylon.
• The two “blesseds” are the Bronze Altar and Golden Altar, representing a testimony on earth and in heaven as two witnesses against the great city. Between them is the word “served,” which has a connotation of “weaned,” a fiery dart aimed at the harlot city who devours the sons of others, a “Jezebel” whose own sons the Lord would “kill with death” for her treatment of God’s people (Revelation 2:20-23).
• “Takes and dashes” is the twofold action of “de-creation”— plunder (blessings removed) and plagues (curses applied). The act itself inverts the splashing of substitutionary blood against the altar to mitigate the Edenic and Mosaic curses.
• The psalmist refers to Isaiah’s prediction concerning the infants of Babylon (Isaiah 13:16). In “eye for eye” justice, the sons of Israel would be avenged against her just as the murdered Hebrew infants were avenged against Pharaoh.
• God took the Levites as substitutes for the firstborn of Israel (Numbers 3:12-13), and that legal connection is expressed in this song of vengeance. “Little ones” and “rock” invert the Abrahamic land and womb promises, so the Levites called for barrenness upon the Babylonian dynasty at the hand of a blessed “Phinehas” chosen by God (Numbers 25:13).
• This cutting off of the Babylonian rulers began under Cyrus the Great, who was welcomed by the citizens of Babylon as a savior; they were suffering the “plunder and plagues” of severe inflation and an epidemic. It was completed under King Xerxes. Queen Vashti rebelled in 483BC, and the Babylonians rebelled against their Persian masters in the following year. Xerxes ordered that Babylon be demolished. Daniel served Nebuchadnezzar during the destruction of Jerusalem, and Esther served Xerxes during the destruction of Babylon. In the chiasm of Daniel-to-Esther as an expression of the death and resurrection of Israel, Jerusalem and Babylon were Edenic trees, the priest-and-king pillars of the old order. Together, Daniel and Esther prefigured Christ and His Church ruling the nations with a rod of iron.¹See Daniel the Destroyer.
• Only in Yahweh is there true Succession. Like the Levites, our hope is not in the fruit of the land or the womb but in the promise of a heavenly country. The “new Jerusalem” of Ezra and Nehemiah would be another earthly sign of the ultimate city of God, its gates of purity, and its river of life.

SUCCESSION – Rest & Rule
(Representation – Judges – Booths)
Silence in heaven

Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling. (Zechariah 2:13)

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