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1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
4 How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
6 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
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if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
7 Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
‘Tear it down,’ they cried,
‘tear it down to its foundations!’
8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
for what you have done to us.
9 He who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
(NIV)
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Psalm 137;-I remember this as a song by Boney M that made it into the charts in my teenage years. I knew it came from a psalm, but I had not understood about the history or the meaning for the Jewish people.
During my research I found out that Jews around the world, will sing this hymn and remember Tisha B’ay the destruction of two temples in Jerusalem, first by the Babylonians then by the Romans.
I wonder if we could sing with such vigour, if Westminster Abbey, or the Vatican was flattened down in a pile of rubble and rebuilt.
Next time you sing this psalm sing out with passion and enthusiasm that our God cannot be flattened or removed from his temple, even if people take the temples we have made God will still be there waiting for us to sing out to Him.
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