The destruction
of the state and the Temple and the exile to Babylonia (6th-5th centuries, B.C.E
) were traumatic experiences that produced extensive literature expressing desires
for revenge, stirrings of repentance, expressions of anguish and lament, and
a yearning to be reconciled with God and restored to the land of Judah. Outstanding
in this literary outpouring is Psalm 137 (best known by its opening words "By
the rivers of Babylon"), a hymn of national mourning.
By
the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion.
WALL
PLAQUE for the REMEMBRANCE of JERUSALEM Artist: Zalman Zwieg,
c1910
From the Gross Family Collection, Israel View
enlarged
There on the willows
we hung up our lyres,
for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither;
let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall;
how they cried, "Strip her, strip her to her very foundations!"
Fair Babylon, you predator,
a blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us;
a blessing on him who seizes your babies
and dashes them against the rocks.
Psalm 137 has been attributed
by rabbinic sources to the prophet Jeremiah, placing him "at the rivers
of Babylon" either at the very beginning of the exile or at the very end;
many modern scholars refute this view. In his scholarly article on Psalm 137,
James Kugel discusses the complexity in pinpointing this poem's authorship and
period of composition.[1]
Several scholars have
claimed that the harp-playing weepers by the rivers of Babylon were not an abstract
personification, but the levitic singers, whom their captors forced to join
the other exotic court orchestras that the Assyrian and Babylonian kings kept
for entertainment. After the return from Babylon, these orchestras served as
the prototype for Temple music established in Jerusalem. Music as a sacred art
and an artistic sacred act was gradually given its place in the organization
of the Temple services, but not without a power struggle between the levites
and the priests. It has been suggested that the descriptions of the numbers
and performance of the levitic singers may have been exaggerated so as to afford
prestige for the levitic singers, and for the same reason, the poem "By
the waters of Babylon" may have been inserted in the collection of Psalms.
WHY
THEY CRIED AT THE RIVER
The midrash offers us another
insight: "Why did Israel see fit to weep along the rivers of Babylon? R.
Yohanan said: The river Euphrates killed more people among the Israelites than
the wicked Nebuchadnezzar had killed. For when Israel had been dwelling in the
Land of Israel, they drank only rain water, running water and spring water; when
they were exiled to Babylon they drank the water of the Euphrates, and many of
them died."[2]
Writes Prof. Kugel: "This explanation, perhaps rooted in reality a well as
biblical texts (see Jeremiah 3:18), connects the weeping in Babylon with that
weeping's cause: there was where we sat down and wept because it was there, at
the river of Babylon, that more of us died than had died even at the hands of
Nebuchadnezzar. It is to be noted that such a reading not only justified the emphatic
'there,' but gives new meaning to the psalm's opening words 'al naharot bavel'
meaning not so much 'by' or 'beside' Babylon's river as because of Babylon's rivers
we sat down and wept, for they were the cause of our greatest suffering."[3]
