Beside Babylon’s rivers
There
we sat / and wept
When we
remembered Zion
On the poplars / in that region
We hung
our lyres
For there / our captors
Asked
us / for words of song
Our
mockers / for joyfulness
“Sing for us
One of
the / songs of Zion”
How could we sing
Yhwh’s
songs
On
foreign soil?
Within the psalms one of the effects of descending to Sheol
is the inability to ‘remember Yhwh’. This ‘remembrance of Yhwh’ is not simply a
forgetfulness. To ‘remember Yhwh’ is to engage in liturgical praise of him.
Sheol is the place of a silence deeper than an inability to speak. It is the
place where one cannot commune with the presence of Yhwh. One cannot sign his
praises there. It is a silence that reaches much deeper. One could say, it is a
silence that stretches to the innermost part of the human—that place where the
human is permitted to be himself in being brought beyond himself in Yhwh’s
presence through praise.
Here, the realm of the ‘captors’ and the ‘mockers’ stands on
the border between the Land and Sheol. Zion and “be remembered” but its songs
cannot be sung. This borderland is important to pause over. In Babylon, beside
its rivers, they wept because of their memory. And yet, they do not want to
banish it. The psalm concludes with a list of curses lain upon them if they do—the
withered hand and the cleaved tongue. This is the borderland of memory,
standing on the verge of Sheol where all memory will be gone, and the Land,
where memory is life-giving and joyous. This is where the opening section so
eloquently says that Yhwh’s people “hung up our lyres”, surrendering their
liturgical instruments. Memory remains, but now not as a source of liturgical joy
but as a form of torture and pain.
We are not, strictly, in the realm of silence of Sheol, but
the realm of sorrow, which is, along the spectrum between the Land and Sheol is
decidedly “in the red”. The songs of Zion are now sources of weeping—that is
their dark liturgy in Babylon.
In a more deeply disturbing display of absence, it is not
simply that they cannot sing the “songs of Zion”, but their captors ask them to
sing them. In the Land the “songs of Zion” are sung in Zion, during times of
pilgrimage to the Temple. The songs and Zion are mutually revealing. The songs
reveal the joy of Zion and Zion is the source and summit of their songs. They
are not simply artistic expressions, but liturgical songs that are rooted in
the place of Yhwh’s home. For the captors and mockers, though, they are just
that—artistic forms of entertainment, utterly severed from the source of their
inspiration. They are made into “play things” for the Babylonians.
For Yhhw’s people, to sing a liturgical song as mere entertainment
is a form of torture, a form of mockery, that compounds their already profound
sense of alienation.
Why poplars and rivers? The psalmist and his people are in
the midst of a lush environment, full of flowing water and healthy trees. And
yet, Babylon’s rivers of water only bring out their own tears of flowing water.
And Babylon’s poplar trees are only hooks on which to hang their harps. In
other words, apart from Jerusalem and Zion, verdant life is meaningless to
them. It holds no joy to them. As the Babylonians ask them to treat their
sacred things as profane, so too does the psalmist almost mock Babylon’s
beauties as but distractions. This becomes important later on when the psalmist
declares curses upon himself if “I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.” Were
he to turn to these rivers and poplars and see in them anything that tempts
away their joy at Jerusalem, he should be cursed.
This psalm then is an exercise at both remembering Jerusalem
and detachment from the beauties of Babylon.
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