Imprecatory psalms:
“The psalms of imprecation are the prayers
of the powerless, whose only source of strength is the hope that God will act
powerfully for their salvation. In such a desperate position, it is difficult
to imagine that salvation from enemies would come in any other form than
violence against them.” “It opens up a dialogue, not just between God and the
supplicant, but between the supplicant and the community.”[1]
Ps137
Questions:
l V3: Song
l V4: Foreign land: out of grief or out of
reverence to God?
l V5: Forget…
l V6: Highest joy
l V7: Why Edom?
l V8: Daughter of Babylon?
l V9: Dashing babies against the rock: contrary
to God’s character?
Genre:
l Lament, Historical, Imprecatory
l A negative Zion psalm. Other Zion psalms talk
of the security, blessings and other positive things of Zion.
Context:
l Post-exilic. Before the rebuilding of the
temple. Between 557-515BC. Those who returned to Jerusalem and saw the city
still in ruins.
Structure:
l Plural V1-4, Singular V5-6.
l Memory as a key theme:
l V1-4: Key verb remember.
l V5-6: Key verb forget.
l V7-9: Key verb remember.
l Jerusalem/Zion: V1,3,5,6,7. This is closely
related to memory.
Key ideas:
l In using this psalm, you cannot help but
remember.
l Similarly, in other Ps adjacent to this Ps:
l Ps135:14: Yahweh’s acts of deliverance. V21:
emphasis on Jerusalem.
l Ps136:23: Yahweh remembers us in our low
estate.
l Destruction of Jerusalem is the biggest
question the Israelites could pose regarding the goodness of Yahweh.
l A plea for divine justice. Is God just? Is God
the ruler of the universe?
Exegesis:
l V1: Start off with waters/rivers. Euphrates in
Babylon. Speaking of canals as rivers expresses the strangeness of their
experience. This remembering is why they wept. For those who endured the exile,
the only way they can remember Zion is Zion as destroyed.
l V2: Harps are the instruments used in worship.
l V3: Tormenters asking for them to worship, to
sing the happy songs that celebrate Zion. A clear sense of mockery in this.
l V4: Foreign land: A cultic land? Song written
for Yahweh’s honour and the honour of Zion. A song to celebrate Zion for
oppressive unclean captors would be inappropriate.
l V5: “May my right hand forget its skill”. No
object in Hebrew actually, so just “may my right hand forget.” Or “may my right
hand wither.”
l V6: “Let my tongue stick to the roof of my
mouth.” How well can you sing like this? So psalmist couldn’t worship as he
cannot use his right hand to play the harp or sing with his tongue stuck unto
the roof of his mouth. If I fail to respond to this situation appropriately,
may I be rendered useless. If I misuse these skills, may they be taken away
from me.
l V7: For Yahweh to remember: This is not just an
act of memory, but to enact on the basis of this knowledge. So, we are not
reminding an Alzheimer ridden God, but to get God to act in this state of
affairs. The force here is, “get them, Yahweh!” “To strip/make naked” down to
her foundations. Cities are feminine. Jerusalem is pictured as a helpless woman
stripped by the Edomites. Why do we strip a woman in a war? To rape. For those
who experienced the exile, this is not a metaphor, but they actually
experienced or witnessed rape. So there is vicious anger here in the actual
historical experience of going through something like this.
l V8: Correspondence between daughter of Babylon
here and the book of Lamentations. “Happy” is the one who sees this. “Blessed”
is a better translation. Pays back.
l V9: A human desire for revenge. Also a faith
statement. Dashing babies against rocks. Rocks are used to build big stuff in
Jerusalem, as there are many rocks in Jerusalem. In Babylon, they build big
stuffs using mudbricks, because there aren’t rocks. Remembering what the
Babylonians did to Israel’s children, and saying that’s how Babylon ought to be
treated. It is a psalm that ends with a blessing. Theology and emotion need not
be pulled apart. Vicious angry emotions can also be the vehicle for theology. The
safest thing we can do with these emotions is to express them to Yahweh and ask
Yahweh to do what is right. That way, Yahweh can vindicate Yahweh’s sovereign
rule.
Key Ideas:
l This justice of God entails God’s judgment on
the nations for their past treatment of Zion.
l This psalm reminds us that the kingdom of the
world is not yet the kingdom of our God.
l The human desire is to see God’s rule and God’s
justice fully expressed in the world.
l Jesus’s command to love our enemy and not
retaliate. This is not the same as to condoning with someone’s crime. Forgiveness
is not a form of condoning someone’s crime. It anticipates waiting for God’s
justice rather than taking it in our hands. Forgiveness is where “I give up my
rights for you to be treated as your crime deserves”. Forgiveness is never
without a context: For God to forgive, there always need to be repentance and
faith. In the absence of repentance, God forgives no one. The only thing left
for those who have offended God but have not repented: Justice/judgment. Do not
condone the evils of this world, which Christ died to defeat.
This psalm ends with the most horrifying
closing line of any psalm, which involves dashing babies at the rocks. It is a
lament sung to God in the face of absolute despair and hopelessness, asking for
God’s justice.[2]
The setting was during or just after the Babylonian exile.[3]
There is no way to soften the words of the imprecatory psalms (Ps137). “Each is
a heart-felt song sung to God, asking for God’s justice to be meted out in the
face of absolute despair and hopelessness. Each is a song of revenge sung on
behalf of the victims of cruelty, despair and destruction.”[4] P.D.
James had a character in her novel say, ‘If I had a God, I’d like him to be
intelligent, cheerful and amusing… I doubt whether you’d find him much of a
comfort when they herded you into the gas chambers. You might prefer a God of
vengeance.”[5]
God does not ask us to suppress the emotions and desire for revenge when we or
our loved ones have been wronged.[6] What about
the child abuse in the church, and the poverty and starvation brought about by
corrupt governments throughout the world? “The imprecatory psalms are outcries
against violence that demand just such violence by God on behalf of the psalm
singers.”[7]
“The imprecatory words of the Psalter are cries to God to “make things right”
in the face of seemingly hopeless wrong.”[8]
Entrust to God the taking of vengeance on wrongdoing rather than taking it into
our own hands.[9]
[1] Joel M. LeMon, “Saying Amen to Violent Psalms: Patterns of Prayer,
Belief, and Action in the Psalter,” in
Soundings in the Theology of Psalms: Perspectives and Methods in Contemporary
Scholarship, ed. Rolf A. Jacobson, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011),
108.
[2] DeClaisse-Walford, Jacobson, and LaNeel Tanner. The Book of Psalms, 956.
[3] DeClaisse-Walford, Jacobson, and LaNeel Tanner. The Book of Psalms, 953.
[4] DeClaisse-Walford, “The Theology of the Imprecatory Psalms,” 79.
[5] Goldingay, Psalms Volume 3:
Psalms 90-150, 612.
[6] DeClaisse-Walford, Jacobson, and LaNeel Tanner. The Book of Psalms, 956.
[7] DeClaisse-Walford, “The Theology of the Imprecatory Psalms,” 83.
[8] DeClaisse-Walford, “The Theology of the Imprecatory Psalms,” 86.
[9] Goldingay, Psalms Volume 3:
Psalms 90-150, 613.
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