Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Minipost: Psalm 137 - Blessed Infanticide

            Remember when I said I might come back to Psalms to do mini posts on individual ones? Well, here’s the first of those.

            Many atheists love to quote the line “blessed is he who dashes your babies against the rocks,” from Psalm 137 as a refutation of the claim that the Bible is a perfect moral guide, because it’s an obviously morally repugnant verse. But Christians love to protest that verses like this are taken out of context. So in the interests of fairness I thought I’d give this psalm a full once-over to see what possible context could possibly justify the verse. Here’s the full text of Psalm 137:

Psalm 137:1 By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. 2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres. 3 For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” 4 How shall we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land? 5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! 6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! 7 Remember, O Yahweh, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!” 8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you what you have done to us! 9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”

            OK, so based on that it looks like this is a song about the Babylonian Captivity, when the Hebrew kingdoms were conquered and many of its citizens forcibly taken to live in Babylon. Those events were described both in Second Kings and Second Chronicles. The Psalm starts out as a lament for their current situation, and then it morphs into a deranged revenge fantasy about murdering the children of their captors.

            Nope. Sorry, the context still doesn’t justify it. Murdering children because you’re pissed at their parents ain’t cool, no matter how much the Bible seems to think that punishing people for the actions of their ancestors is justified. Well, in some places, such as the multiple times God orders genocides against people’s because stuff their ancestors two centuries back had done. In others, the Bible tells you that killing people for the sins of their fathers isn’t allowed. Because the Bible can’t really get its shit together long enough to give any consistent moral message.

            And heck, even within the context of the Bible itself, this is a shit attitude this Psalm is expressing. You see, according to both the Kings and Chronicles accounts, God caused the Babylonians to conquer Judah in order to punish the Israelites for not worshipping him properly. So this Psalm is a revenge fantasy about killing children because their parents did the bidding of the god the writer supposedly worships. It makes no fucking sense whatsoever!

            So yeah… I’m gonna go with the conclusion that atheist condemnation of this Psalm is fully justified.

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