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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