Dashing Infants Against Rocks

C. S. Lewis, Walter Brueggemann, and Eugene Peterson argue that the imprecatory psalms (those praying for judgment on enemies) serve a crucial spiritual function: they give voice to real human anguish before God rather than suppressing it into polite religious language.

Psalm 137 was written by survivors of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem (587 BCE), who witnessed the literal dashing of infants against stones by Babylonian soldiers (cf. Isaiah 13:16; Nahum 3:10). The prayer for reciprocal violence is the raw cry of traumatized people bringing their full emotional reality to God.

Its inclusion in Scripture validates the human capacity for honest, even violent, prayer without endorsing the action prayed for.

Traditional interpreters, including Derek Kidner, note that the language of 137:8-9 is a prophetic curse invoking the ancient lex talionis (eye for eye): Babylon did to Israel what the Psalmist prays will be done to Babylon. Isaiah 13:16 and 47:1-3 contain similar oracles of divine judgment against Babylon in prophetic literature. The "happiness" (ashre) formula does not mean the Psalmist endorses this as universally desirable; it describes the agent of divine justice as blessed for executing the righteous judgment God has decreed through the prophets.

The verse is a prayer for divine justice, not a command to act.

Imprecatory psalms (including Psalms 35, 58, 69, 83, 109, 137) form a recognized genre within the psalter that prays for God's judgment on enemies. Comparable curse literature exists throughout the ancient Near East: Mesopotamian curses invoke destruction on enemies' children and cities in similar terms. Within this literary genre, the verse is a formal curse-invocation, not a personal threat or instruction.

Ancient readers understood the imprecatory form as a prayer surrendering vengeance to God rather than taking it personally. The brutality of the language reflects the brutality of the historical event that provoked it.

Some Christian interpreters, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, argued that the imprecatory psalms should be read Christologically: Jesus, who bore the full weight of human sin and violence on the cross, prays these psalms on behalf of humanity's victims. The "enemy" against whom judgment is invoked becomes, in a christological reading, sin, death, and the demonic, rather than ethnic Babylonians. This reading does not deny the psalm's historical meaning but finds a second, spiritual sense in which the violent language points toward the ultimate judgment of evil at the cross and final consummation.