By the Rivers of Babylon

The river slides past, wide and slow. A row of harps hangs in the branches of the trees, swaying a little in the breeze. No one is playing them. The people who own them are sitting on the bank, and they are weeping.

The year is around five hundred and eighty-six before Christ. The armies of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, have broken through the walls of Jerusalem. The city has been burned, the temple of Solomon destroyed. Thousands of people from Judah have been marched hundreds of miles east, to Babylon, in what is now Iraq. Babylon is a great city on the river Euphrates, with canals running through the fields all around it. It is rich and impressive. And it is not home. Among the captives are singers and musicians, people who used to lead worship in the temple. One of them later wrote a song about those days. We know it as Psalm one hundred and thirty-seven.

It begins: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Zion is another name for Jerusalem, the hill where God's temple stood. Picture it. Evening by the water. People who have lost their homes, their city and their place of worship. They think of the steps of the temple, the festival crowds, the songs they used to sing there. And the tears come. “We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.” They are still carrying their instruments, but they cannot bring themselves to play. The music has gone out of them.

Then someone comes along the bank. Babylonians, the people who captured them. And they want entertainment. Go on, they say. You people of Judah are famous for your songs. Sing us one of the songs of Zion! It may have been teasing, or it may have been cruelty. Either way, they want the songs of God's temple turned into a show for the people who destroyed it. And the singer asks the question at the heart of this psalm: “How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?” How can we sing those songs here, to them, as if nothing had happened?

Then the singer makes a promise, out loud, so that everyone can hear. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” Cunning here means skill. A harpist plays with the right hand. Let my hand forget how to play if I ever forget you. “If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” Let me never sing again if I do not keep you first in my heart, above my greatest joy. This is not a song of giving up. It is a song of holding on. Babylon can take their homes. It cannot take their memory of God and his promises. And remember how this story ends. Some seventy years after the first exiles were taken, God did bring his people home, and they sang again in Jerusalem.

The musicians of Jerusalem really were famous. More than a century before the exile, the Assyrian king Sennacherib besieged Judah. His own record of the campaign, carved on a clay prism now in the British Museum, lists the tribute King Hezekiah sent him: gold, silver, ivory, and male and female musicians. Mighty empires wanted the singers of Jerusalem. No wonder the Babylonians asked for a song.

You'll find this song in Psalm one hundred and thirty-seven, verses one to six. Exiles who could not sing, but would not forget. So here is a question to carry with you. When you are somewhere that feels far from God, how can you keep remembering him?