In the last triplet (vv. 23-25) the singer comes to the Israel of the present. It, too, had experienced Jehovah's remembrance in its time of need, and felt the merciful grasp of His hand plucking it, with loving violence, from the claws of the lion. The word for "low estate" and that for "tore us from the grasp" are only found besides in late writings—the former in Eccles. x. 6, and the latter in Lam. v. 8.
But the song will not close with reference only to Israel's blessings. "He gives bread to all flesh." The loving-kindness which flashes forth even in destructive acts, and is manifested especially in bringing Israel back from exile, stretches as wide in its beneficence as it did in its first creative acts, and sustains all flesh which it has made. Therefore the final call to praise, which rounds off the psalm by echoing its beginning, does not name Him by the Name which implied Israel's special relation, but by that by which other peoples could and did address Him, "the God of heaven," from whom all good comes down on all the earth.
[PSALM CXXXVII.]
1 By the streams of Babylon, there we sat, yea, wept,
When we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows in the midst thereof
We hung our harps.
3 For there our captors required of us words of song,
And our plunderers [required of us] mirth;
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
4 How can we sing Jehovah's songs
In a strange land?
5 If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
May my right hand forget!
6 May my tongue cleave to my palate,
If I remember thee not,
If I set not Jerusalem
Above the summit of my joy!
7 Remember, Jehovah, to the children of Edom
The day of Jerusalem,
Who said, "Lay bare, lay bare,
To the foundation therein."
8 Daughter of Babylon, thou that art laid waste,
Happy he that requites thee
Thy doing which thou hast done to us!
9 Happy he that seizes and dashes thy little ones
Against the rock!
The Captivity is past, as the tenses in vv. 1-3 show, and as is manifest from the very fact that its miseries have become themes for a psalm. Grief must be somewhat removed before it can be sung. But the strains of triumph heard in other psalms are wanting in this, which breathes passionate love for Jerusalem, tinged with sadness still. The date of the psalm is apparently the early days of the Return, when true-hearted patriots still felt the smart of recent bondage and sadly gazed on the dear ruins of the city. The singer passes in brief compass from tender music breathing plaintive remembrance of the captives' lot, to passionate devotion, and at last to an outburst of vehement imprecation, magnificent in its fiery rush, amply explicable by Israel's wrongs and Babylon's crimes, and yet to be frankly acknowledged as moving on a lower plane of sentiment than is permissible to those who have learned to repay scorn with gentleness, hate with love, and injuries with desires for the injurer's highest good. The coals of fire which this psalmist scatters among Israel's foes are not those which Christ's servants are bidden to heap on their enemies' heads.
Nothing sweeter or sadder was ever written than that delicate, deeply felt picture of the exiles in the early verses of the psalm. We see them sitting, as too heavy-hearted for activity, and half noting, as adding to their grief, the unfamiliar landscape round them, with its innumerable canals, and the monotonous "willows" (rather, a species of poplar) stretching along their banks. How unlike this flat, tame fertility to the dear home-land, with its hills and glens and rushing streams! The psalmist was probably a Temple singer, but he did not find solace even in "the harp, his sole remaining joy." No doubt many of the exiles made themselves at home in captivity, but there were some more keenly sensitive or more devout, who found that it was better to remember Zion and weep than to enjoy Babylon. "Alas, alas! how much less it is to hold converse with others than to remember thee!" So they sat, like Michael Angelo's brooding figure of Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel, silent, motionless, lost in bitter-sweet memories.