Kirk E. Miller
Psalm 137 ends with one of the Bible’s most scandalizing lines: a prayer that an enemy’s infants would be dashed against rocks. It understandably troubles believers, and for skeptics, it’s a classic case against the Bible’s goodness. Does this cry for violence—especially against innocent babies—belong in what is supposed to be a sacred hymn book? On this episode of What in the Word?, Kirk E. Miller brings in Dr. Bruce Waltke to reckon with this troubling passage.
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Episode guest: Bruce Waltke
Bruce Waltke is Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Regent College and Knox Theological Seminary. He holds a ThD in Greek and New Testament (Dallas Theological Seminary) and a PhD in ancient Near Eastern languages (Harvard). His career also included teaching positions at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Reformed Theological Seminary. Dr. Waltke has written numerous scholarly books and articles and edited or contributed to various editions of the Bible, including the New American Standard Version and the New International Version. He was also president of the Evangelical Theological Society (1975). He and his late wife, Elaine, have three children and three grandchildren.
Episode synopsis
The context of the cry
Psalm 137 speaks to the experience of the Babylonian exile. The Southern Kingdom of Judah has been conquered, Jerusalem has been destroyed, and the people have been carried off. Their captors gloat, demanding they perform a joyous song of Zion while Zion lies in ruin and the people lack all joy (Ps 137:1–6).
Psalm 137:7 turns to address God, calling on him to remember how the Edomites cheered on Jerusalem’s destruction when it fell. Then Psalm 137:8–9 turns attention to Babylon itself, calling for her own devastation and declaring “blessed” whoever repays her with what she has done.
Many of us come to a passage like this from places of comfort and security, with little frame of reference for the kind of deep suffering the exiles experienced. However, a sympathetic engagement of Psalm 137 will reckon with the utter brutality to which it responds.
Delineating the difficulty
Christian readers often see this prayer for violent retribution as contradicted by the Bible’s—especially the New Testament’s—ethic of non-retaliation (e.g., Luke 6:27–36; Rom 12:17–21; 1 Pet 3:9; 1 Thess 5:15; cf. Lev 19:18; Prov 20:22; 24:29). Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek (Matt 5:38–48). From the cross, Jesus prays for the forgiveness of those wrongfully executing him (Luke 23:34). Stephen follows suit as he’s stoned to death (Acts 7:60). In fact, we are told to bless, not curse (Luke 6:28; 1 Cor 4:12). So how can the same Bible that holds up these models also contain a prayer for vengeance?
Furthermore, Psalm 137:9’s difficulty is not merely its call for violent retribution, but its call for the destruction of infants who have done no wrong. Are they to bear the sins of their parents (cf. Deut 24:16; Ezek 18:20)?
Finally, the psalm describes the person who would perform this act as “blessed.” This is the same word used elsewhere in the Psalter to describe the righteous person who walks in the ways of God (e.g., Ps 1:1–6; see also Ps 2:12). How can someone who commits infanticide be so regarded?
Different interpretations
Several attempts to make sense of Psalm 137:9, and the imprecatory psalms in general, have been proposed over the centuries.
1. Predictive. Some take the Hebrew form of this verb as simply describing what will happen (a statement of fact), not a desire or prayer for this to happen. Dr. Bruce Waltke finds this reading implausible.
2. Immoral. Others deem the psalm to be wrong and immoral at this point. The psalm contains the raw, albeit sinful response of the psalmist to injustice.
However, the Psalter provides no indication that such cries for judgment were inappropriate. Moreover, the Psalms were intended for public worship (e.g., “to the choirmaster”). Additionally, Waltke points to 2 Timothy 3:16, which states that all Scripture—including the imprecatory psalms—are divinely inspired and profitable for training in righteousness.
3. Discontinuity. Still others suggest the Psalter’s imprecations, like Psalm 137:7–9, are un-Christian (or maybe sub-Christian). Whereas the Old Testament regularly models violence and desire for vengeance, the New Testament provides a superior ethic of forgiveness, non-retaliation, and non-violence.
However, conflicting with this suggestion, the New Testament quotes imprecatory psalms approvingly (e.g., Acts 1:20; Rom 11:9–10) and even pronounces curses of its own at times (e.g., Acts 8:20–23; 13:9–11; 1 Cor 16:22; Gal 1:8–9; 2 Tim 4:14). The New Testament speakers see themselves as heirs of the Old Testament’s ethics (e.g., Matt 22:34–40). The imprecatory psalms cannot be dismissed as a relic of an ethically inferior dispensation, as they are being prayed even today by morally perfected saints in heaven: Revelation depicts the martyrs crying out for God to take vengeance on their persecutors (Rev 6:9–10).
4. Allegory. Some early Christian interpretations allegorized the text. For example, Augustine took the “rock” as Christ (per 1 Cor 10:4) and the “infants” as “evil desires newly come to birth” which we are to destroy via Christ.1 However, this approach severs the psalm from its historical and literary context and is disconnected from the actual concerns of the text.
5. Justice. A final view, advocated by Bruce Waltke and others, is that the psalm expresses a righteous call for proper divine justice in response to evil.
Babylon’s guilt and lex talionis
Waltke seeks to make sense of this passage by situating it within the Old Testament’s broader theological framework of justice.
Although God used Babylon to discipline Israel, Babylon was not thereby innocent. God can use an unjust agent for a just purpose without approving the agent’s methods or motives (e.g., Isa 10:5). Israel had not wronged Babylon. Babylon’s conquest was brutal and included atrocities against the civilian population. As a result, Babylon itself deserves—and will face—God’s judgment.
With regards to the specific language of dashing infants, the psalm seems to suggest that Babylon had done this very thing to Israel (“see according to what you have done to us”; Ps 137:8). This prayer for the same fate to fall on Babylon is direct application of lex talionis (eye for eye, tooth for tooth, etc.; see Exod 21:24). Lex talionis was not a call for savage revenge. Quite to the contrary, it required proportional justice, a safeguard against disproportionate revenge like that of Lamech in Genesis 4:23–24. In its original context, lex talionis insists that punishment must match the crime (i.e., “eye for eye”—and no more).
The imprecatory psalms are prayers for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10). This, among other things, includes the executing of God’s just judgment on evil.
Vengeance is God’s, not ours
In the Old Testament, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Israel were co-extensive. Israel was to be a theocratic state in which the nation embodied the covenant community. Thus, it at times wielded divinely authorized violence, such as in the Canaanite conquest. By contrast, today the church is not a geopolitical state but transcends such boundaries.
Thus, we must recognize all the more the distinction between the ethics of the state and the ethics of the church. Vengeance is the responsibility of the state who bears the sword (Rom 13:4). It is not the prerogative of the private Christian (Rom 12:19). Vengeance is God’s (Rom 12:17–21), mediated provisionally during this time through his minister, the state (Rom 13:1–4).
Within Israel’s legal structure, personal revenge was also prohibited. Vengeance had to be carried out by the community through due process, or through the cities of refuge in cases of manslaughter (Num 35:6–34). Where no human court could reach a verdict, the appeal went to the highest court: God himself.
This is precisely what Psalm 137 is doing. The exiles in Babylon cannot bring charges before any tribunal. Babylon is beyond their reach. So they do the only thing available: They take the case to God, asking him to act as judge and to render a just verdict. Rather than encouraging and giving license to revenge, the imprecatory psalms restrain it. Instead of taking matters into their own hands, the psalmist places vengeance in God’s.
Is the language hyperbolic?
Kirk E. Miller asks whether the language of dashing infants is meant to be taken literally or if we are meant to understand it as hyperbolic ancient Near Eastern (ANE) war rhetoric. Should we read this as a literal desire for violence or is it a conventional poetic expression of total destruction of an oppressor?
Waltke acknowledges the legitimacy of this question. At the same time, as he explains, historical records show that ancient cultures, such as Sparta, did practice infanticide of this sort. Thus, the prayer in Psalm 137 may well be literal, understood within this framework as proportional justice for the exact things Babylon had done (“as they have done to us”; Ps 137:8).
As Waltke explains, the world of the Old Testament operated with a sense of community solidarity, rather than individualism (e.g., Josh 7). Children would have been seen as the continuation of their parents’ trajectory. Babylon was not merely a political enemy but a tyrannical kingdom whose next generation was assumed to perpetuate its evil. Thus, destroying the next generation was a way of ending Babylon’s capacity for harm.
“Blessed” is the one who does this?
As noted above, the Hebrew אַשְׁרֵי (often translated “happy” or “blessed”) is used elsewhere to refer to the righteous. But can someone be “blessed” for violently killing infants?
Waltke clarifies that אַשְׁרֵי functions not as an emotional state (“happy”) but as a declaration of divine reward: how rewarded is the one who … Compare this usage with the Beatitudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” does not describe a positive feeling but God’s favor and vindication of a certain kind of person and way of life.
With this in mind, the “blessing” of Psalm 137 is not celebrating bloodlust as a virtue. It is declaring that whoever executes this righteous judgment on this tyrannical empire is rewarded by God for upholding his justice.
The eschatological horizon
Kirk introduces the potential eschatological implications of this psalm, particularly as it connects to the judgment of “Babylon” in the book of Revelation. The arc of redemptive history shows that the full realization of justice that Psalm 137 looks for awaits the return of Christ. The imprecatory psalms, thus, are an expression of this hope.
Jim Hamilton’s commentary on the Psalms makes this observation on Psalm 137 specifically:
In Ps 137 the psalmist longs for the vindication of God’s people promised in Deut 32:36, recalled in Ps 135:14, guaranteed in Ps 136. This vindication will be realized by the Ps 1 blessed man (137:8, 9), who arises to do what was promised in Ps 2:9, rule the nations with a rod of iron, shattering them like a potter’s vessel. The word “shatter” (נפץ) occurs only twice in the Psalter, at 2:9 and 137:9. The 137:8–9 twofold use of “blessed” (אשרי), the first word of Ps 1 that opens the concluding statement of Ps 2, and the use of this verb “shatter” join together to assert that the blessed king from David’s line, spoken of in Pss 1 and 2, is the seed of the woman who will crush the head of the seed of the serpent in Ps 137:9. This interpretation receives confirmation from the fact that Ps 137 precedes the final set of Davidic psalms in the Psalter, Pss 138–145. The conqueror blessed in Ps 137:8–9 will be the future king from David’s line, David’s own Lord (110:1, 6).2
Preaching and applying the psalm
Resist the temptation to skip or sanitize this passage. The imprecatory psalms, including Psalm 137, give language to genuine suffering. They refuse to pretend that evil is not evil. At their core, they are acts of extraordinary trust in God, who alone is qualified to render final judgment. They call us, like Christ, to entrust ourselves to God (1 Pet 2:23) rather than perpetuate cycles of retaliation.
When we find ourselves suffering unjustly—when there is no earthly court to appeal to, no mechanism for redress—we must not despair. Neither should we retaliate. Rather, the imprecatory psalms, like Psalm 137, teach us to bring our case to God. We are to live by faith that God sees, that he judges rightly, and that he will act—even if that means waiting for Christ’s return for this judgment.
Logos values thoughtful and engaging discussions on important biblical topics. However, the views and interpretations presented in this episode are those of the individuals speaking and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Logos. We recognize that Christians may hold different perspectives on this passage, and we welcome diverse engagement and respectful dialogue.
Let us know what you think
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Resources for further study
War Psalms of the Prince of Peace: Lessons from the Imprecatory Psalms, 2nd ed.
Regular price: $7.99
Psalms (The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Revised Edition, Volume 5 | REBC)
Regular price: $66.99
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- Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 121–150, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine 20 (New City, 2000), 275.
- James M. Hamilton Jr., Psalms, ed. T. Desmond Alexander, Thomas R. Schreiner, and Andreas J. Köstenberger, Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary 2 (Lexham Academic, 2021), 445.
