Bad Theology

Text for today: Psalm 137

Lamenting the master race's defeat and exile in Babylon, the psalmist boasts of the Israelites' refusal to humour their conquerors by singing their native music. The idea of singing praises to God in a foreign country was anathema to the Jews, who had not yet been informed of God's omnipresence and thus assumed that He was a purely local deity. Given that the exile was God's punishment for excessive tolerance of foreign customs, the Israelites naturally assumed that the Babylonians' wish to learn more about their culture was motivated entirely by mockery and malice.

The psalmist then recalls Jerusalem, wishing paralysis and muteness on himself should he forget the city of God's official residence. Since the exile in Babylon entailed national and cultural impotence as well as self-censorship, it could be argued that these exhortations show a certain passive-aggressive priestly irony, calling down a curse that had already descended in return for a sin which no Israelite, and certainly no composer of official propaganda, was likely to commit.

Finally the psalmist celebrates the prospect of violent revenge, calling on God to remember the Edomites who encouraged the Babylonians in their sack of Jerusalem. The last line of all, blessing those future persons who will smash the heads of Babylonian infants against the rock, connotes the gleeful slaughter of the people of Seir by King Amaziah (II Chronicles 25 xi-xvi), who predictably received God's approbation for the mass murder but then came to grief through multiculturalism. After the Second Vatican Council, these lines were censored from the Roman liturgy as being incompatible with the Gospels, presumably on the grounds of insufficient violence. Certainly the all-encompassing genocide which the Saviour envisaged would be impracticable if carried out solely by hand.