Contemplative Bible Reading

Psalms 137:8-9

⁸ O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-

⁹ he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Before looking at the verses from Psalms, let’s consider these verses from 2 Timothy 3:

¹⁶All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The “scripture” mentioned in 2 Timothy is what we have in the Old Testament, in the Psalms.  I believe these verses from 2 Timothy. I believe that the Psalms are from God and are useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.

Does the passage from 2 Timothy also mean that:

• All scriptures are right?
• All scriptures are correct?
• All scriptures were written for us to imitate and follow?

Are there other reasons for some scriptures?

Now let’s consider the verses from Psalms 137. The writer is lamenting the disaster that fell on Jerusalem. The Babylonians destroyed the city and rejoiced in their victory over God’s people. God used the Babylonians to exact punishment on His disobedient people, but He later punished the Babylonians for their attitude.

But look at the verses (my paraphrase):

Happy is he who dashes your infants against the rocks

What? Happy is he who murders Babylonian babies? What is that? This is scripture that is God-breathed and useful teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. We could have put these verses on banners and used them to extol troops in the recent fighting in Iraq. Right?

This brings me to the title of this post. Was the writer of this Psalm wrong? Are there things written in scriptures – Old and New Testaments – where the writer was wrong? I haven’t heard this question raised before. I doubt I am original in this, but I haven’t heard it.

In this Psalm, I believe the writer is wailing in sorrow to the point of being out of his right mind. The context drives him to write such as Happy is he who dashes your infants against the rocks. I don’t see this as an admonition for training in righteousness that we should slaughter Iraqi babies.

I may be going on and on about something that is obvious to everyone, well almost everyone. This is an example of a small part of scripture that is easy to misuse, easy to misunderstand. At least it is an easy scripture for someone to hold up and say, “what kind of monster are you Christians to hold as sacred such writings?”

Let us not ignore scriptures such as this. Let us not brush off non-Christians with a simple, “Oh, you just don’t understand, go away” when they confront us with ugly scriptures like this (killing babies is an ugly subject).