Catholic Commentary
Imprecatory Cry Against Edom and Babylon
7Remember, Yahweh, against the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem, who said, “Raze it! Raze it even to its foundation!”8Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, he will be happy who repays you, as you have done to us.9Happy shall he be, who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock.
Psalms 137:7–9 records the psalmist's prayer for divine vengeance against Edom for their treachery during Jerusalem's fall to Babylon in 587 BC, and against Babylon itself for its destruction. The passage expresses the justice of God through language of retribution, which patristic readers interpreted spiritually as the destruction of nascent temptations against the Rock of Christ.
Prayer need not be polished — the Psalter canonizes raw rage at injustice, trusting God alone with vengeance while the soul wages war against sin itself.
Psalms 137:7 — "Remember, Yahweh, against the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem"
The psalmist opens with a petition rooted in covenant history. The Hebrew z'kor ("remember") is not a reminder to an absent God but a liturgical invocation — a call for God to act in accordance with his justice. The "children of Edom" refers to the Edomites, Israel's fraternal enemies, descendants of Esau and thus blood-relatives of Israel through Jacob. Their crime was committed "in the day of Jerusalem" — the day of the city's catastrophic fall to Babylon in 587 BC. The Book of Obadiah and Lamentations 4:21–22 corroborate the charge: rather than assisting their kin, the Edomites stood on the sidelines cheering, shouting "Raze it, raze it, down to its foundations!" (v. 7b, implied from the broader psalm tradition and Obadiah 1:11–14). The betrayal is doubly bitter because it was fraternal — from those who should have been allies. The Edomites later occupied southern Judah and became the Idumeans of the New Testament era. This verse, then, is not petty tribalism but a prayer for divine justice against a specific, documented act of complicity in genocide and sacrilege.
Psalms 137:8 — "Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction"
The phrase "Daughter of Babylon" (bat-Bavel) is a Hebrew poetic personification of the city as a woman — a common idiom for nations in biblical literature (cf. "Daughter of Zion"). The term translated "doomed to destruction" (ha-shudedah) is a participial form meaning "the one being destroyed" or "the devastated one," though some translators render it as a prophetic future: "who is to be destroyed." The NABRE and RSV-CE capture the tension between present reality and imminent fate. This phrase functions as a counter-proclamation: Babylon, so triumphant in its destruction of Jerusalem, is itself under the judgment of God. The prophet Isaiah (chapters 13–14, 47) and Jeremiah (chapters 50–51) thunder this same verdict. Babylon's power is real but temporary; its destruction is as certain as its pride is tall. Crucially, the psalmist does not take up the sword — he places the execution of justice entirely in divine hands.
Psalms 137:9 — "Happy shall he be"
This is the most jolting verse in the psalm — the "beatitude of vengeance." The Hebrew ashre ("happy" or "blessed") is the same word that opens Psalm 1 and the Beatitudes tradition. To deploy it here, in blessing whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks, is to create one of the most visceral collisions in sacred literature. Literarily, the verse describes the brutal ancient Near Eastern practice of warfare by which conquering armies destroyed enemy children to eliminate future resistance — attested in Assyrian and Babylonian war records and in 2 Kings 8:12 and Isaiah 13:16. The verse is a prayer that Babylon's fate mirror what it inflicted on Israel. It is lex talionis — the law of retribution — applied with full ferocity.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Origen, followed by Augustine and Cassiodorus, opened the decisive interpretive path: read spiritually, "Babylon" represents the disordered world, the realm of sin and spiritual captivity; the "little ones" of Babylon are the nascent temptations and sinful thoughts that, if not dashed immediately upon their emergence, grow into full-grown vices that enslave the soul. "Happy is he who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock" — the Rock is Christ (1 Cor 10:4). The spiritual reader is called to dash every newborn temptation against the Rock of Christ before it can mature. This reading, far from sanitizing the verse, gives it a more demanding application: the violence is turned inward, against the self, against concupiscence. The "Daughter of Babylon" becomes the spiritual tyrant — the ego, pride, lust, despair — that holds the soul in bondage far from its true home, which is God.
Catholic tradition brings a uniquely layered interpretive framework to these fearsome verses that neither dismisses them as primitive nor adopts them uncritically.
On the inspiration and canonicity of the imprecatory psalms: The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (§11) teaches that Scripture, in its entirety, is written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit for our salvation. The Church has never excised these verses from the canon — indeed, they appear in the Liturgy of the Hours — precisely because their inspired status means they reveal something true about the human condition before God. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, observed that the Psalms are the prayer of Christ himself, meaning even the cries of desolation and rage are taken up into his own paschal cry.
On the Fathers' spiritual exegesis: Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 136) is the foundational Catholic voice here. He explicitly addresses verse 9: "What are the little ones of Babylon? Evil desires at their birth." He insists the verse is not a license for physical violence but a prescription for spiritual vigilance: kill sin at its inception. Cassiodorus and Origen similarly build on this. This allegorical reading is not an escape from the text's difficulty but a deeper entry into it.
On divine justice and forgiveness: The Catechism (§2302–2303) teaches that anger at injustice is not sinful in itself; what matters is its orientation. These verses direct wrath entirely to God (z'kor, "remember" — act on this, Lord). They model what the Catechism calls the proper ordering of the passion of anger: entrusting retribution to God rather than seizing it oneself (cf. Romans 12:19). The psalmist does not pick up a sword; he prays. This is, paradoxically, a posture of faith.
For contemporary Catholics, Psalm 137:7–9 offers three concrete spiritual challenges.
First, honest prayer. We live in a culture — and sometimes a Church culture — that encourages sanitized, polished prayer. These verses give permission to bring rage, grief, and the hunger for justice to God raw and unfiltered. If you have been betrayed, oppressed, or have watched innocents suffer, the Psalter says: say so to God. Don't perform serenity you don't feel.
Second, the discipline of dashing temptations early. Augustine's reading is spiritually urgent in an age of algorithmically engineered temptation. Every addiction, every pattern of sin, every destructive habit began as a small, manageable "infant." The spiritual practice embedded in verse 9 is radical early intervention: when a sinful desire is newborn — before it has named itself, before it has built a case — dash it against Christ in prayer. Don't negotiate. Don't wait.
Third, entrusting justice to God. In an age of social media vigilantism, cycles of political hatred, and communities nursing generational grievances, this psalm models something counter-cultural: hand vengeance upward. "Remember, Yahweh" — not "remember, my followers." The psalmist's restraint is the beginning of freedom.