(Image source: Ben Nelms for CBC)

The biblical psalmist never tells us about her own children. But if you look for them, they are there.

The death of a child is intolerable. When an adult dies, especially if they have had a long, happy life, it is possible to say their death was a good one and mean it. When a child dies, the world comes undone. There is no schema of justice, meaning, or order that can hold the death of a child. Children shouldn’t die. They do, but they shouldn’t.

You would expect stories of infant and child death in the Bible — infant mortality during the centuries the Bible was written and edited was high, perhaps as high as fifty percent — but there are few. Biblical stories of barrenness and infertility are a dime a dozen, as are miraculous pregnancies, but little is said of babies and toddlers, and even less of babies and toddlers who die. I don’t know who taught me to think of this absence as indication that ancient people cared less about babies. Having had my own babies, I am sure this is wrong. Pain, not indifference, seems the likely explanation.

When the Bible gives us stories of child death, they are outrageous and extreme. War and famine, voracious gods, and the Lord’s terror. There are the two women who come to Solomon because one of them has smothered their baby (1 Kings 3:16-28). The stories of cannibalism when cities are besieged (2 Kings 6:24-30, Lamentations 4:10). The king of Moab who sacrifices his eldest son (2 Kings 3:27). Jephthah who sacrifices his only daughter (Judges 11:31).

Most outrageous is Psalm 137, its final blessing. “Happy is the one who takes and breaks your little ones against the rock.” This is the worst of it. The pebble in the shoe of the Bible. The verse that makes the whole thing suspect. “Brutality and exploitation….god is tied up in it to his neck,” writes Canadian poet and essayist Dionne Brand. Children shouldn’t die, but in the Bible God sometimes kills children and hears petitions from people who praise those who do. Maybe the best thing to do is to get out the scissors and remove that verse. The rest of Psalm 137 is hauntingly beautiful, sad and angry, but acceptably so. But that last line… The scholar Modupe Oduyoye calls it satanic, and maybe she is right.

***

“Happy is the one…”

What do we do with these words? It is easy to condemn them. They are so beyond the pale that condemnation is unlikely to cost you much. No one is going to remind you of that time you wished to dash babies against rocks.

And yet.

On May 27^th, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced they had found the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Since then, unmarked graves have been found at residential schools across Canada and the search continues. Thousands of children who never came home.

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Psalm 137 begins softly. “By Babylon’s rivers…” Its words are more widely known than most of the Bible’s psalms, because they have been put to music by a wide array of musicians.

By Babylon’s rivers,
there we sat, oh we wept,
when we remembered Zion.

It is a perfect poem, compact and mournful. Hebrew psalmody at its best.

On the willows in her midst,
We hung our harps.
For there they asked us, our captors: “Words of song!”
And our tormentors: “Mirth!”
“Sing for us some songs of Zion.” 

A relationship of exploitation and oppression, boiled down to short commands, sparse and careless: Mirth! Song!

How can we sing YHWH’s songs on foreign soil?
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget.
May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you,
If I do not raise Jerusalem above my highest joy.

It is an eloquent lament for a lost city. A lament made indignant by the demand that the old life, the music of Jerusalem, be turned into pageantry for the enemy. A lament embittered by the unsaid, that the god whose songs the tormentors demand didn’t save them. A sad song, but one that migrants and people living under occupation have found comforting.

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The topic of Psalm 137 isn’t children, or at least not on the surface. For most of the psalm, the psalmist speaks of land, of Jerusalem. But when she turns to cursing, the language of children seeps through.

Remember, YHWH, against Edom’s sons, the day of Jerusalem.
The ones who said: Strip! Strip! Down to her foundation!
Daughter Babylon, the devastated.
Happy is the one who pays you back in kind for what you did to us.

“Edom’s sons” and “Daughter Babylon.” Common expressions, metaphors for whole populations, but taken together, “sons and daughters,” they form a pair that most often appear in the Bible’s genealogies. “He had other sons and daughters” (Gen. 5:4). In biblical genealogies, these words promise a future, more children than need be named, an excess of riches, life continuing on.

***

Edom’s sons and Daughter Babylon may be poetic circumlocutions for peoples and lands, but the last verse of the psalm cannot be explained in this way.

Happy is the one who takes and breaks your infants against the rock.

Most words in Biblical Hebrew that mean “child” have a lexical range that extends beyond childhood. “Son” and “daughter” describe relationships, not age, much like the words do in English. The word for a young boy, yeled, is used for anyone in a dependent position, including adult children and slaves. But there are a few words that unequivocally refer to children. There is the one the psalmist uses here, ‘olal, and its variant ‘olel, either from the verb ‘wl, to nurse and nourish, or ‘ll, to be mischievous. Yoneq and ‘ul both mean nursling; gamul, weaned child. And taf, so much like the English word toddler, is from the verb tafaf, to take little steps or to trip.

None of these words are frequent in the Hebrew Bible. The most common, taf, occurs fourty-one times. The others, taken together, appear only thirty-five times. So when the psalmist refers to the Babylonian children as ‘olalaik, your little ones, she has chosen with care. She means to speak of kids.

***

My life as a European in North America is built on a foundation of violence against children. “Everyone who calls Canada home is guilty,” writes Ray Aldred of the abuses suffered by Indigenous kids in residential schools. That shared communal guilt holds true for the United States as well. Violence against children does not show up in the history of North America as odd exceptions, but as part of the pattern.

The reason Psalm 137 is so easy to condemn is that we’re supposed to agree that harming children is always unacceptable. And yet some children are more important to us as a society than others. That’s not accidental, and we sleep quite well anyway. When I think of that, I think that maybe the right question is not, is the ending of Psalm 137 acceptable, but rather, who might need to say these kinds of words? It must be someone who has experienced excruciating loss, someone brought to extreme anger. So, I ask a new question: What is my responsibility in relation to that anger and to the people who feel it?

***

Psalm 137 is angry. Anger is a difficult emotion and also an important one. Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard writes that “in the context of ongoing settler-colonial injustice, Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment can indicate a sign of moral protest and political outrage that we ought to at least take seriously, if not embrace as a sign of our critical consciousness.” But anger and resentment are rarely embraced in reconciliation politics, he writes, because “they sometimes can manifest themselves in unhealthy and disempowering ways.”

This ambivalence about anger — its importance and its dangers — runs through anti-colonial writings. Taiaiake Alfred calls destructive anger “an isolated, unfocused state of rage,” but he also notes the request from Patricia Montour-Angus that Native men “respect our [Native women’s] anger and work with us through it.” Raja Shehadesh, writing of his grief and anger at the encroachment of Israeli settlements on his Palestinian hills, says “I cannot continue in this stage of anger, otherwise it will consume all my energy and I shall waste my life in grumbling and regret.” Glen Coulthard describes the anger he seeks to cultivate as “an affective indication that we care deeply about ourselves, about our land and cultural communities, and about the rights and obligations we hold as First Peoples.” Audre Lorde writes that “anger expressed and translated into action” is an “act of clarification,” because it makes clear “who are our allies with whom we have great differences, and who are our genuine enemies.” Hatred is destructive, she says, but anger “is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”

The subtext of almost all commentaries on Psalm 137 is the question: “Is this an appropriate way to express anger?” Rather than explore that question, I am more interested in what it means to claim the right to judge someone else’s anger. It is easy for the question “is this an appropriate way to express anger?” to assume a moral high ground. Look at those violent Israelites! We know better now. Look at those violent school administrators and teachers, the nuns and the priests, the predators. That’s not me! But Coulthard’s catalogue of the contemporary oppressive relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous nations – “poverty, unemployment, substandard housing conditions, infant mortality, morbidity, youth suicide, incarceration, women as victims of abuse and sexual violence, and child prostitution” – all affect children. Several include direct violence against children, and yet we tolerate it. Whether Psalm 137 is acceptable is not an important question. But given what as a society we do to children, how might we hear its anger in new ways? How might we be changed by its anger?

***

On July 22, 2011, I was at my cottage in Norway. I was not supposed to be there. I was about to start graduate school in the U.S. and had planned to leave earlier that month, but I had run into difficulties in getting my passport back from the U.S. embassy. So, on July 22, I was sitting with my family when I watched the news that a bomb had gone off in Norway’s government quarters. As the evening wore on, there were rumors of shots fired at Utøya, the island at which the Labour Party’s youth wing, AUF, holds its summer camp.

When I woke up the next morning, reporters said 80 people were dead, most of them teenagers.

***

A protracted siege, the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army, forms the background of Psalm 137. Scholars disagree about the length of the siege, 18 or 30 months, but either way, it was long. If the stories and poetry of the Bible are to be believed, the population of Jerusalem suffered extreme deprivation. “Lift your hands to [YHWH] for the life of your children [‘olalaik again, exactly as in Psalm 137], who are sick from famine” writes the poet of Lamentations (Lamentations 2:19). Then, turning to God, the poet accuses God of bringing famine so intense that women consumed their own children (Lamentations 2:20-21).

The biblical shorthand for siege warfare is “sword, famine, and plague.” Mass graves thought to date from Sennacherib’s campaigns in the 8^th century BCE have been excavated at Lachish, a city named in the Bible. They contained large numbers of women and children, most of whom, explains biblical scholar Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, have “no obvious injuries and so likely succumbed to dehydration, starvation, or illness.” If estimates for urban population density in the 8^th century are correct, the mass graves contain most of what would have been the city’s population. “Sword, famine, and plague” and whole populations dying sound biblical and ancient, but contemporary and ancient siege warfare share many features, because one of its primary weapons was and is hunger. During the 1941-44 siege of Leningrad, an estimated 37% of the city’s population died in the first eleven months, primarily from starvation. Bombings have been the main cause of civilian deaths in more recent sieges, like Aleppo in 2016 and Mariupol in 2022, but food and water shortages caused widespread suffering.

One of the tropes of siege literature from the ancient Near East is stories of parents eating their own children. In 2 Kings 6, two women make a pact to eat their sons. Less extreme, parents in Jerusalem and in Leningrad had to watch their children starve. Much more common than stories of cannibalism are stories of severely starved parents in Leningrad giving their last bread to their children. Historian Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reports that one survivor of the siege asked her mother, many years later, what was hardest for her during the siege, and she replied, “when you were begging me for something to eat.”

It is difficult to know if parents, ancient or modern, have eaten their kids in sieges – and nothing much would be gained by such knowledge. Rumors of cannibalism are (imagined?) responses to the question “what is the worst thing that can happen?” The books of the Bible are more or less unanimous in their answer: a siege-induced famine so severe that people eat their babies (Leviticus 26:29; Deuteronomy 28:53-57; Jeremiah 19:9; Ezekiel 5:10; Lamentations 4:10). After that, what is there to say? No one recovers.

Psalm 137, the siege of Leningrad. This poem, these events, might seem useless, things we can learn little from, ancient horrors and Nazi cruelties we no longer have to deal with. Do you know anyone who has been so desperate they have considered eating their own child? Me neither. But I also did not think someone, anyone, could spend an hour hunting down teenagers on an island. And although I know many teachers, I don’t know anyone who has, through abuse and neglect, caused the death of a student. But that happened in Canada, fairly recently. The last Canadian residential school closed in 1996.

To send your child to school and have your child not return: to demand healthy expressions of anger after that – what’s the point?

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Another theme in debates about Psalm 137 is its therapeutic value. The basic argument is that it is better to share revenge fantasies with God than to act on them. Yes, anything is better than actually killing infants. But this feels like an argument about catharsis, and yet what words are sufficient to provide catharsis for the violent loss of a child? Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says:

Canada has become very good at responding to our pain by deploying the politics of grief: a set of tools the state uses to avoid structural changes and accountability by focusing on individual trauma rather than collective, community, or nation-based losses, by truncating historical injustice from the current structure and the ongoing functioning of settler colonialism, by avoiding discussions about substantive changes involving land and dispossession in favor of superficial status quo ones, and by turning to ‘lifestyle choices’ and victim blaming to further position the state as benevolent and caring…

As if the loss of children can be made up for by a lot of therapy.

I don’t think the anger of Psalm 137 is about catharsis. It is one thing to hope that by speaking of grief and trauma, one may heal from it. It is another to demand that healing of another. Perhaps speech is cathartic. But to demand it of someone else (don’t you feel better now?) is not kindness, but impatience, a desire to be done with recollections that bring shame.

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When I place Utøya next to Psalm 137 and to Indigenous anger, I am not saying that this is how Indigenous anger might be expressed, so take caution. The Indigenous peoples of North America have not channeled their anger into violence against children. But white supremacists, in Europe and North America, have. The children of slaves, residential schools, terrorism, hate crimes, the school-to-prison pipeline, police brutality, the abysmal natal care offered Black women and their infants. Utøya was targeted because it was a youth camp. When I talk about anger as a white person, it is important to say that I have no right to judge the anger of others. It is also important to note that white anger is dangerous.

***

Psalm 137 is about children and it is also about land. The longing for Jerusalem is not evasion before we get to the heart of things. Violence against children in settler colonialism is also about land, about the ability of peoples to go on living on their land. The psalmist has seen her future destroyed in two ways. Her land has been torn apart and she has been exiled from it. And her children, who were to live on the land with her and after her, are dead. Residential schools did not have the explicit goal of killing children. Their aim was to kill the Indian and save the child. This way, there would be no Indian children who would become Indian adults who remembered and existed and insisted that this land is their land. No pesky Wet’suwet’en refusing to abandon their territories and their waters to gas companies.

Children and land belong together, because together they are a community’s future. Take away children and land, and you take away the future. Who will remember Jerusalem when the psalmist dies if her children are not there to carry on her memories? And where will the children live if they have no home to return to?

***

Anders Breivik, who murdered the teenagers on Utøya, said his goal for the July 22 massacre was to rid Norway of Muslim influence. He was inspired by the Eurabia genre, a right-wing conspiracy theory concerned with the idea that European elites are colluding with Muslim powers to promote Islamic colonization of Europe. Aspects of this idea can be found in mainstream newspapers and political discourse in Norway.

Despite this connection between Breivik’s ideology and public discourse in Norway, authors and journalists have emphasized Breivik’s troubled childhood and downplayed the ideological foundations of his acts. For example, the author Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote, “I do not believe that Breivik himself has anything to teach us. I believe that his life is a coincidence of unfortunate circumstances, and what he did was such an anomaly that it makes no sense even to guard ourselves against it.” Writer Åsne Seierstad emphasizes Norway’s innocence: “What could go so wrong in such a peaceful and harmonious country?”

But I can’t escape the sense that Breivik’s extremity has some connection to more socially appropriate forms of racism, what in Norway is called hverdagsrasisme, everyday racism. And this it seems worth being on guard against, even if what we are guarding against is in ourselves, not out there in the world.

***

What holds all this together? Why connect Psalm 137, the unmarked graves, and Utøya?

The final verse of Psalm 137 “happy is the one…” is almost always excluded when the psalm is put to music. Biblical scholar David W. Stowe writes: “There’s some irony here: a psalm centrally concerned with memory … has itself been partially suppressed because it expresses ideas that we would rather not remember.”

Both Utøya and the unmarked graves raise questions about historical memory and what we choose to notice and address. The events of July 22, 2011 are not in danger of being forgotten, but the ways the rest of us in Norway may have contributed to them by our participation in, or tolerance of, anti-Islamic rhetoric: that we are doing our best to forget.

And the unmarked graves. Indigenous communities across Canada requested that in 2021, Canadians not celebrate Canada Day, but instead join them in mourning. Most Canadians went ahead with celebrations. The conflict about whether to celebrate Canada Day is a conflict about how much the memory of the children should disrupt what white Canadians think of as normal life. About how central the memory of residential schools should be to Canadian identity. Are the graves anomalies or at the heart of the establishment and continuance of Canada?

The residential schools and Utøya are not the same. Residential schools were an act of genocide. Utøya was a terrorist attack. Residential schools gobbled up whole generations. Utøya was one devastating event. But both come out of the same thing. They are expressions of white supremacy, of a sense that white ways of doing things must be protected at all costs. Whiteness is more important than the lives of children, even if some of those children happen to be white.

There is, in a way, nothing to be said about Psalm 137. Only dismay, grief, silence. The world contains enough horrors that someone, but not everyone, needs to say this. That seems the important thing to think about now. That the world contains this, that I might be implicated in it, that the word “responsible” might apply to me in some way. Not in the way I am responsible to take out the garbage or responsible for the fact that I forgot to pay the energy bill last month. But definitely responsible in some way.

***

“At the end, I wanted to comfort him,” writes Amy Hempel in a short story. “But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arab proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.”

The tormentors ask the exiles, “Sing for us some songs of Zion” (Psalm 137:3). And they do. Danger has come and continues to come, and they sing to it. But what a song. Psalm 137 does not fit in any of the known genres of biblical hymns. It borrows from laments, imprecatory psalms, and wisdom psalms, but looks like none of them. The best description of its genre, I think, is that it is an adaption of the Songs of Ascent, hymns sung on the approach to Jerusalem during religious festivals and times of sacrifice. Instead of “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of YHWH'” (Psalm 122:1[2]), we have “By Babylon’s rivers, there we sat, oh we wept” (Psalm 137:1). Instead of “happy is the man who has his quiver full of sons” (Psalm 127:3), we have “happy is the one who takes and breaks your little ones” (Psalm 137:9). A song of homecoming refashioned into a song of anger and exile. It is not a song I imagine the Babylonians would want to hear.

I think of it this way, Psalm 137 today: I am the danger approaching, we are. The danger that has come to stay. And they, the communities and nations whose children did not come home, are singing at the sight of us. Hard songs. Songs I often would prefer not to hear. But I am trying to listen. I am trying to listen to their songs, so that when we meet again (we live right next to each other, they must meet us whether they want to or not), the meeting might be something else than it is and has been. I am trying to listen so that we might become, with time, worthy of other songs.

Mari Joerstad teaches Hebrew Bible at the Vancouver School of Theology. Her research and writing focus on topics of ecology, land, and migration in the Bible and other literature of the ancient Near East.