"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion." The line that begins Psalm 137 is one of the most
lyrical of the Hebrew Bible, and has been used since its genesis to
evoke the grief and protest of exiled, displaced, or marginalized
communities. The psalm is most directly a product of the Babylonian
exile-the roughly fifty-year period after Jerusalem was destroyed
by Nebuchadnezzar's army and many of its leading Judeans taken
northeast into captivity. Despite the psalm's popularity, little
has been written about its reception during the more than 2,500
years since that period. In Babylon Revisited David Stowe addresses
this gap using a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that
includes textual analysis, historical overview, and a study of the
psalm's place in popular culture. Stowe locates its use in the
American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, and
internationally by anti-colonial Jamaican Rastafari and immigrants
from Ireland, Korea, and Cuba. He studies musical references
ranging from the Melodians Rivers of Babylon to the score in Kazakh
film Tulpan. Based on numerous interviews with musicians,
theologians, and writers, Stowe reconstructs the rich and varied
reception history of this widely used, yet mysterious text. The
book is broken up into three parts that closely examine each of the
psalm's stanzas. Stowe concludes by exploring the often ignored
final words: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones against the stones." Usually excised from liturgy and
forgotten by scholars, Stowe finds these words echoed in modern
occurrences of genocide or ethnic cleansing, and more generally in
the culture of vengeance that has existed in North America from the
earliest conflicts with Native Americans. Exploring the presence
and absence of these words in modern culture is the culmination of
Stowe's study as he weaves together the fascinating story of how
Psalm 137 has both shaped and been shaped by our understanding of
violence, pain, oppression, and justice.
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