Song of Exile
The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137
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- USD 22.99
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- USD 22.99
Descripción editorial
Oft-referenced and frequently set to music, Psalm 137 - which begins "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion" - has become something of a cultural touchstone for music and Christianity across the Atlantic world. It has been a top single more than once in the 20th century, from Don McLean's haunting Anglo-American folk cover to Boney M's West Indian disco mix. In Song of Exile, David Stowe uses a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that combines personal interviews, historical overview, and textual analysis to demonstrate the psalm's enduring place in popular culture.
The line that begins Psalm 137 - one of the most lyrical of the Hebrew Bible - has been used since its genesis to evoke the grief and protest of exiled, displaced, or marginalized communities. Despite the psalm's popularity, little has been written about its reception during the more than 2,500 years since the Babylonian exile. 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.
Stowe concludes by exploring the presence and absence in modern culture of 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 and ethnic cleansing, and more generally in the culture of vengeance that has existed in North America from the earliest conflicts with Native Americans.
Based on numerous interviews with musicians, theologians, and writers, Stowe reconstructs the rich and varied reception history of this widely used, yet mysterious, text.
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Psalm 137 opens with a lament "By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept.... How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land" and closes with what sounds like a gleeful cry for vengeance: "Happy is he who dashes your little ones against the rock." As Stowe (No Sympathy for the Devil) points out in this illuminating and clear-eyed work, which is part biblical criticism and part pop-culture study, most folks never hear the entire psalm read in their religious services. He explores the ways that the first four verses reflect and mediate upon the historical situation of the Jewish writers, as well as the ways that civil rights activists and popular music adapt this history to modern times. The psalm's second section engages the collective memories of the Jews in exile, and Stowe examines the ways that this theme of forgetting weaves its way into sermons by Frederick Douglass and Jeremiah Wright and hymns by American composer William Billings. Finally, Stowe interprets the final lines of the psalm through that same theme, illustrating that the closing line's call of vengeance finds resonance in early American colonial attempts to take revenge on Native Americans for siding with the British against the colonists in King Phillip's War. Erudite but never abstruse, Stowe carefully and quite brilliantly illustrates the ways that Psalm 137 is still resonant today.
