When one prays repeatedly through the Psalter in sequence, one tends to start noticing patterns in how the Psalms are arranged, or at least suspecting characteristic editorial strategies. The set of Psalms for Evening Prayer on the 28th of the month — 136, 137, 138 — exemplifies one of those strategies: what I think of as the containment of imprecation.

Psalm 137 is perhaps among the most famous of Psalms: “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion,” it opens. We are in the immediate aftermath of the exile from Judah, with the grief still raw, the horror still fresh. “On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Then the Psalm goes on in progressively darker tones, with (interestingly) two sets of imprecations. First is the less famous double self-imprecation, enjoining the singer not to forget Zion — “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill; let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!” Only then follows a double imprecation against Judah’s enemies. The singers urge the Lord to remember Edom’s complicity in the “day of Jerusalem, how they said ‘Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”, before concluding with the most notorious passage: “O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”

There is a lot going on here, even just within the Psalm itself. For starters, the final imprecation — certainly as violent as anything in the entire Bible — is, strictly speaking, not a curse, but a blessing. It performs a complexly layered speech act: 1) pronouncing a (future and hypothetical) blessing on conquering soldiers who will dash Babylonian infants against the rock, which in turn 2a) reveals to the reader, and 2b) reminds the singer, just what the Babylonian soldiers themselves did when they conquered Jerusalem; thus 3) entreating the Lord to mete out his retributive justice (as the previous clause makes clear: “who repays you with what you have done to us”), and only after and through those layers 4) wishing for the violent destruction of the singers’ enemies. This violent pitch is also only reached after the singers have recalled their mockery by their captors (“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"), and their betrayal by Brother Edom (“Lay it bare!"). None of this makes, or should make, the final sentence itself “easier” to read (or pray), but it does (in a certain literary sense) contain the scope and import of the curse, and illuminates the deep emotional complexity and psychological honesty of the Psalter.

Now observe how the editors of the Psalter contextualize and contain this imprecatory outburst by placing it between Psalms 136 and 138. Psalm 136, first: this is surely among the most uncomplicatedly celebratory Psalms, with its recounting of the Lord’s “great wonders” punctuated by the response “His steadfast love endures forever.” These “great wonders” are, first, the orderly creation of heavens, earth, and waters, and the lights that rule over them; second, the deliverance of the elect nation in the Exodus, their protection through the wilderness (“To him who struck down great kings…"), and their conveyance into the promised land. (There is just the merest hint of Judges-style post-conquest troubles: “It is he who remembered us in our low estate… and rescued us from our foes”.) There is no explicit mention of Jerusalem, but the narrative setting is — at least imaginatively — before exile. And if that is implicit in Psalm 136, it is made explicit in the tightly linked Psalm 135, which concludes in Jerusalem herself: “Blessed be the Lord from Zion, he who dwells in Jerusalem! Praise the Lord!” For that matter, the whole sequence Psalms 120–134 are the “Psalms of Ascent,” sung by pilgrims on their way to the festivals in Jerusalem, renarrating the long journey from “the tents of Kedar” (120:5) to “the house of the Lord” (134:1). The Psalms which precede 137 are, quite literally, “the songs of Zion” demanded by the Judahites' Babylonian captors.

Meanwhile, in Psalm 138, we are in a tonally somewhat different world than 136 (as well as temporally different, per the superscription “of David”). It is undoubtedly a Psalm of thanksgiving, but the exuberance is tempered by recent suffering and deliverance: “On the day I called, you answered me… Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand delivers me.” Nevertheless, there is at least one indubitable link to 136: that Psalm’s refrain appears again in David’s concluding lines, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever” — before the somewhat open-ended “Do not forsake the work of your hands.” (The refrain is thus modulated, perhaps, into an injunction that the Lord should be mindful of his own nature and remain faithful to his covenant!) Less overt, but still clear, links to 136 include “all the kings of the earth” giving thanks to the Lord (recalling, by contrast, the kings who were struck down); “though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly” (recalling the Lord remembering Israel “in our low estate”); and, perhaps more speculatively, “before the gods I sing your praise” (recalling the “great lights” created to rule over the day and the night). And our note that (at least) 134–136 are among “the songs of Zion” draws attention to the liturgical setting of 138: “I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks…”

So what were the editors of the Psalter thinking in placing 137, the paradigmatic Psalm of grief and rage at Jerusalem’s destruction, between 136 and 138, two Psalms of rejoicing in Jerusalem? I suggest that it is purposeful, and strikingly psychologically insightful. They have put grief and rage — and yes, imprecation — in its proper place. The exiles' anger is given its full venting, as it must be. The sheer horror of violence against the innocent, compounded in the destroying victors' demonic mockery, must be recalled, and these must continually shock to the point of outrage. There is to be no naïvety. Evil must have its due, and — when revealed for what it truly is — what it is due truly is cursing. But precisely as — and because — the curse is offered up to God, it is given over to God. It is made His responsibility (“Do not forsake the work of your hands”). And as it is made His responsibility, it is contained. It is put into the context of God’s creative and saving blessing. In fact, it only acquires its force from the fact of His creative and saving blessing. And by that same fact the curse is given its definite limitations, limitations which are notably not placed upon the blessing. The imprecation is not allowed to devour the Psalmist from the inside, but it is released; better still, the Psalmist is released from it, to the joy of God’s abundant blessing. Sin always crouches at the door of imprecation, but in offering the imprecation as prayer, the Psalmist masters it.

So the curse is put in its place, and thus we are promised that the curse will not reign forever, but that blessing, having given way to curse, will one day be restored. This yields the larger narrative purpose in the Psalter, of which this psychological purpose is an icon. The sequence of Psalms 136–137–138 enacts in small the story of exile and return. As we read, we follow the Psalmists through time, from exuberant rejoicing through gutting anguish to renewed joy; we experience the dialectic of resonance and alienation; we know the presence of God even as we momentarily feel His absence; we trace what my teacher Jeremy Begbie describes as the movement of “home, away, and home again” — with the essential acknowledgement that home, when you do return, is never quite the same. We rehearse the pattern of the Lord’s faithfulness and steadfast love.

Or, in the words of that great Master Teacher of Scripture: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should first suffer all these things, and then enter into his glory?”