Nine verses, the only psalm that names the exile as something the speakers are living in rather than praying about, and the only one that ends where this one ends. In many communities it is said before the grace after meals on ordinary weekdays, with Psalm 126 taking its place on Shabbat and festivals, so the two psalms divide the week between memory of loss and memory of return. For a learner the page is a drill in the first person plural: we sat, we wept, we hung, our lyres, our captors, our tormentors, seven forms of the -nu suffix in the first three verses. Then verse 5 switches to the singular and stays there, and that switch is the psalm.
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A place, a posture and a cause, in that order. Sitting down is the mourner's position in biblical Hebrew, so the weeping is described as ritual before it is described as feeling.
2
עַל עֲרָבִים בְּתוֹכָהּ
תָּלִינוּ כִּנֹּרוֹתֵינוּ
עַל
al
on
עֲרָבִים
a-ra-VIM
willows
בְּתוֹכָהּ
be-to-CHAH
in her midst
On the willows in her midst,
תָּלִינוּ
ta-li-NU
we hung up
כִּנֹּרוֹתֵינוּ
ki-no-ro-tei-NU
our lyres
we hung up our lyres.
The instruments are not broken or abandoned, only put out of reach and left there. Everything the psalm goes on to say about singing depends on this being a decision.
The demand is for the temple repertoire specifically, which makes it a demand to perform the thing that was destroyed. The second line has no verb of its own and borrows the first one, which is why it lands harder.
4
אֵיךְ נָשִׁיר אֶת שִׁיר יְהֹוָה
עַל אַדְמַת נֵכָר
אֵיךְ
eich
how
נָשִׁיר
na-SHIR
shall we sing
אֶת
et
the object marker
שִׁיר
shir
the song of
יְהֹוָה
a-do-NAY
the LORD
How shall we sing the song of the LORD
עַל
al
on
אַדְמַת
ad-MAT
the soil of
נֵכָר
ne-CHAR
a foreign land
on foreign soil?
A question, not a refusal, and it is left unanswered. The objection is geographical rather than emotional: the problem named is the ground, not the mood.
The plural stops here and does not come back until the last two verses. One person steps out of the group and puts himself under oath, and the thing he wagers is the hand that plays the instrument.
if I do not raise Jerusalem above the head of my joy.
The second half of the oath takes the other organ needed for song. Having refused to sing in Babylon, the speaker binds himself so that he cannot sing anywhere else either, unless the city comes first.
Remember, LORD, against the sons of Edom the day of Jerusalem,
הָאֹמְרִים
ha-om-RIM
who were saying
עָרוּ
a-RU
strip bare
עָרוּ
a-RU
strip bare
who said, strip her bare, strip her bare,
עַד
ad
down to
הַיְסוֹד
hai-SOD
the foundation
בָּהּ
bah
in her
down to the foundation in her.
The verb that has meant our remembering since verse 1 is now handed to God, and the speaker asks Him to do it against someone. Edom is charged with words rather than with the destruction itself.
happy is the one who repays you what you dealt to us.
The measure asked for is exact and no more than exact: what you dealt to us. The city is addressed as already destroyed, which places the curse after the fact rather than before it.
Happy is the one who seizes and dashes your infants
אֶל
el
against
הַסָּלַע
ha-SA-la
the rock
against the rock.
The hardest verse in the book, and the psalm gives it no softening and no answer. It is a curse spoken by people who watched this done, and the page does not ask the reader to agree with it.
♦ PARDES analysis: פרדס
The four levels of Jewish reading of the sacred text: פשט Peshat (literal meaning), רמז Remez (symbolic allusion), דרש Drash (midrashic interpretation), סוד Sod (mystical meaning). The word פרדס means "orchard", each level is a fruit.
פשט · Peshat: literal meaning
Three movements. Verses 1 to 4 are plural and set in Babylon: a group by the water, instruments hung up, a demand for entertainment, and a question. Verses 5 and 6 are a single voice under oath, and they are the only part of the psalm addressed to Jerusalem rather than about her. Verses 7 to 9 turn outward and ask for reckoning against two enemies, Edom for what it said and Babylon for what it did. Watch the verb remember. In בְּזׇכְרֵנוּ (bzoch-re-nu, v.1) it is what the exiles do and it produces weeping; in אֶזְכְּרֵכִי (ez-kre-chi, v.6) it is what the speaker swears never to stop doing; in זְכֹר (ze-chor, v.7) it is what God is asked to do, and there it produces judgement. One root carries the psalm from grief to oath to demand.
רמז · Remez: allusion
Verse 5 says only let my right hand forget, with no object, and the omission is deliberate enough that translations supply one, most often her skill. Some read the verb differently and take it as wither or become useless rather than forget, and both readings are current; what is not in dispute is that the hand named is the one that stops a lyre string. הַשְּׁדוּדָה (hash-du-da, v.8) is a passive form, the one laid waste, which sits oddly on a city still standing at the time, and readings divide between a prophetic past, an address to a city already doomed, and an emendation to the one who lays waste. וְתוֹלָלֵינוּ (ve-to-la-lei-nu, v.3), our tormentors, is rare enough that its sense is argued over. The two closing verses both open with אַשְׁרֵי (ash-rei, v.8) and אַשְׁרֵי (ash-rei, v.9), the word that opens the whole book of Psalms in verse 1 of Psalm 1, so the vocabulary of blessing is used for the thing furthest from blessing.
דרש · Drash: midrashic reading
Verse 6 is the source of the line sung at Jewish weddings, and the custom of breaking a glass under the canopy is regularly explained by it: Jerusalem is set above the head of any joy, so the largest private joy a person has is required to carry a mark of the city's ruin. Read against verse 2 the oath also completes an argument. The hands that hung up the lyres in Babylon are the hands put at risk in verse 5, so the silence that began as a refusal becomes a permanent obligation. The final verses have never been comfortable, and the tradition has handled them mostly by leaving them in place while reading them as a report of what people in that condition say. What the psalm records is not policy but the shape grief takes when the people who caused it have gone unpunished.
סוד · Sod: mystical reading
The wish in verse 9 is not invented by the psalm. Isaiah 13:16 and Nahum 3:10 both describe infants dashed to pieces as the standard end of a sacked city, and the second of those is about a city that had done the sacking. The curse therefore asks for the ordinary fate of empires and asks for nothing worse, which is the only defence the plain sense offers. The mystical reading takes the whole psalm as a statement about where song comes from. Verses 1 to 4 establish that the temple repertoire cannot be produced on demand or on foreign ground, verses 5 and 6 make the speaker's own voice conditional on the city, and verses 7 to 9 are what is left when the singing stops. On that reading כִּנֹּרוֹתֵינוּ (ki-no-ro-tei-nu, v.2), our lyres, are hung up not out of defeat but because the instrument and the place are one thing, and the psalm ends in the register that remains available.
Hebrew text: Miqra according to the Masorah (MAM), after the Aleppo Codex, via Sefaria, CC BY-SA. English: The Holy Scriptures, a New Translation (JPS 1917), via Sefaria, public domain. Transliteration generated by this site's own engine (assets/translit.js).