GOD Spews:
A major difference between Judaism and Christianity is in the definition of the “Bible.”
There is a lot of hatred in your “Bible” .. and a lot of effort to explain the hatred away by people who insist they know My intent.
My intent is not a problem for fundamentalist Jews … with the Torah and 3000 years of adjudication, for the most part Jews are very sure of what I want them to do.
Muslims, though a much younger faith. also have it easy .. they too have a book. Mormons, an even younger set of believers, have their book as well.
The Christian’s problem ……..
Where Christians consider everything bound between the black leather covers as revealed truth, for Jews only the Torah .. the Five Books of Moses are the word of God. The rest is a collection of documents .. sort of a shoe box of letters and news clippings from our history.
So, when reading this imprecation of hatred toward Babylon, Jews have no problem .. no need to decipher the simple rage against an oppressor … one of many who have oppressed us.
I suspect much the same feelings motivate Muslim and Jewish victims in Israel and Palestine today.
The rest of the Verse:
The Verse
1 By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat and we wept
as we remembered Zion.
2 On the poplars within her we hung our lyres,
3 for it was there our captors asked us for words of song,
and our tormentors – for their amusement –
said, “Sing for us from a song of Zion.”
4 How can we sing a song of the Lord on foreign soil?
5 O Jerusalem, if I should forget you may my right hand wither.
6 May my tongue cleave to my palate
if I cease to remember you,
if I do not cause Jerusalem to be raised
to the very top of my joy.
7 Do you remember, O Lord, the Edomites on
the day of Jerusalem?
How they said, “Tear her down!
Down to her very foundation!”
8 O, Daughter of Babylon, you despoiler,
Happy is the one who pays you your recompense
as you dealt out to us.
9 Happy the one who will seize and dash your infants against the rock!