happiness · noun, common masculine plural construct
rewardeth
שֶׁיְשַׁלֶּםshey.sha.lem-
H7999
to be safe (in mind · relative particle + verb, piel imperfect, 3rd person masculine singular
served
שֶׁגָּמַ֥לְתְּshe.ga.Malt
H1580
to treat a person (well or ill) · relative particle + verb, qal perfect, 2nd person feminine singular
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Revelation 18:6 Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.
Isaiah 14:4-24 That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!
Jeremiah 25:12-14 And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the LORD, for…
Isaiah 21:1 The burden of the desert of the sea. As whirlwinds in the south pass through; so it cometh from the desert, from a terrible land.
Isaiah 47:1-15 Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou s…
Revelation 14:8-11 And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of t…
Psalms 149:6-9 Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a twoedged sword in their hand;
Isaiah 13:1-22 The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Psalms 137:7–end
The pious Jews in Babylon, having afflicted themselves with the thoughts of the ruins of Jerusalem, here please themselves with the prospect of the ruin of her impenitent implacable enemies; but this not from a spirit of revenge, but from a holy zeal for the glory of God and the honour of his kingdom.
I. The Edomites will certainly be reckoned with, and all others that were accessaries to the destruction of Jerusalem, that were aiding and abetting, that helped forward the affliction (Zac 1:15) and triumphed in it, that said, in the day of Jerusalem, the day of her judgment, "Rase it, rase it to the foundations; down with it, down with it; do not leave one stone upon another." Thus they made…
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed,.... By the determinate counsel and decree of God, and according to divine predictions; see Jeremiah 50:1; so mystical Babylon, antichrist, and the man of sin, who therefore is called the son of perdition, 2 Thessalonians 2:3; because appointed to destruction, and shall certainly go into it, Revelation 17:8; or "O thou destroyer", as the Targum, which paraphrases it thus,
"Gabriel, the prince of Zion, said to the Babylonish nation that spoileth or destroyeth;''
which is true of literal Babylon, called the destroying mountain, Jeremiah 51:25; and of mystical Babylon, the destroyer both of the bodies and souls of men, Revelation 11:18;
happy sh…
Psalm 137:5-9
5. If I shall forget thee, O Jerusalem! let my right had forget. [184] 6. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not, if I set not Jerusalem over the head of all my joy. 7. Remember, O Jehovah! the children or Edom, in the day of Jerusalem, saying, Lay it bare, lay it bare even to the foundation thereof. 8. O daughter of Babylon laid waste. [185] happy he who shall pay thee back the retribution wherewith thou retributedst us! 9. Happy he who shall take and dash thy little ones upon the stones. [186]
5. If I shall forget thee, O Jerusalem! This confirms what was said in the former verse, and leaves us in no difficulty to understand what the Psalmist m…
The Church Fathers
Wretched daughter of Babylon. The daughter of Babylon is the soul which is always in motion and in confusion, and has no stability, but is in vices and in sins — which is truly wretched. "Blessed is he who shall repay you your recompense which you have repaid to us." Blessed is he who shall repay her what she herself has done. For example: she cast me out of paradise; I, through abstinence, bring her back there. She deceived me into fornication; I, through chastity, bring her back into Jerusalem, and out of vices into virtue. Therefore I do this not as an enemy, but as a friend.
Then he turneth himself to her, "O daughter of Babylon, unhappy;" unhappy in thy very exulting, thy presumption, thine enmity; "unhappy daughter of Babylon!" (ver. 8). The city is called both Babylon, and daughter of Babylon: just as they speak of "Jerusalem" and "the daughter of Jerusalem," "Sion" and "the daughter of Sion," "the Church" and "the daughter of the Church." As it succeedeth the other, it is called "daughter;" as it is preferred before the other, it is called "mother." There was a former Babylon; did the people remain in it? Because it succeedeth to Babylon, it is called daughter of Babylon. O daughter of Babylon, "unhappy" thou! ...
And David, pitying her, says, "O wretched daughter of Babylon." Wretched indeed, as being the daughter of Babylon, when she ceased to be the daughter of Jerusalem. And yet he calls for a healer for her and says, "Blessed is he who shall take your little ones and dash them against the rock." That is to say, shall dash all corrupt and filthy thoughts against Christ, who by his fear and his rebuke will break down all actions against reason, so as, if any one is seized by an adulterous love, to extinguish the fire, that he may by his zeal put away the love of a harlot and deny himself that he may gain Christ.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Music — Jubal was the inventor of musical instruments (Gen. 4:21). The Hebrews were much given to the cultivation of music. Their whole history and literature afford abundant evidence of this. After the…
Willows — (1.) Heb. ‘arabim (Lev. 23:40; Job 40:22; Isa. 15:7; 44:3, 4; Ps. 137:1, 2). This was supposed to be the weeping willow, called by Linnaeus Salix Babylonica, from the reference in Ps. 137. This tree…
Jews, The · None hated or oppressed, with impunity — None hated or oppressed, with impunity
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
The second part of the Psalm supplicates vengeance upon Edom and Babylon. We see from Obadiah's prophecy, which is taken up again by Jeremiah, how shamefully the Edomites, that brother-people related by descent to Israel and yet pre-eminently hostile to it, behaved in connection with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans as their malignant, rapacious, and inhuman helpers. The repeated imper. Piel ערוּ, from ערה (not imper. Kal from ערר, which would be ערוּ), ought to have been accented on the ult.; it is, however, in both cases accented on the first syllable, the pausal ערוּ (cf. כּלוּ in Psa 37:20, and also הסּוּ, Neh 8:11) giving rise to the same accentuation of the other (in orde…
The poet witnessed the betrayal of God’s people from Judah by the Edomites, so he curses Edom. The long rivalry between Edom and Judah came to a head during Judah’s last days, when the Edomites handed the Judeans over to the Babylonians (Obad 1:10-11) and rejoiced in Jerusalem’s fall. • This prayer for vengeance is shocking.
Spurgeon's Treasury of David on Psalms 137:8
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed. Or the destroyer: let us accept the word either way, or both ways: the destroyer would be destroyed, and the Psalmist in vision saw her as already destroyed. It is usual to speak of a city as a virgin daughter. Babylon was in her prime and beauty, but she was already doomed for her crimes. Happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. The avenger would be fulfilling an honourable calling in overthrowing a power so brutal, so inhuman. Assyrian and Chaldean armies had been boastfully brutal in their conquests; it was mee…
