The occasion of this psalm was the captivity of the Jews in Babylon, and the treatment they met with there; either as foreseen, or as now endured. Aben Ezra ascribes this psalm to David; and so the Syriac version, which calls it, “a psalm of David; the words of the saints, who were carried captive…

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down If by Babylon is meant the country, then the rivers of it are Chebar, Ulai, Tigris, Euphrates, and others; see ; but if the city itself, then only Euphrates, which ran through it; and is expressed by rivers, because of the largeness of it, and because of…

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. ] These were musical instruments, used in the temple service by the Levites, who seem to be the persons here speaking; who took care of them, and preserved them from the plunder of the enemy; and carried them with them to Babylon, in hope…

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song Or, “words of a song” [[24]]. To repeat the words of one of the songs of Zion, as it is afterwards expressed: this the Babylonians did, as the Targum; who were they that carried the Jews into captivity; and this is given as a reason…

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? ] This is the answer returned by the Jews to the above request or demand; it may be, particularly, by the Levites, whose business it was to sing these songs: so the Targum, “immediately the Levites said, how shall we sing the hymns of the Lord in…

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem This was said by one or everyone of the Levites; or singers, as Aben Ezra and Kimchi; or by the congregation of Israel, as Jarchi; by one of them, in the name of the rest; or by the composer of the psalm.

If I do not remember thee In prayer, in discourse, in conversation; this is the same as before, to forget, repeated for the confirmation of it; let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; as is the case of a person in a fever, or in a violent thirst, which is to be in great distress, ; the sense…

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem Of her visitation, calamity, and destruction, how they behaved then, and them for it; who, though the children of Esau and brethren of the Jews, as well as their neighbours, yet hated them; the old grudge of their father, because of the…

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed By the determinate counsel and decree of God, and according to divine predictions; see (Jer. 50:1–46, Jer.

Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. ] That takes the infants from their mothers’ breasts, or out of their arms, and dashes out their brains against a “rock”, as the word [[9]] signifies; which, though it may seem a piece of cruelty, was but a just…