7 Remember the children of Edom, O Lord, in the day of Jerusalem: how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the ground.

8 O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery: yea, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee, as thou hast served us.

9 Blessed shall hee be that taketh thy children: and throweth them against the stones. [1]

The sense of glee in the violent conclusion of Psalm 137 is remarkable: the speaker pronounces him “blessed” (the Hebrew word is ‘esher, which means “happy”; the Vulgate uses beatus) who throws the Babylonian children against the stones, when he had claimed in verse 6 that nothing but the memory of Jerusalem could bring him mirth (simchah).

Adding to the psalm’s bitterness is the origin of the relationship between Israel and Edom. Edom is another name for Esau, who sold the birthright to his twin brother Jacob (later given the name Israel) for a mess of pottage. The enmity between Israel and Edom reflects all the acrimony of a family relationship gone sour, and this bitterness appears both in the Edomites’ chanting and in the psalmist’s call for vengeance.

Could these horrifying verses serve to justify violence in the here and now? Discussions of religious violence often go back to scripture, as when Bill Warner writes that because the Koran, the Sira, and the Hadith (a) define normative Islam and (b) command violence against non-Muslims, then (c) normative Islam requires the destruction of non-believers. Should Christians and Jews who accept Psalm 137 as sacred writ respond to those who have gloated over their failures by dashing the offenders’ children against the stones, at the risk of not being “blessed” otherwise?

I think that the relationship between scripture and violence is more complicated than writers like Warner make it out to be, because his model omits the reality of human interpreters who must ultimately decide how to apply a scriptural passage to a present, non-scriptural context. This post is the first in a five-part series that will aim to show how the act of interpretation works in determining whether and how violent scripture translates to violent action.

These posts will draw on the varied uses of Psalm 137 in a controversy dating to England in the 1640s. I hope the vintage of this controversy means that perhaps the dust has settled enough by now for us to talk about it without bloodying ourselves too badly, even though many of its aftereffects (like the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith) still remain with us.

Violence was never too far from the surface in 1640s England: the 1630s had seen the spectacular public punishment of religious polemicists, followed by two wars caused by the attempted imposition of English liturgy in Scotland. Then, in 1641 Irish Catholics rose up in a rebellion that many English believed (mistakenly) to have resulted in the deaths of 200,000 Protestants. Finally, the period 1642-1651 was marked by three civil wars that led to the deaths of 190,000 people in England alone, some 3.7% of the population. [2]

While I am wary of drawing direct historical parallels between 1640s England and our globalized 2011, I hope that these posts will give us occasion to reflect on the violence, both rhetorical and literal, of our own times.

The controversy in question had to do with how the Church of England was governed: should it be run by bishops, who were effectively appointed by the king and endowed with political, legal, and economic power, or in some other way? If the church should have bishops, what should bishops really be like?

On the surface, Psalm 137 has nothing whatsoever to do with this controversy. And yet its frequent appearance in pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, and sermons at the time suggests that this psalm—and its violence—speaks poignantly to the tensions of a society on the verge of civil war. As we will see, the opposition to episcopacy had grown quite heated by 1640, and this opposition had already been met with judicial violence.

Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, introduced the psalm to the controversy in an official defense of episcopacy commissioned and supervised by Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. Hall condemns “two sorts of Adversaries,” emphasizing the deep divisions over episcopacy while insisting that the bishops bear no responsibility for them:

The one are furiously and impetuously fierce, crying down Episcopacy for an unlawfull, and Antichristian state, not to be suffered in a truly Evangelicall Church, having no words in their mouthes, but the same which the cruell Edomites used concerning Jerusalem, Downe with it, downe with it, even to the ground.

For such, Hall says, “no answer is indeed fit, but darke lodgings, and Ellebore.”

His other adversaries are those who, being “milde and gentle, and lesse unreasonable,” do not “[disallow] Episcopacy in it selfe,” but nevertheless advocate its reform. [3] While Hall considers even those who desire reform of episcopacy to be adversaries, they do not merit the harsh scorn he reserves for those who press for its utter abolition, who have cut themselves off from church and nation and should suffer accordingly. They are like the Edomites: once brothers, but now enemies.

His second adversaries, though, remain Israelites, and are therefore susceptible to persuasion. Hall uses Psalm 137 to dismiss the first adversaries outright so that he can turn his labors to the second—a field that might bear fruit. Claiming to exercise a form of divine judgment, Hall winnows prospective wheat from certain chaff.

Hall’s use of the psalm in this context brings out several features of the relationship between scripture and violence that remain salient today. First, he uses scripture to insist that people who hold certain views don’t count. The opponents of episcopacy aren’t Israelites; they’re Edomites, so they can be damned and dismissed. Next, he blames the violence on this newly-created other, or at least accuses them of cheering the violence on.

This manner of othering one’s opponents, however, conveniently refuses a parallel application of the long stretches in Jeremiah and Ezekiel explaining why Jerusalem deserved to be destroyed, which raises another key point about the all-too-frequent failure to be sufficiently self-critical, or to judge oneself by the same measure used to judge others.

Reconciliation often depends upon such equanimity, as in the lovely story in Genesis 32-33 of Jacob and Esau meeting again in the desert after many years. But even though Archbishop Laud deliberately chose a relatively moderate bishop in Hall to defend episcopacy, the controversy did not end well for the bishops. On 10 January 1645, Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill by Parliamentary order. The Edomites, at least temporarily, had prevailed.

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Part II: Root and Branch –>

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Notes

The booke of common prayer and administration of the sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies of the Church of England (London, 1637). STC 16404.9.

Casualties were worse in Scotland (60,000 people, 6%) and Ireland (660,000, 41%). See Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), 47. See p. 146 for Richard Baxter’s take on the Irish Rebellion, from which the figure of 200,000 killed is drawn. Scott’s book provides a magisterial account of the events discussed in these posts.

Joseph Hall, Episcopacie by Divine Right Asserted (London, 1639/40), II:5-6. Thomason E.203[8]. Hall’s tract is paginated by section.