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John Gill
INTRODUCTION TO Psalms 137 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 into Babylon.'' The Septuagint, Vulgate Latin, and Ethiopic versions,...
John Gill
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, Psalms 18:6; the sense is, let me have no use of my tongue; let me be dumb and speechless, and never sing a...
Matthew Henry
There are divers psalms which are thought to have been penned in the latter days of the Jewish church, when prophecy was near expiring and the canon of the Old Testament ready to be closed up, but none of them appears so plainly to be of a late date as this, which was penned when the people of God were captives in Babylon, and there insulted over by these proud oppressors; probably it was towards...
Charles H. Spurgeon
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;- They said it each one for himself; they would sooner be dumb than sing these sacred songs for the amusement of the ungodly revelers who had gathered round about them. Instead of a song, they offered a prayer which must have sounded terribly in the ears of those who mocked them; it was a fierce prayer, — a prayer made under...
Charles H. Spurgeon
If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. These Edomites, who ought to have been like brothers to the Jews, were their most ferocious enemies, and they stirred up the Chaldeans to be more terribly cruel than they otherwise would have been.