“Dashes them against the rocks”
Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. (Psalm 137:9 BSB)
What it sounds like today
The Bible pronouncing a blessing on the murder of babies.
The cultural key
This verse rightly horrifies modern readers, and its meaning depends entirely on genre and context. Psalm 137 is a lament sung by exiles by the rivers of Babylon whose own city has just been sacked and whose own children were killed, because the dashing of children was the routine, ghastly reality of ancient siege warfare, threatened and carried out across the region (2 Kings 8:12; Hosea 13:16; Nahum 3:10). The 'blessing' is not a moral instruction to go and kill infants; it is the raw, anguished language of imprecation, calling down on Babylon, by the era's own brutal law of like-for-like, the precise horror Babylon had inflicted, and handing the cry for justice to God rather than taking up the sword. The psalm does not endorse the violence; it lays the survivors' rage and grief, unedited, before God. Read as a command it is monstrous; read as a lament's cry for justice it is a window into unspeakable trauma.
Recovered meaning
The line is not a command but the raw cry of traumatized exiles, wishing on Babylon the very atrocity Babylon did to their children, the standard horror of ancient war, and leaving vengeance to God. It voices anguish and appeals for justice; it does not bless murder.