Verse explainer
One of the most shocking lines in scripture. The honest reading doesn't soften it — it asks what kind of prayer this is, and to whom the rage is handed.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
BSBBlessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
The plain meaning
This is the cry of survivors of genocide. Babylon had razed Jerusalem, killed children, and dragged the rest into exile (the psalm opens “by the rivers of Babylon… we wept”). Verse 9 invokes the exact horror Babylon inflicted — infants killed against rocks was a known atrocity of ancient warfare — back onto Babylon. It's not God commanding violence; it's a wounded people handing their fury to God instead of taking it up themselves. The Bible records the prayer; it does not bless the act.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Spurgeon doesn't flinch: he reads the line as the natural, terrible cry of the oppressed, and as a prophecy of the just fall of a cruel empire — yet he is careful to distinguish recording the imprecation from endorsing personal vengeance.
Barnes frames it as the language of judgment, not malice — the principle of retribution turned back on a nation that had done exactly this to others, expressed in the raw idiom of those who had watched it happen.
Clarke notes these “imprecatory” psalms are predictive as much as vindictive — describing what would come upon Babylon — and warns against reading them as a model for how believers should wish harm on enemies.
The word behind it
The same word translated “blessed / happy” that opens Psalm 1. Here it's bitterly ironic: it pronounces a grim “fortunate is the one” over the agent of Babylon's downfall — the vocabulary of beatitude bent around an act of judgment.
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