Super flumina — Psalm 136/137

Last tended: 4 July 2026

The exile psalm, and the one the Psalter addresses to its own singers. Palestrina set it, and Victoria, and Lassus, so a choir often meets it as repertory before it meets it as prayer. Coverdale keeps the scene plain.

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion. As for our harps, we hanged them up: upon the trees that are therein.The LXX hangs up τὰ ὄργανα — already the general word for instruments — and the Vulgate follows with organa, which is how the middle ages came to paint organs in the willows.

The captors ask for a song, and the psalm answers with a question. It is sharpest in the Greek:

πῶς ᾄσωμεν τὴν ᾠδὴν Κυρίου ἐπὶ γῆς ἀλλοτρίας;

How should we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? The verb ᾄσωμεν is a deliberative subjunctive: not a refusal but a real question, the kind a cantor asks with the book already open — how would one begin? And what cannot begin is not song in general but ἡ ᾠδὴ Κυρίου, the Lord’s own song, which belongs where the Lord is worshipped. The harps go up on the willows not in despair but in reverence: the song is not refused, it is reserved.

notes

1 waters Heb. nahărôt — the canals of Babylon rather than grand rivers; the LXX has ποταμῶν. The exiles sat down by the irrigation ditches.
4 song LXX ᾠδήν; the subjunctive ᾄσωμεν keeps the question inside the craft — a singer’s question, not a bystander’s.

glossary

ᾠδή: the LXX’s word for the song itself — whence ode; in the psalm it is the Lord’s ᾠδή, not the singer’s.
Super flumina Babylonis: the Latin incipit (Vulgate), by which the psalm is named, and the motets after it.

Changelog

4 July 2026 — planted: the harps on the willows, and the cantor’s question in the Greek.