After listening to the context of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s controversial 9-11-2001 sermon, I began looking at the various translations of a Christian Biblical passage that I had not ever read nor heard before. Reverend Wright’s depletion of my ignorance was tear-filled and propulsive in my interest. My dallying around the internet for some more context into Psalms has led me back to my original interest in learning Ancient Greek. At one time I had hopes of reading the LXX and the Koine New Testament.
1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill .
6 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.
7 Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. “Tear it down,” they cried, “tear it down to its foundations!”
8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us-
9 he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
Psalm 137 (NIV)
Τῷ Δαυΐδ ῾Ιερεμίου. –
1 ΕΠΙ τῶν ποταμῶν Βαβυλῶνος ἐκεῖ ἐκαθίσαμεν καὶ ἐκλαύσαμεν ἐν τῷ μνησθῆναι ἡμᾶς τῆς Σιών.
2 ἐπὶ ταῖς ἰτέαις ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῆς ἐκρεμάσαμεν τὰ ὄργανα ἡμῶν·
3 ὅτι ἐκεῖ ἐπηρώτησαν ἡμᾶς οἱ αἰχμαλωτεύσαντες ἡμᾶς λόγους ᾠδῶν καὶ οἱ ἀπαγαγόντες ἡμᾶς ὕμνον· ᾄσατε ἡμῖν ἐκ τῶν ᾠδῶν Σιών.
4 πῶς ᾄσωμεν τὴν ᾠδὴν Κυρίου ἐπὶ γῆς ἀλλοτρίας;
5 ἐὰν ἐπιλάθωμαί σου, ῾Ιερουσαλήμ, ἐπιλησθείη ἡ δεξιά μου·
6 κολληθείη ἡ γλῶσσά μου τῷ λάρυγγί μου, ἐὰν μή σου μνησθῶ, ἐὰν μὴ προανατάξωμαι τὴν ῾Ιερουσαλὴμ ὡς ἐν ἀρχῇ τῆς εὐφροσύνης μου.
7 μνήσθητι, Κύριε, τῶν υἱῶν ᾿Εδὼμ τὴν ἡμέραν ῾Ιερουσαλὴμ τῶν λεγόντων· ἐκκενοῦτε, ἐκκενοῦτε, ἕως τῶν θεμελίων αὐτῆς.
8 θυγάτηρ Βαβυλῶνος ἡ ταλαίπωρος, μακάριος ὃς ἀνταποδώσει σοι τὸ ἀνταπόδομά σου, ὃ ἀνταπέδωκας ἡμῖν·
9 μακάριος ὃς κρατήσει καὶ ἐδαφιεῖ τὰ νήπιά σου πρὸς τὴν πέτραν.
ΨΑΛΜΟΙ ΗΔΔΔΠ Ι
What I have not found out is why the Septuagint lists this as Psalm 136, and the NIV lists this as Psalm 137.
I thought for some reason that Greek versions of these books would add a sense of veracity to my studies. It did not take much reading to learn that this thought was at worst spurious to reality; and at best very gullible. But religion is taking some new twist on my life, albeit for mostly selfish and photogenic affairs. Symbols and ideographs are invaders. They are the barbarians that have long since ago knocked the fuck out of my intellectual and emotional gates. Now they sit with me drinking coffee and reading the newspaper and chatting with strangers.
But now I am back to the thoughts of Koine and Attic; and I am thinking about hopeless languages dying some descriptivist death like a thousand-fold murmuration of starlings smacking headlong into a glass-plate leviathan. Each tiny avian skull cracking and crushing under the weight of the next as the speakers become fewer and fewer and my enthusiasm diminishes.