SONG IN A FOREIGN LAND: A POSTCOLONIAL READING OF PSALM 137 IN THE CONTEXT OF PE
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Abstract
Psalm 137 preserves the collective trauma of the people of Judah in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile. This article analyses Psalm 137 through a postcolonial hermeneutical approach in order to disclose the dynamics of imperial hegemony, cultural resistance, and the preservation of communal identity under conditions of domination. Employing a qualitative library-based method, the study proposes that Babylon's demand that the Judean exiles sing the "songs of Zion" may be read not as a neutral request for entertainment, but as a practice of cultural domination that sought to appropriate and control the identity of the colonised community. Conversely, the refusal to sing, the vow to remember Jerusalem, and the lament articulated in the psalm are interpreted as forms of symbolic resistance against imperial power. The article then brings this reading into dialogue with documented struggles for customary land among the Toba Batak community in North Sumatra. Since this is a library-based study, the contextual discussion draws on scholarly literature, advocacy reports (e.g., AMAN, KSPPM), and documented legal cases rather than on ethnographic fieldwork. In this comparative light, the psalm illuminates analogous patterns in the defence of ancestral land, collective memory, and cultural identity amid contemporary forms of marginalisation. The article therefore argues that Psalm 137 is not merely a historical record of suffering, but a text of resistance that remains theologically and ethically relevant for communities confronting domination, dispossession, and injustice in the present.
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