What Does Psalm 137:7 Mean?
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem, who said, Strip it bare, strip it bare, even to its foundation.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.THE KEY
Jerusalem carries the sound of wholeness, yet the taunt demands that it be stripped down to its foundation.
THE MEANING
The reader hears an unambiguous demand for Jerusalem’s ruin, repeated all the way down to its foundation. The plea to remember brings this cruelty before the LORD, where it cannot pass as an insignificant taunt.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that a call for another’s ruin is harmless when spoken as a taunt, or disappears once the words are over.
THE ROOT
עָרוּ
ʿārû
GROWS FROM
ערה
ʿ-r-h
To be bare, make bare, or lay bare; the root also carries the sense of emptying or pouring out.
“strip it bare, strip it bare” in this verse is ʿārû. The repeated command is more than a wish for damage: it calls for Jerusalem to be laid bare. The root’s sense of emptying gives the taunt its full force, a demand to leave nothing standing.
ALSO GROWS
ʿārâ: To lay bare or uncover
עָרָה
This verb exposes the stripping beneath the command to rase the city.
heʿĕrâ: Poured out or emptied
הֶעֱרָה
The same root’s emptying sense echoes the demand to reduce the city to its bare base.
הַיְסוֹד
hayesod
GROWS FROM
יסד
y-s-d
To set, establish, or lay a foundation.
“Foundation” in this verse is hayesod. The taunt reaches the very place from which a structure is established. The root connects the base being targeted with the act of founding: the demand is to undo what has been set in place.
ALSO GROWS
yāsad: To establish or found
יָסַד
The verb makes the foundation an act of setting something in place, which the taunt seeks to erase.
môsād: Foundation or base
מוֹסָד
This related noun keeps the focus on the structure’s established base.
יְרוּשָׁלַיִם
Yerushalayim
GROWS FROM
שלם
sh-l-m
To be complete, whole, or sound.
Jerusalem’s name carries the sound and sense of shalom, wholeness. That name stands against the taunt’s demand to strip the city down to its foundation.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness or wellbeing
שָׁלוֹם
The city’s name echoes the wholeness that the call for destruction attacks.
shalem: Whole or complete
שָׁלֵם
This branch brings the contrast into focus: completeness is spoken against a demand for total dismantling.
THE PATTERN
Scripture keeps the cry against violence before God so that devastation is neither hidden nor treated as forgettable.
Rise, God, contend for your own cause; remember the taunt against you from the withered one all day.And will God not set his own chosen straight, the ones who cry out to him day and night, though he is slow to heat with them?And they cry out with a great voice, saying, How long, Set-Apart and true Master, will you not judge and avenge our blood against those who settle upon the earth?THE THREAD
Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion a stone, a tested stone, a weighty cornerstone, a foundation set firm. The one who leans his weight will not hurry.The foundation in both verses grows from יסד (y-s-d), “to establish or found.” Psalm 137 names a demand to strip the base away; Isaiah names a foundation laid in Zion.
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