Psalms 137:4
How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?
BSB
ASV
How shall we sing Jehovah’s song In a foreign land?
KJV
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Ecclesiastes 3:4a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
leads to
For His anger is fleeting, but His favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning.
Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.
Grieve, mourn, and weep. Turn your laughter to mourning, and your joy to gloom.
When the LORD restored the captives of Zion, we were like dreamers.
Truly, truly, I tell you, you will weep and wail while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.
Through
Isaiah 22:12On that day the Lord GOD of Hosts called for weeping and wailing, for shaven heads and the wearing of sackcloth.
leads to
Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar. Come, spend the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God, because the grain and drink offerings are withheld from the…
Shave yourselves bald and cut off your hair in mourning for your precious children; make yourselves as bald as an eagle, for they will go from you into exile.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? They answer, those who have sinned and been deceived, and they say: "How shall we sing you the Lord's song in a strange land, set as we are in our sins, we who have fallen from Jerusalem into Babylon?" Therefore no one can praise the Lord unless he is holy. For the sinner ought not to sing to the Lord, but to mourn his sins.
Profane scoffers are not to be humoured, nor pearls cast before swine. David prudently kept silence even from good when the wicked were before him, who, he knew, would ridicule what he said and make a jest of it, Ps. xxxix. The reason they gave is very mild and pious: How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land How shall they sing at all? sing in a strange land? sing Jehovah's song among the uncircumcised? No, that must not be; it shall not be. With one voice they refuse, but the refusal is humbly worded by being put in the form of a question.
