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Chapter 5 uses the model of the three “worlds of the text” to discuss the ways that poems are always spanning the ancient world and the worlds of their readers. It advocates for the necessity of both historical sensitivity and attention to the needs of the present moment. It discusses allusion as one way in which biblical poems can relate to one another. It argues that prophetic poetry in particular is both uniquely oriented to historical moments and at times paradoxically resistant to specific rhetorical purposes. It also considers how the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE was a traumatic catalyst for new creative work. The chapter ends with a reading of Psalm 137 as a poem of rage and trauma, in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the work of reading poems is not easy, but is myriad, demanding, and morally complex. It requires patient consideration of the poem in its diverging contexts and the extension of empathy to readers and writers, past and present.

References to the famous 137th Psalm (“by the rivers of Babylon”) by colonial captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Isaac Jogues, John Williams, and Elizabeth Hanson are different from those of other Christian writers. Elements of the psalm were recapitulated in the ethnohistorical context of Indian captivity. These include the riverine landscape and pagan captors (verse 1), the compulsion to sing “songs of Zion” (verse 3), and infanticidal violence (verses 8-9). The question posed by verse 4 – “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” – may have been as relevant to the Christian Indians who were confined and persecuted by settlers during King Philip’s War as for any other Christian community.

This chapter analyzes the use of the Bible in torture. Boney M’s song “Rivers of Babylon”—which sets the biblical Psalm 137 to music—was played at ear-splitting volume in the attempts to break prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Examination of this generally overlooked detail reveals much about why torture has been considered both permissible and necessary in the war on terror. The use of this particular psalm as a form of torture—ending with revenge as it does—calls for an interrogation of the relationship of revenge to torture. The chapter traces the interpretive tradition that promotes violence and revenge toward Babylon. It suggests that an apocalyptically inflected form of biblical interpretation, involving a literalist reading of allegory, allows this text to be used as torture. “Rivers of Babylon” at Abu Ghraib reveals how allegory, scripture, torture, and revenge are used to establish the truth of U.S. sovereignty and to diminish any threat to it in the future.

Sewol names both the senseless mass drowning of schoolchildren in a 2014 ferry disaster off the southwest coast of South Korea and its abiding affective impact on the South Korean population and diaspora. Anchoring itself in the tide of emotion washing from the broadcasted images of Pangmok Harbor where families and friends wept and awaited news of lost loved ones, but also reactivating the image from Psalm 137 of earlier weeping by another body of water (“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…”), this essay explores the affective possibilities of water as an elemental archive or repository of emotion beyond the constricting confines of the national. The essay also argues that a generalized concept of affect will not suffice to do justice to Sewol. A Korean tragedy evokes a Korean affect, and that affect the essay locates in the Korean concept of Han.

This chapter analyses how poetry for Herrick and many other royalists connected to the Caroline court is political, not in the limited sense of power relations but in the sense of being concerned with public life and affairs, with the body politic and the social body as well as the individual. It involves a moral stance. The continuing vitality of historicist criticism for reading Herrick’s poetry is made clear and it is argued here that if this is combined with a sophisticated, complex understanding of the structures of religious belief, structures which express ideas about human nature, imagination and art and the relationship of the past to the present, the resonance of Herrick’s printed poetry for a defeated and dispersed royalist Anglican community becomes clear.

This chapter examines texts in which children experience violence. By examining childhood violence in war contexts, we see how brutal treatment is used in promotional texts for its rhetorical effect. Likewise, violence against children through curses is met with an equally robust societal response. Further, child sacrifice is rarely practiced but had broad narrative impact. In childhood burials, we see a high regard for children reflecting the child’s value in the domestic cult. These contexts frame how we read childhood violence in the Hebrew Bible. Psalm 137 and 2 Kings 8:11–12 offer a poetic and narrative example of how violence against children assumes a child’s value in order to be effective texts. This is demonstrated through 2 Samuel 12 and the boys and the bears in 2 Kings 2 as well as in Genesis 22. To be rhetorically effective, violence used against children assumes their broadly held value.