Rivers of Babylon Lyrics - Boney M.

Song Facts:

• Genre: Reggae/Disco


• Featured Artist: None


• Lyricist: Adapted by Boney M. from Psalm 137
  
• Composers: Frank Farian
  
• Awards/Nominations: Not specified


• Soundtrack: Featured in the series "Monkey Man."





Annotations and Meaning:


"Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M. is a highly religious song, struggling with the themes of longing for one's home and struggle to have faith when in lost and foreign circumstances. This is an adaptation of Psalm 137 from the Bible. It narrates the pain of the exiled Israelites in Babylon, towards losing Zion (Jerusalem).
The repeating lines, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, ye-each we wept when we remembered Zion," they indeed describe exile and the sorrow it brings. Sitting by the rivers and weeping is a symbolic act that describes the pain and profound loss felt for their home. This emotional response underpins the intense, connected relationship that the people feel towards Zion as a location of the physical, spiritual, and cultural homeland.
The stanza, "When the wicked / Carried us away in captivity / Requiring of us a song; / Now how shall we sing the Lord's song / In a strange land?" represents the moral and spiritual question of the captives. This passage asks how one may sing in any form of happiness or, indeed, continue to make music of a sacred kind in a land symbolic of nothing other than cruelty and woe, hence touching on themes of both cultural and religious identity under duress.

Those are the words "Let the words of our mouth and the mediation of our heart be acceptable in thy sight here tonight." Regarding this point of their prayer, one would say if they wanted God to take away and put out of his mind their inabilities, too, on account of the hardships. It accents the human heart's longing to remain faithful and righteous before God, even on the road—far from their native spiritual land.