By the Rivers of Babylon
Sometimes a tune is released into the market and it becomes an instant hit. Such one song is the modern rendition of a well-known Jewish song, “By the Rivers of Babylon” done by the group “Boney M”.
Sometimes a tune is released into the market and it becomes an instant hit. Such one song is the modern rendition of a well -known Jewish song, “By the Rivers of Babylon”, done by the group “Boney M”.
The most popular modern version by the group was sung in 1978 and became a worldwide hit selling millions of copies. It was a revision of a 1970 song written by Brent Dowe and Trevor McNaughton who were Jamaican reggae Rastafarians going by the name, “The Melodians”.
In case you are not familiar with the term, Rastafarianism refers to an extremist Jamaican cult that is a mixture of some faith they hold dear to themselves and a claim of some connection to Ethiopia which they associate with the Queen of Sheba who had a strange relationship with King Solomon. A really complex relationship but so are a lot of the stories in the Bible.
The words of the original song composition appear in the Old Testament mostly in Psalms 137 and some verses collected from Psalms 19. The words of the songs refer to the capture and sending into exile in Babylon (modern-day Iraq) of Jews from the Southern kingdom of Judah. This happened around 580 BC and led to the first recorded destruction of the greater kingdom of Israel after it was set up by King David and his son, Solomon.
It was during their captivity and the destruction of their capital city, Jerusalem, which the Jews realized how transient freedom could be as they were reduced to slaves and mere spectators in a land far away from their promised land of Zion.
Interestingly, Babylon was their original home before Abraham set off on a trip to find the “Promised Land, Canaan that was full of milk and honey”. How the Jews fared in that pursuit is a major issue in the Bible and need not concern us here.
In a way, their resistance and refusal to be cowed even in captivity in Babylon led to their ultimate release by King Cyrus of the Persian Empire who not only allowed them to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild their temples but also partly financed their reconstruction. By this time, the Persian Empire stretched all the way from Pakistan to Turkey and south to Egypt and that included Israel.
The Jews of Babylon were lucky in having a king who was so magnanimous that he could allow them to continue worshipping their strange God even in captivity. It was through his largesse that they finally returned to Jerusalem only to lose it again in AD 70 to a more brutal Roman Empire this time lasting more than 1,800 years.
Lessons from the Song
If you ever get a chance to listen carefully to the words of the song, you will get a clear picture of a people who had developed a religion and a culture that survives to this day and yet the Jews never had an empire of their own unless you want to call the tiny piece of land occupied by the 12 tribes of Israel an Empire. This would be a long stretch of the imagination even under the most generous conditions.
And yet, the religion of this tiny “kingdom” in the Middle East has gone on to become one of the major religions of the world spread by the very people who were their conquerors. These were initially the Romans who presided over the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and even have a whole book in the Bible written in their honour. Give them credit: Without them, Christianity would never have spread to the rest of Europe, England and the Americas, Africa and Australia.
And, yet, the real paradox is that while their religion was spreading like an epidemic all over the world, they them-selves clung to an older version of Judaism that does not even explicitly recognise Christianity.
The second paradox of the Jewish kingdom is that despite their numerous disruptions and hardships they have acquired incredible capacities in various aspects of human enterprise - physics, economics, medicine, money, etc. - to such an extent that some people accuse them of collusion especially in winning prizes like the Nobel Prizes.
The Reality of Man
Until you read a book by the misleading title, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, you may not fully appreciate the many aspects of human development. The book attempts to explain the true origins of man in a non-religious way that is both frightening and prophetic. Frightening because man is still evolving even as we watch every day and wonder where we are headed. Anybody who is over 70 years old finds it extremely hard to explain so many of the changes they have seen in their own lifetimes. Prophetic because, if you try to predict how the world will look like in 100 years, you will be perfectly wrong. That is how fast the world is changing.
Back to Rastas
But back to the authors of the famous songs. They disappeared from the scene a long time ago and their only remnant was Bob Marley who, after popularising his infamous cult, died in 1981 at a relatively young age of 36 but, mercifully, his cult and his songs still exist to this day. Even among our youth in Kenya where, I am reliably informed, the Rastas got their unique hair-style adapted from the likes of our own legendary Mau Mau fighters led by Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi and General Mwariama.
Strange, isn’t it, how human society has evolved. The modern purveyors of the popular versions of the Jewish faith are widely spread in many African countries and barely know about the many contradictions of that faith. Even where their most ardent supporters hardly know about its origins.
But, for those who were brutally colonized by the Europeans, they used those same songs to characterise their oppression by those Europeans whose languages they, like me, continue to popularise to their children as if these languages are their own. Yet, if you ask most of them to tell you about the He- brew language they know nothing about it. “Hiyo”, they tell you proudly, “ni ushenzi wa Wayahudi”.
Except about Canaan, “the promised land full of milk and honey”.