Polyglot Bible: Psalms: Psalms 136

This is a parallel-text biblical scholarship document presenting two adjacent psalms across four manuscript traditions simultaneously: the Hebrew Masoretic Text (Tanakh), the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the King James Version, with Strong's Concordance lexical numbers embedded in the KJV column. The left-side pair (KJV and Hebrew) gives Psalm 136, the "Great Hallel," a liturgical hymn of thanksgiving structured entirely around the repeated refrain "for his mercy endureth forever," cataloguing God's acts from creation through the Exodus, wilderness wandering, and conquest of Canaan. The right-side pair (Septuagint Greek and Vulgate Latin) gives Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon"), a lament of the Babylonian exile expressing anguish at being asked to sing sacred songs in a foreign land, closing with a curse against Babylon and its infants. The juxtaposition is notable: Psalm 136 celebrates triumphant divine rescue while Psalm 137 voices raw grief and vengeance from a later historical catastrophe, and presenting them together across traditions highlights both the textual continuity across language communities and the thematic tension between gratitude and exile within the psalter itself.

Polyglot Bible: Psalms: Psalms 136

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