Did you know that even though the weeping willow came from China, its scientific name associates it with Babylon… because of the Bible? Diana Wells explains in her new book The Life of Trees that it’s called Salix babylonica because of the biblical tradition of Jews weeping for Zion after being taken into exile by their Babylonian conquerors. Think: Psalm 137 which begins,”By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our harps for our captors asked us there for songs. Our tormenters, for amusement, ‘Sing us one of the Zion songs…” Or Godspell, where the psalm is rendered into a beautiful, melancholic song. There it’s associated with Matt 26:20-30, a Last Supper scene, which concludes with reference to singing the psalms. In the Godspell version, some lyrics have “hung up our lives” rather than “our lyres” — mistake or reinterpretation?
