Walk through almost any Jamaican community and you will hear the Bible in places you might not expect. It is in the proverbs grandmothers use, the names painted on minibuses, the signs over shop doors. And it is in the language of Babylon and Zion, two words that have travelled from the Psalms and the prophets into everyday speech, and from there into music heard around the world.
Bob Marley did a great deal to carry that vocabulary abroad. Raised with a mother who sang in church, he later embraced Rastafari, and in the last months of his life he was baptised into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Christians and Rastafarians have long discussed what that journey meant, and it is not the aim of this piece to settle the question. What is worth noticing is how deeply the Bible’s story of exile and homecoming shaped his songs, and how deeply it still shapes the way Jamaicans at home and abroad think about where they belong.
A people who know about exile
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137:1, KJV). That line was written by Israelites carried far from home. It has spoken with special force to people whose ancestors were taken from Africa in chains, and later to the many who left the island for London, New York and Toronto in search of work and ended up raising children who speak with a different accent.
In popular usage, Babylon came to stand for systems that grind people down: oppression, greed, the sense of living in a place that is not really yours. Zion came to mean the opposite: freedom, belonging, the true home. Songs with titles like Exodus and Redemption Song drew on that biblical pattern of captivity and deliverance, and millions who had never opened a Bible heard its echo.
Where is home, exactly?
For many Caribbean families this is not a theoretical question. Consider a woman who has lived in Birmingham for forty years. She owns her house there, her children and grandchildren are there, and her church is there. Yet she has spent decades building a house in St Elizabeth that she visits every other winter. Ask her where home is and she may answer “yard”, meaning Jamaica, and then add, quietly, that she does not know if she will ever live there.
Or think of a young man in Kingston who has never left the island but feels like an exile in his own community: no land, no title, renting a room from a relative, watching house prices move out of reach. Babylon, for him, is not a far-off city. It is the gap between the life he was promised and the one he can afford.
Both are asking the ancient question: where do I belong?
The Christian answer: both and not yet
The letter to the Hebrews describes Abraham and his family as people who lived in tents in the land of promise, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Then it says, “But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:16, NKJV).
Christian hope agrees that we live in a world marked by Babylon. It agrees that Zion is real. But it locates the final homecoming not in a particular country, and not in a human ruler, but in the city God Himself is preparing, where Revelation says He will dwell with His people and wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:3-4). No house in St Elizabeth or Scarborough, however lovingly built, is the final answer to the longing.
That might sound as though earthly homes do not matter. The opposite is true. Because the final home is secure, we are free to build and love the ones we have now without asking them to carry more weight than any house can bear.
What this means for how we live
- We can put down roots where we are. The woman in Birmingham does not have to feel she is betraying Jamaica by loving her street in England, or betraying England by sending money to build back home. Both can be gifts.
- We can resist Babylon without despair. Unfair systems, exploitative landlords, land grabbed from the poor: Scripture condemns these plainly. Christians can work for justice in housing and land precisely because they know it matters to God.
- We can hold property loosely. A title, a house, a family yard are precious, but they are not our salvation. That frees families to settle disputes over land more generously.
- We can practise one love on the road where we live. Unity and welcome, sung about so widely, are tested at the gate, in how we treat the neighbour, the tenant and the stranger.
A bridge worth crossing
Jamaicans of every faith share a vocabulary drawn from Scripture. That shared language can be a bridge. A Christian who takes the time to understand what Babylon and Zion mean to a Rastafarian neighbour, or to an uncle who grew up on those songs, will often find a doorway into a deeper conversation about exile, justice and home, and about the One who promised His followers, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2).
Until that place is ready, we build, we plant, we pay the land tax, we welcome people in. And we sing, with the exiles of every age, of a Zion that is still to come.
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