An Wasserflüssen Babylon

"An Wasserflüssen Babylon" (By the rivers of Babylon) is a Lutheran hymn by Wolfgang Dachstein, which was first published in Strasbourg in 1525. The text of the hymn is a paraphrase of Psalm 137. Its singing tune, which is the best known part of the hymn and Dachstein's best known melody, was popularised as the chorale tune of Paul Gerhardt's 17th-century Passion hymn "Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld". With this hymn text, Dachstein's tune is included in the Protestant hymnal Evangelisches Gesangbuch.

Several vocal and organ settings of the hymn "An Wasserflüssen Babylon" have been composed in the 17th and 18th centuries, including short four-part harmonisations by Johann Hermann Schein, Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach. In the second half of the 17th century, Johann Pachelbel, Johann Adam Reincken and Bach's cousin, Johann Christoph, arranged settings for chorale preludes. Reincken's setting of "An Wasserflüssen Babylon" was elaborate and of great length; with one of Pachelbel's shorter settings as a chorale prelude, it forms the earliest extant transcriptions of Bach, copied on a 1700 organ tablature in Lüneburg when he was still a youth; remarkably, they were only unearthed in Weimar in 2005.

In 1720, at a celebrated organ concert in Hamburg, Bach extemporised a chorale setting of "An Wasserflüssen Babylon" in the presence of Reincken, two years before his death; earlier, during his second period in Weimar, Bach had already composed two organ settings of the chorale prelude. Finally, during his maturity in Leipzig, Bach reworked the chorale prelude as BWV 653, part of his Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, written in 1739–1742.