"If only I could have my life over again, I would set the entire Bible to music, from the first word to the last," Alkan declared to his friend, Ferdinand Hiller, in a letter from January 3, 1861. The Adagio of a lost orchestral Symphony in B minor from the 1840s, seen by the critic Léon Kreutzer, was prefaced in Hebrew by the third verse of Genesis—"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." A number of surviving works also bear Biblical titles or epigraphs, for instance, several of the set of Préludes (25), Op. 31, or the cello sonata's exquisite Adagio ("...as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass that tarrieth not for man...." Micah 5:7). But while most of these touch a vein of rare poetry in Alkan, his "paraphrase" of Psalm 137 looms to suggest what he might have done with the more dramatic Biblical incidents. Super flumina Babylonis is the Vulgate's rendering of the Hebrew words translated in the Authorized Version as "By the waters of Babylon." The Psalm recounts how the Israelites captive in Babylon were required to provide entertainment for their enslavers —"Sing us one of the songs of Zion"—provoking an embittered vengefulness that looks forward to the day when "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." A droopingly Lamentevole opening gives way to the Israelites' song—"yea, we wept when we remembered Zion"—with its quasi arpa rolled chords marked Dolcissimo, while Alkan has taken care to direct that the moving Bellinian melody be quietly intoned Suavissimo and Molto espressivo. It is regrettable that he did not make more of this, for, with an abruptness that looks forward to the notorious brusquerie of Albéric Magnard, Alkan embarks upon an indignant Con energia episode—"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning"—propelled by boiling triplets. A brief return of the Israelites' song leads to an adamant Allegro feroce that graphically portrays the dashing of the petits enfants against stones, ending Furiosamente and triple forte. Alkan is known to have daily translated several verses of the Bible from at least the early 1850s, working largely from the Peshitta, a fourth century CE Syrian text thought in the nineteenth century to be original and to embody the language spoken at the creation and in the Garden of Eden. By August 1858, he claimed to have translated three-quarters of the Bible. And on May 30, 1865, in answer to Hiller's inquiry, he noted that "...I've finished all the canonical books, and I'm now on to the Apocrypha." As with his Symphony in B minor, this translation has been lost, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the French translation of Psalm 137 heading the score is the sole remaining example of what Hiller jokingly called Alkan's "Semitic studies." While precise dating is problematic, Super flumina Babylonis was published by Richault in 1859 with a dedication to one "M. l'abbé Auguste Latouche."

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