Artemy Vedel composed On the Rivers of Babylon, his choral setting of Psalm 137, at some point during the years he later looked back on as his most productive, though no precise date for this particular concerto survives among his roughly thirty one sacred concertos. He had trained at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy under the Italian composer Giuseppe Sarti, taken over the Academy's own choir and orchestra after graduating in 1787, and reached the height of his output between 1794 and 1798 under the patronage of General Andrei Levanidov, for whom he organized regimental chapel choirs first in Kyiv and then, from 1796, in Kharkiv, where he also taught at the Kharkiv Collegium.
Psalm 137's lament, its refrain asking how a people can sing the Lord's song in a foreign land while held captive far from home, gave Vedel material for one of his most emotionally direct concertos, scored for unaccompanied choir in the style scholars now describe as the archetype of Ukrainian Cossack baroque, a blend of the Ukrainian choral tradition he had inherited with the operatic and instrumental idioms then arriving from Western Europe. Nine of his eleven surviving concertos share that same pleading, minor key character, and this setting is counted among the most performed of them. Within a few years of whichever year it was actually written in, the patronage and the regimental choirs that had made this productive period possible were both gone, dissolved by imperial decree before Vedel's own life took its own far darker turn.