The Imprecatory Psalms · Featured Study
Praying the Hard Psalms
Psalm 137 begins with the most beautiful line about homesickness in world literature and ends by pronouncing a blessing on the man who kills Babylonian babies. Roughly a dozen psalms pray for the ruin of enemies, and they sit inside the same book the church has prayed for three thousand years. This study does not soften them. It puts the texts on the table unedited, gives every defence its full strength and its limits, names the church's own record of abusing them, and then asks the only question that matters: what does a Christian do with these words now?
The Texts, Unedited
— four psalms as they actually read“O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.”
The most quoted horror in the Psalter, and the one no reading makes comfortable. What the frame supplies is not comfort but context: infanticide in a sacked city was not a fantasy in the ancient Near East, it was standard military practice, and it is what Babylon had just done to Jerusalem. The psalm's last line is a prayer that the perpetrator receive precisely what he did — the lex talionis, applied by name. It is not a plan; it is a wish, and the psalm hands it to God rather than picking up a stone.
“Let their table before them become a snare… let their eyes be darkened… Pour out thine indignation upon them… Let their habitation be desolate… Let them be blotted out of the book of life.”
The escalation is total: sight, home, posterity, and finally the book of life itself. And this is the psalm the New Testament quotes more than almost any other — Jesus applies its zeal (John 2:17) and its hatred-without-cause (John 15:25) to himself, and Peter applies verse 25 to Judas (Acts 1:20). Whatever the church does with the imprecations, it cannot classify Psalm 69 as sub-Christian material the apostles ignored.
“Set thou a wicked man over him; and let an adversary stand at his right hand… let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”
The longest sustained curse in the Bible, and the sharpest test case, because the curse reaches past the man to his wife and children. Two things are usually noted and both matter: the psalm opens by describing the speaker as one who gave love and got accusation, and gave prayer where others gave hatred (109:4–5); and a minority reading — grammatically possible, not certain — takes verses 6–19 as the psalmist QUOTING what his enemies say about him, before answering in verse 21. Peter quotes verse 8 of Judas's vacated office (Acts 1:20).
“Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Jehovah.”
Aimed not at private enemies but at the judiciary — men whose office was justice and who sold it. The imagery is deliberately of disarming a predator rather than of torture: a lion without teeth cannot eat the flock. This is the imprecation at its most defensible, and it is worth reading first, because it shows what the whole class is FOR before the harder examples show what it costs.
“He does not say, ‘Break their necks’ (no; let them live to repent, slay them not, lest my people forget), but, ‘Break their teeth, for they are lions, they are young lions, that live by rapine.’”
Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Psalm 58:6 — public domain
First, the Objection — at Full Strength
— before any defence is offeredC.S. Lewis devoted a chapter of Reflections on the Psalms (1958) to the cursing psalms and refused every available escape. He would not allegorize them, would not plead the ancient context as an excuse, and would not pretend the words are anything other than what they look like. His verdict on their vindictiveness was unsparing — he called the spirit in them contemptible and devilish, and said so as a believer who prayed the Psalter. (Lewis, cite-only; paraphrased.)
That objection goes first here on purpose. Any treatment of these psalms that begins with the defences has already lost the argument, because it has quietly conceded that the words need managing before they can be heard. The honest order is: read them, feel what they are, and only then ask what they are doing in the Bible.
Four Frames
— each at full strength — and what each one fails to coverHanded over, not taken up
The psalmist is not planning anything. He is doing the opposite of vengeance — transferring the case to the only judge entitled to hear it, and then leaving it there. Psalm 109:4 says of the accusers, “but I give myself unto prayer.” The New Testament reasons identically: “Avenge not yourselves… Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith the Lord” (Rom 12:19, quoting Deut 32:35). The alternative to praying Psalm 109 is not gentleness — it is a knife.
What it does not cover · It explains the ADDRESSEE but not the CONTENT. That a wish is prayed rather than executed does not by itself make the wish good, and Psalm 137:9 is still a wish for a specific dead child.
Covenant lawsuit
These are not free-form curses; they are largely petitions that God enforce sanctions he swore himself. Deuteronomy set out blessings and curses as the terms of the covenant, and the imprecatory psalms mostly ask that the covenant's own penalty clause be applied to covenant-breakers and to the nations that destroyed God's city. Read this way they are not malice but litigation — a plea that the law God wrote be the law God keeps.
What it does not cover · It works cleanly for Psalm 58's judges and Psalm 137's Babylon. It works less well where the target is one personal enemy and the curse falls on his children, which no covenant clause specifies.
Christ prays the Psalter
Bonhoeffer's reading (Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, 1940, cite-only): the Psalms are first the prayers of Christ, prayed by the church in him rather than out of private grievance. The imprecations then become the sinless one's absolute opposition to evil — a hatred of wickedness with no self-interest in it — and the church prays them only as it is IN him, which strips out exactly the malice that made them dangerous. The apostles' use of Psalms 69 and 109 (Acts 1:20) is evidence they read them this way.
What it does not cover · It relocates the voice but does not answer the historical question of what the original psalmist meant, and it can become a way of not hearing the psalm's own anger — which is the thing the Psalter refused to censor.
The voice of the genuinely oppressed
The people who find these psalms unbearable are, with striking consistency, people who are safe. They were written by the sacked, the enslaved, the judicially robbed. A piety that requires the plundered to speak politely about their plunderers is not gentler than the psalms — it is a demand for silence, made by the comfortable, and the Psalter refuses to make it.
What it does not cover · It establishes the psalms' right to exist and be prayed by the wronged. It does not license the powerful to borrow them, which is precisely the misuse the church's own history records.
The Church's Own Record
— the argument against careless use is historical, not theoreticalWeaponized
The imprecations have been read over armies before conquests, aimed at religious minorities and at political opponents, and quoted by people who were not the plundered party but the plundering one. Every one of those uses inverts the psalms: prayers written by the powerless against their oppressors, borrowed by the powerful against the powerless. The frames above all assume a speaker who has been wronged and cannot retaliate. Remove that and nothing is left but a curse with a chapter number on it.
Or quietly deleted
The opposite reflex is just as common and less honest: modern lectionaries and hymnals routinely drop the imprecatory psalms, or print them with the sharp verses removed and no note that anything is missing. A congregation is then formed by a Psalter that has been edited to be nicer than the one God gave — and, having never been given words for rage, learns to bring God everything except what it actually feels.
Where MannaFest Plants Its Flag
— the founder's position, stated plainlyThe discomfort is real and stays on the page. Psalm 137:9 is not airbrushed here and will not be. What these psalms teach is that God can be handed the worst thing in you — that rage brought to him is safer than rage carried out, and infinitely safer than rage denied — and that having brought it, you leave the vengeance with him. They are a sanctioned place to put what would otherwise become a weapon. They are not, and have never been, licence for a human being to execute a single line of them.
Both halves are load-bearing. Drop the first and you get a sanitized faith with no vocabulary for evil. Drop the second and you get a crusade.
How to Pray Them Now
— three movements, in order- 1
Name the evil truly
Start where the psalm starts: with an honest account of what was done, refusing both euphemism and revenge. This is the step most Christian prayer skips, and skipping it is why so much of it is thin. The Psalter's judgment is that God would rather be handed your rage than your composure.
- 2
Take it to the cross
Then remember where the curse actually landed. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). Every imprecation a Christian prays has to run through the fact that the fullest answer God ever gave to human wickedness was to absorb it — and that the person you are praying about may be someone he intends to absorb it for.
- 3
Leave it at the judgment
And then let it go to the assize. The martyrs under the altar pray an imprecation — “How long… dost thou not judge and avenge our blood?” (Rev 6:10) — and they are not rebuked; they are given robes and told to wait. That is the psalms' own posture, held to the end: the cry is heard, the vengeance is God's, and the waiting is part of the prayer.
Voices consulted: C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (1958) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (1940) — both in copyright, summarized here and never quoted at length. Public-domain commentary: Spurgeon, The Treasury of David on Psalms 58, 69 and 109, and Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, both of whom faced the imprecations directly rather than passing over them. Exact wordings are being verified against the printed texts before any is quoted directly.