Psalm 58

Psalms 58:1-2

This psalm carries the same title as 57 and 59, To the chief Musician, Altaschith, Michtam of David, the three sharing one tune name and one Davidic superscription though no occasion is given here. The word rendered O congregation in verse 1 is a genuine crux: the King James follows one reading of the Hebrew, while others, following the Septuagint's rendering or a different pointing of the same letters, read O ye gods or O ye mighty, the same word Psalm 82:1 and 82:6 use of unjust judges. Either way the address is to men who sit in judgment, and verse 2 answers the question already, ye weigh the violence of your hands, corruption measured out like a merchant's goods.

Psalms 58:3-5

The wicked are estranged from the womb: Estranged from the womb pushes the wicked man's turning as far back as language allows, not a fall into evil but evil found already present at the beginning of the account the psalm gives. The poison of a serpent in verse 4 and the deaf adder that will not hear the charmer in verse 5 describe a hardness that resists correction by nature, snake charming being a known ancient practice the psalm assumes its hearers recognize. Gill and Henry both take the picture as a hyperbole for how set the corrupt judges of verse 1 have become in their ways, not a claim that undoes the appeal made to them in verse 1 to judge uprightly.

Psalms 58:6-8

The prayer turns from complaint to petition, break their teeth answering the biting corruption of verses 1 and 2 with an image of the predator disarmed before it can strike again. The pictures that follow, water that runs away, a snail believed in the ancient world to dissolve into its own trail as it moved, a birth that never sees the sun, are the commentators' named readings for how completely the psalmist wants the wicked's power ended, not literal predictions of what will happen to any one man. The New Testament licenses this kind of prayer as Scripture, Acts 1:20 quoting an imprecatory psalm as written in the book of Psalms, and the same gracious handling this book gives every imprecatory psalm applies here: judgment prayed toward wickedness as a class, never turned on any living person.

Psalms 58:9-11

The thorns under the pot in verse 9 picture a fire lit but not yet felt, judgment arriving before the wicked can finish what they were doing, whirlwind naming its suddenness. The rejoicing of verse 10, washing his feet in the blood of the wicked, is read by the older commentators as the language of a decisive battlefield victory rather than a literal scene, the same kind of image Psalm 68:23 uses, and it answers rather than celebrates the violence named in verse 2. The psalm's last word settles the question it opened with: a man shall say there is a reward for the righteous, verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth, the whole prayer aimed at proving that judgment is real rather than only at the wicked's undoing.