Psalms 109
Psalms 109 — Commentary and Meaning
The short answer
Psalm 109 opens with a cry that God not stay quiet: "God of my praise, don't remain silent." The psalmist is under attack — surrounded by lying mouths and hateful words, repaid with evil for good and hatred for love. His response, remarkably, is not to strike back but to pray. "But I am in prayer," he says (v. 4). What follows, though, is a prayer unlike anything most of us have ever spoken aloud.
Verses 6 through 20 unleash a torrent of curses against the enemy: let his days be few, let his children be fatherless, let his wife be a widow. The psalmist even asks that the enemy's children become "wandering beggars" (v. 10) and that creditors seize everything he owns. This is the language scholars call imprecatory — prayer that invokes God's judgment on one's foes. Psalm 109 is widely regarded as the most sustained and severe example of it in the entire Psalter.
But notice what the psalm does not do. The psalmist never lifts a hand against his enemy. Every violent wish is handed over to God, spoken in God's presence, and left there. After the curses, the psalm turns back to petition: "deal with me, Yahweh the Lord, for your name's sake" (v. 21), "for I am poor and needy" (v. 22). It ends not in vengeance but in praise, trusting that God "will stand at the right hand of the needy" (v. 31).
Read this way, Psalm 109 is less a manual for cursing and more a portrait of radical honesty before God. It insists that rage, humiliation, and the ache for justice belong inside prayer — not because those feelings are righteous, but because God is the only one who can safely receive them and the only one qualified to judge.
What scholars say
Nancy deClaissé-Walford answers the first question this psalm raises — what kind of prayer is this? — by defining the imprecatory genre and showing just how vivid Psalm 109's curse language is, while Walter Brueggemann presses the harder question: why even the most faithful worshipers cannot tolerate all its verses, and what our habit of editing out the psalm's thirst for vengeance says about the faith of our therapeutic culture.
“Psalm 109 is classified as an individual lament, in which the psalmist invokes the wrath of God upon a group of foes. The language and message of the psalm place it within a special category of lament psalms called "imprecatory psalms." "Imprecatory" comes from the Latin word imprecari, meaning "to pray to, to invoke." Many psalms of lament contain imprecatory language in the psalmists' petitions to God (see Pss. 17:13; 31:17; 35:4; 59:11–13; 70:2–3). But in a few psalms the imprecatory tone is very apparent: Psalms 12, 58, 83, 137, 139. Psalm 109's imprecatory language is vivid and abundant. In vv. 10–11, we read: Let his children continuously roam about and beg; let them offer entreaties from their desolate ruins.”
“Beyond “The L ORD is my shepherd” in Psalm 23, we know, “I lift up my eyes to the hills” in Psalm 121, “God is our refuge and strength” in Psalm 46, and perhaps a few others—or, rather, snippets of a few others, to be precise. Even liturgical churches manage very often to exclude and disregard psalms that do not fit with what has become the happy, reassuring mode of gospel faith in our therapeutic culture. Even with the psalms we use, it has become mandatory to edit out the objectionable parts. I have had opportunity to observe even the most faithful who cannot tolerate all the verses in Psalm 109 with its thirst for vengeance. So it is that we find parts of the Psalms problematic, at least, and often so scandalous that they must be dismissed.”
What it means for you
Most of us have felt what the psalmist feels — betrayed, slandered, powerless — and most of us have been taught to hide those feelings from God. Psalm 109 suggests another way: say it all, out loud, to the One who judges justly. Praying your anger is not the same as acting on it; in fact, handing vengeance over to God may be precisely how we let go of it.
So when the polished words won't come, let this psalm give you permission to be honest. God is not scandalized by your worst thoughts. The psalm's final movement — from fury to trust to praise — traces a path that honesty, not suppression, makes possible.
Psalms 109 in context
Psalm 109 sits in Book V of the Psalter, between the confident Psalm 108 and the royal Psalm 110. It is an individual lament with a clear shape: an opening plea against deceitful accusers (vv. 1–5), an extended series of curses on the enemy (vv. 6–20), a petition from the "poor and needy" psalmist (vv. 21–29), and a closing vow of praise (vv. 30–31). The New Testament quotes verse 8 in Acts 1:20, applying it to Judas — a sign that early Christians read this difficult psalm rather than avoiding it.
Passages we cover in this chapter