Imprecations in the Psalms

Love for Enemies in Hard Places

Steffen G. Jenkins

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781725292413
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

The gap between the New Testament and the Imprecatory Psalms is less than we think. When faced with prayers against enemies in the Psalms, we are too quick to assume that these Old Testament authors were ignorant of some basic New Testament ethics. They are self-righteous, thinking they have earned God's favor. They don't know that the wicked can repent and be forgiven. They believe in vengeance and hating their enemies. We assume wrongly. These prayers are far more aware than many modern churchgoers of how deeply our own sin runs, so that even when persecuted, we are not automatically entitled to divine help. Even when we are truly entitled to justice against unrighteous attackers, if God rescues us, that is unmerited grace. Further, the psalms are fully aware that their enemies can repent, and they show mercy to them. The Book of Psalms teaches its readers--individuals and the whole people of God--to desire the repentance, forgiveness, and divine blessing of all nations, even the people's most vicious enemies.

1

Introduction

Certain prayers about enemies in the Psalms have always jarred Christian readers: they appear to be at significant odds with the ethics of the New Testament. The psalmists are full of self-righteousness, blithely unaware of their own sinfulness, and imagining themselves to have earned God’s favor against their enemies. They are vengeful and vindictive, wanting nothing more than retribution.

In response, many will grant the cleft between the Psalms and the New Testament, and say that it is only to be expected. The events and teaching of the New Testament ought to have improved on the ethics of the psalms. The legalism and exceptionalism of the Old Testament does lead to delusions of self-righteousness, earned merit before God, and superiority over the enemy. They could not have known better this side of the cross of Jesus. Similarly, there was no way for someone like David, born before the age of the gospel, to know that the wicked are redeemable. If he had no notion that the enemy could repent, he had no way of asking for the end of evil than to ask for the destruction of evildoers. Not having seen the example of the Christ, but living in a world where the friend is to be loved but the enemy is to be hated, how could the authors of psalms be expected to love their enemies, or to have known to pray for God to forgive and bless the wicked who troubled them?

A different tack would treat these prayers as only ever appropriate to Jesus, since he is sinless. Their time will come at the end of the age, when there is no more opportunity to repent but judgment finally arrives.

Responses such as these make common assumptions about the Old Testament which need to be investigated. In the Psalms, especially in the most brutal psalms that deal with enemies in very honest ways, we will test these presuppositions about the Old Testament:

1.Do prayers against enemies require perfect righteousness?

2.Alternatively, do such prayers stem from a deluded self-righteousness, which is unaware of the supplicant’s own need for mercy and forgiveness?

3.Is suffering a sufficient qualification for praying against enemies?

4.Do the psalms understand that the enemy is able to repent, or do they imagine that they can only ask for the destruction of the enemy?

5.Do the psalms have any notion of loving the enemy, desiring their blessing, or do they simply demand vengeance?

After a brief survey of the responses to these prayers in the Psalms, we will introduce the art of reading a psalm within its context in the Book of Psalms. We will then examine the introduction to the Book of Psalms (Pss 1 and 2) and see that it already begins to overturn some of these assumptions. For example, Ps 2 clearly indicates that the enemy can and must repent. They are redeemable. The psalmist even desires their blessing.

We will see in Ps 3 that David is introduced at the most sinful point of his career and embattled with a wicked enemy. He is presented as a type of Israel in exile, embattled by Babylon. David serves as a model for individuals and for the nation of how to respond in prayer when faced by vindictive, wicked, and murderous enemies. Already in Ps 3, we find that he is well aware of his own guilt and the opposite of self-righteous. He does not presume on God’s favor but knows himself to be reliant on God’s undeserved mercy to rescue him.

When given victory over his enemies, he foregoes not only vengeance but even justice, and instead desires their blessing. David is presented in the psalms in the aftermath of his disgraceful incident with Bathsheba and Uriah, where David himself understands his sin to be a total apostasy, on a par with Israel turning from Yahweh to the golden calf. As representative king, his sin is equivalent to that of the nation. The same astonishing mercy which Yahweh showed to Israel in Exod 34 is what David has experienced, and psalms which appeal to it are strategically placed in every book of the Psalter.

In Book I, we examine imprecations in Pss 7 and 18, in their context. We find that each of the assumptions above about the pre- and/or sub-Christian Old Testament are ill-founded. David’s appeals to righteousness are not the same as claims of perfection and certainly not appeals to merit. In Ps 7, they are an honest confession of “not guilty” in the face of particular false accusations. In Ps 18, they are followed by Ps 19, confessing David’s precarious moral standing. As for the enemy, in Ps 7, David warns and desires for them to repent, and if they will not, he is restrained in what he asks for them; he is much harsher with himself than with them. In Ps 18, we see what happens when the enemy will not repent, but the surprising twist at the end of the psalm is that other enemies, kings and nations, come to David submissively. David then promises to tell the enemy kings and nations about Yahweh’s forgiveness and relationship with him through his Torah, which he does in Ps 19. Far from living before the gospel age or being ignorant of the repentance of the wicked, we find David as an evangelist to the nations.

David’s example in his prayers of Book I and the way that he is introduced by the Book of Psalms is picked up in Book V, which looks back on the brutal experience of the Babylonian invasion and exile. David is enlisted as the representative of the nation, who prayed about enemies in analogous situations, such as his flight from Absalom. Absalom sinfully attacked him, as Babylon did Israel. Absalom and Babylon were God’s chosen agents of righteous judgment against sinful David/Israel. A prophetic oracle declared that the sinful agents would be overthrown and that sinful David/Israel would be rescued. How should Israel think and pray about Babylon and about such cobelligerents as Edom? David’s prayers will show the way to appropriate Ps 137, where Edom and Babylon are in focus after the end of exile.

We will examine every imprecation in Book V. Book V is artfully divided into three sections, and the devices that signal those divisions make Yahweh’s hesed prominent: his “steadfast love” which he showed to Israel when Israel deserved the very opposite.

David teaches the nation that their sin makes them entirely reliant on that undeserved mercy. There is no room for self-righteousness. David shows Israel that those who have received mercy must show it to others; why should wicked nations not experience the blessings that wicked Israel enjoyed? In fact, Book V builds up a growing chorus of calls to all the nations to join Israel in celebrating the mercy that Yahweh offers promiscuously to all. Not only can the wicked nations repent and be redeemed, but they also are encouraged to do so. Further, Israel is encouraged to enjoy thanking Yahweh for his mercy alongside their former enemies.

In answer to our five questions, we will see that the gap with the New Testament is much less than often assumed:

1.Prayers against enemies do not require perfect righteousness, but only innocence in the conflict at issue.

2.The supplicants are well aware of their own need for mercy and forgiveness.

3.In any particular conflict, suffering will not supplant innocence: we are not entitled to divine intervention when we are being justly punished for our own wickedness.

4.The supplicants understand that the enemy is able to repent, and sometimes ask for an end to their wicked deeds, as preferable to the destruction of the enemy.

5.These prayers do not simply demand vengeance, but sometimes desire to show mercy to the enemy, even with a hope that the enemy will repent, be forgiven and be blessed.

Such an attitude is not only shown by individual psalmists against their private enemies, but also modelled to the people of God as a whole when faced by their corporate enemies.

While what follows is an exposition of the Hebrew Bible, I have dared to hope that readers from other disciplines will find the topic interesting. In an effort to make the text bearable, I have limited quotations from Hebrew, provided transliterations so that it can be pronounced, and offered translations where appropriate. I have tried to limit technical Hebrew discussion to the footnotes, but those who read below the line are assumed to be Hebraists. (The same goes for the excursus on the textual variants in Ps 2.) I apologize in advance for keeping the Hebrew term hesed in transliteration rather than translating it (as in the title!), despite how often it appears. The pregnant ambiguity of many of its uses in the Book of Psalms leaves me no option.

2

A Real, Bib...