Do You Rulers Speak Righteousness?
1 For the Chief Musician. To the tune of “Do Not Destroy.” A poem by David. Do you indeed speak righteousness, silent ones? Do you judge blamelessly, you sons of men? 2 No, in your heart you plot injustice. You measure out the violence of your hands on the earth. 3 The wicked go astray from the womb. They are wayward as soon as they are born, speaking lies. 4 Their poison is like the poison of a snake, like a deaf cobra that stops its ear, 5 which doesn’t listen to the voice of charmers, no matter how skillful the charmer may be. 6 Break their teeth, God, in their mouth. Break out the great teeth of the young lions, Yahweh. 7 Let them vanish like water that flows away. When they draw the bow, let their arrows be made blunt. 8 Let them be like a snail which melts and passes away, like the stillborn child, who has not seen the sun. 9 Before your pots can feel the heat of the thorns, he will sweep away the green and the burning alike. 10 The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked, 11 so that men shall say, “Most certainly there is a reward for the righteous. Most certainly there is a God who judges the earth.”
Judges who sell verdicts are addressed to their faces, and the psalm's violence is entirely a demand that they be disarmed.
For the Chief Musician. To the tune of “Do Not Destroy.” A poem by David. Do you indeed speak righteousness, silent ones? Do you judge blamelessly, you sons of men?
The psalm opens by cross-examining the court. Those addressed are judges, and the first charge is silence — they are not saying what they are supposed to say.
No, in your heart you plot injustice. You measure out the violence of your hands on the earth.
The verb is a weighing word. Injustice is being dispensed by measure, deliberately and in the right quantities, which is worse than injustice done in a temper.
4 Their poison is like the poison of a snake, like a deaf cobra that stops its ear, 5 which doesn’t listen to the voice of charmers, no matter how skillful the charmer may be.
The image is of something that cannot be reached. A snake charmer works on a snake; this one has stopped its ears, so the ordinary means of controlling it fails. The psalm is describing men beyond persuasion, which is why what follows is addressed to God rather than to them.
Break their teeth, God, in their mouth. Break out the great teeth of the young lions, Yahweh.
This is the imprecation, and its exact content matters. He does not ask for the men to be killed. He asks for the teeth to be broken — for the apparatus of harm to be removed while the creature remains. The requests that follow are of the same kind: that they drain away like water, that their arrows be blunted Psalms 58:7. Every one is a disarming.
Let them be like a snail which melts and passes away, like the stillborn child, who has not seen the sun.
The comparison is unbearable and it is chosen for a reason — of everything that exists, the stillborn child is the thing that did the least harm.
The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked,
The hardest verse in the psalm, and it should not be softened into a metaphor it is not. It is the language of a battlefield after the fighting. What has to be held with it is who is speaking: people with no court, no appeal, and no protection, whose judges have been bought. The psalm is not celebrating cruelty; it is the sound of a longing for justice in a place where justice has been sold, and it is voiced as a prayer rather than a plan. Nobody in this psalm is authorized to do anything.
so that men shall say, “Most certainly there is a reward for the righteous. Most certainly there is a God who judges the earth.”
The psalm names what it actually wants, and it is not blood. It wants the question settled — the question the corrupt judges had made unanswerable, which is whether anything is finally weighed at all.
held with reason What this mark means