God Will Save Zion
22 Let their table before them become a snare. May it become a retribution and a trap. 23 Let their eyes be darkened, so that they can’t see. Let their backs be continually bent. 24 Pour out your indignation on them. Let the fierceness of your anger overtake them. 25 Let their habitation be desolate. Let no one dwell in their tents. 26 For they persecute him whom you have wounded. They tell of the sorrow of those whom you have hurt. 27 Charge them with crime upon crime. Don’t let them come into your righteousness. 28 Let them be blotted out of the book of life, and not be written with the righteous. 29 But I am in pain and distress. Let your salvation, God, protect me. 30 I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. 31 It will please Yahweh better than an ox, or a bull that has horns and hoofs. 32 The humble have seen it, and are glad. You who seek after God, let your heart live. 33 For Yahweh hears the needy, and doesn’t despise his captive people. 34 Let heaven and earth praise him; the seas, and everything that moves therein! 35 For God will save Zion, and build the cities of Judah. They shall settle there, and own it. 36 The children also of his servants shall inherit it. Those who love his name shall dwell therein.
The longest imprecation in the Psalter, quoted by an apostle about Judas, and then a promise that the poor will inherit.
Let their table before them become a snare. May it become a retribution and a trap.
Seven verses of curse, the most sustained in the collection. Paul quotes the first two of them in Romans, applying them to a hardening that came on Israel Romans 11:9–10, and Peter quotes verse twenty-five of Judas when the eleven choose his replacement Acts 1:20.
That the New Testament uses these verses is the reason they cannot simply be dismissed as sub-Christian anger. They are treated as prophetic, and what they describe is judgment on a settled refusal.
Still, the shape of them should be stated plainly. Let their eyes be darkened, so that they can't see Psalms 69:23 asks that people who would not look be left unable to. Let their table before them become a snare asks that what they were enjoying become the trap. In each case the punishment requested is the thing itself, allowed to run to its end — which is the pattern of judgment throughout this collection.
Let them be blotted out of the book of life, and not be written with the righteous.
The severest request in the Psalter. Whatever else is said about it, the psalmist asks God to do this and does not presume to do it himself — and Scripture elsewhere is clear that the book is God's to keep Exodus 32:33 Revelation 20:12.
For they persecute him whom you have wounded. They tell of the sorrow of those whom you have hurt.
The reason offered, and it is the psalm's own justification. Their crime is kicking a man who is already down, and specifically one whom God had struck. They saw the wound and used it.
But I am in pain and distress. Let your salvation, God, protect me.
The curses stop as suddenly as they began, and the man returns to his own condition.
30 I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. 31 It will please Yahweh better than an ox, or a bull that has horns and hoofs.
The same judgment as the fiftieth psalm, from the other direction: a song is worth more than the largest animal on offer. The detail about horns and hoofs specifies a mature bull, the most valuable sacrifice available, and the psalm says the song beats it.
For Yahweh hears the needy, and doesn’t despise his captive people.
For God will save Zion, and build the cities of Judah. They shall settle there, and own it.
The psalm ends far from where it began. A man drowning alone finishes with a rebuilt country and people living in it who did not own it before — and the last line gives the qualification for inheriting: those who love his name Psalms 69:36.
held with reason What this mark means