Psalm 109

Here is the King James Version in its standard modern-spelling edition, verse numbers inline. The short heading that stands above verse 1 is covered in the next section.

1 Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise; 2 For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue. 3 They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause. 4 For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer. 5 And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love.

6 Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand. 7 When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin. 8 Let his days be few; and let another take his office. 9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. 10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour. 12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children. 13 Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out. 14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. 15 Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

16 Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart. 17 As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him. 18 As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.

19 Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually. 20 Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the LORD, and of them that speak evil against my soul. 21 But do thou for me, O GOD the Lord, for thy name's sake: because thy mercy is good, deliver thou me. 22 For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.

23 I am gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and down as the locust. 24 My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness. 25 I became also a reproach unto them: when they looked upon me they shaked their heads. 26 Help me, O LORD my God: O save me according to thy mercy: 27 That they may know that this is thy hand; that thou, LORD, hast done it.

28 Let them curse, but bless thou: when they arise, let them be ashamed; but let thy servant rejoice. 29 Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame, and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a mantle. 30 I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth; yea, I will praise him among the multitude. 31 For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those that condemn his soul.

In the American Standard Version of 1901 the heading reads: "For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David." Those words belong to the Hebrew text, where they open verse 1 itself, lamnatseach le-David mizmor, running straight into the plea, O God of my praise, be not silent.

What the heading settles is narrow. The first phrase is a musical direction, the same one that stands over dozens of psalms, addressed to whoever led the singing. The second links the psalm to David. Of the 150 psalms, 73 carry David's name in their headings, and thirteen of those tie the psalm to a specific incident in his life. Psalm 109 is not one of the thirteen. No verse names the enemy or the year.

Commentators have filled that gap with guesses. Matthew Poole's commentary places the psalm in a time of persecution by Saul or Absalom, names Doeg or Ahithophel as the one man singled out, and admits it cannot say which. The Pulpit Commentary, on verse 17, points to Shimei, the man who cursed David and threw stones at him in 2 Samuel 16. Every one of those is an inference from David's story. The psalm itself names nobody.

On authorship, the honest position is that the heading reports a tradition. Modern scholarship does not accept Davidic authorship of the psalms as historical fact, reading the name as a link to a famous figure, and dating any single psalm is notoriously hard. Commentators who hold to David as author, Spurgeon among them, lean on David's character to explain the curses.

Psalm 109 is the lament of one person under attack, and it belongs to the group called the imprecatory psalms, the ones that pray for harm to fall on enemies. The list most often given is 55, 59, 69, 79, 109 and 137. The New Oxford Annotated Bible titles Psalm 109 a prayer for deliverance from enemies.

The outline is easy to see once you look for it. Verses 1 to 5 are a plea: liars have surrounded the speaker and paid back his love with hatred. Verses 6 to 19 are the curse, summed up in verse 20. Verses 21 to 29 return to pleading, now with the speaker's own body in view, weak knees and thin flesh. Verses 30 and 31 vow praise. That ending is normal for a lament. The long curse in the middle is what sets this one apart.

Watch the pronouns. Through verse 5 the enemies are plural: they have spoken, they compassed me, they rewarded me. At verse 6 the text switches to one man, with his days and his children, and stays singular until verse 19. Verse 20 goes plural again. That switch drives the main argument about this psalm, covered below. Psalm 55 makes a similar turn from a crowd to one former friend: "But it was thou, a man mine equal."

The psalm is built around mouths. Verse 2 opens with the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful. Verse 30 answers it: "I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth." It is also built around a right hand. In verse 6 an accuser stands at the enemy's right hand. In verse 31 God stands "at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those that condemn his soul." The psalm ends in a courtroom where the defendant finally has someone on his side.

This is the part people search for after reading the psalm, so here it is plainly. Verse 9: "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." That asks for the man's death, phrased through the people he leaves behind. Verse 10 asks that the children wander and beg. Verse 12 asks that nobody pity them. Verse 13 asks that his line die out and that the family name be gone in the next generation.

The curse runs across three generations. It falls on the man in verse 8, on his children in verses 9 to 13, and on his father and mother in verse 14, where the speaker asks God to keep the parents' sins on record. For ancient Israelites the extinction of a family name was close to the worst calamity there was.

No honest reading makes that mild, and older readers felt the tension inside scripture itself. Deuteronomy 24:16 rules: "neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers." Matthew Poole raised exactly that law against the curse on the children and resolved it by reading the psalm as aimed at Judas. Jeremiah 18:21 prays something close to verse 9 against his own persecutors, so this language has company in the Bible.

The text gives its reason in verse 16. The man "remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart." The curse answers a specific charge. The psalm presents its target as someone who hunted a broken person to death, and asks that what he did come back on him and his house.

Because the pronouns change at verse 6, one reading, recorded by Ellicott and adopted by the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, takes verses 6 to 19 as the enemies' words. On this reading the speaker is quoting what they say against him, the way a plaintiff reads a hostile letter into the record, and his own voice comes back at verse 20 or 21.

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers, on verse 6, grants that quotations without any introductory words are common, and calls the theory "tenable, but improbable." In its note on verses 17 and 18 it adds that verse 19 strikes most commentators as an anticlimax, and that this supports the quotation theory. The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition goes further than Ellicott. It adds words at the start of verse 6 assigning the curses to the enemies, with a footnote saying the Hebrew lacks them.

The older readers held the curses to be the psalmist's, then argued about what kind of speech they are. Augustine read them as prophecy dressed in the grammar of a wish. Spurgeon called verses 6 to 20 a prophetic denunciation and refused to treat them as David's personal wish made in cool blood. Both keep the curse in the speaker's mouth and change what it means for him to say it.

The question is open. The quotation reading makes the psalm easier to pray and has the pronoun shift on its side. The traditional reading is the majority view in the older commentaries and matches the way Acts 1 uses verse 8. A translation that inserts the enemies' voice at verse 6 has made that decision for you, and its footnote is where it says so.

Verse 6 is the sharpest split. King James: "Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand." World English Bible: "Set a wicked man over him. Let an adversary stand at his right hand." The American Standard also has adversary. The Hebrew word is satan, which means an opponent or accuser and later became the name of the devil.

Ellicott says the word is "by no means here a proper name," though the Greek and Latin translations rendered it devil, and sums up the verse as an unscrupulous judge and an adversary as accuser. The Cambridge Bible notes that the same root gives adversary in verses 4, 20 and 29, and reads the scene as a human court, with the accuser standing at the defendant's right hand as in Zechariah 3:1.

The second split is quieter and matters more. King James verse 17: "As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him." World English: "Yes, he loved cursing, and it came to him. He didn't delight in blessing, and it was far from him." The King James turns the line into another wish. The World English and American Standard read it as a report of what already happened.

Ellicott is blunt: "The optatives in the English are wrong." Keil and Delitzsch agree that verses 16 to 18 are written in historical form. On their reading, the man's own cursing came home to him and soaked in like water and oil. Ellicott places the return of the wish at verse 19. Verse 20 shows the same split: King James has "Let this be the reward," the World English has "This is the reward."

The third difference is small on the page. In verse 4 the King James reads "but I give myself unto prayer," and both the King James and the American Standard mark give myself unto as words the translators supplied. The Hebrew is closer to and I, prayer. The World English Bible renders it "but I am in prayer." Facing people who repay love with accusation, the speaker describes himself as nothing but prayer.

The New Testament quotes this psalm directly in Acts 1, where, before the apostles choose a replacement for Judas, Peter says scripture had to be fulfilled "which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake before concerning Judas." Then, in the King James: "For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his bishoprick let another take."

That verse joins two psalms. The first line comes from Psalm 69:25. The second is Psalm 109:8, where the King James has office. Bishoprick renders the Greek episkope, oversight.

That citation gave the psalm its old nicknames, the Judas psalm and the Iscariot psalm. Augustine opens his exposition by saying that anyone who reads Acts faithfully sees a prophecy of Christ here. On the curses he writes of "this mode of predicting the future, under the appearance of wishing evil." Read that way, verse 9 is a forecast of judgment from someone who sees it coming.

The Christ reading split commentators on a hard point. John Gill heard the Messiah himself praying the psalm. Spurgeon accepted that it refers to Judas because Peter quoted it, but said that putting its "bitter denunciations" in the mouth of the suffering Christ "is more than we dare to do." Verse 25, where onlookers shake their heads at the sufferer, has an echo at the cross in Matthew 27:39, where those passing by revile Jesus, "wagging their heads."

The Judas reading also has a history that should be named. Augustine wrote that Judas represents "those Jews who were enemies of Christ," and later writers went further. George Horne's commentary, quoted in Benson's, applies verse 6 first to Judas and then to the synagogue, and describes the Jewish people as estranged from God and in bondage to the devil. That move took a curse aimed at one traitor and pointed it at a whole people. Acts 1 applies verse 8 to Judas and to nobody else.

After the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church reformed the Liturgy of the Hours, the daily cycle of psalms prayed by priests, religious communities and many lay people. Psalms 58, 83 and 109 were left out of the four-week psalter entirely, and cursing verses were cut from nineteen other psalms. Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington counts roughly 120 verses removed in all.

The General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours, paragraph 131, gives the reason as "a certain psychological difficulty," and adds that the psalms of imprecation are used as prayer in the New Testament, citing Revelation 6:10, where martyrs ask how long until their blood is avenged. Fritz Bauerschmidt, writing at Pray Tell and drawing on Annibale Bugnini's history of the reform, reports that the study group and the 1967 Synod of Bishops had leaned toward keeping the whole psalter, and that Paul VI directed the omission.

The Church of England kept it. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer appoints Psalms 108 and 109 for Evening Prayer on the 22nd day of every month, so a parish that follows its monthly cycle of psalms says or sings this one about twelve times a year. Thomas Hardy used that in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard persuades a church choir to sing Psalm 109 at the man he hates, and the choir master protests that it was never made for singing.

Neither tradition took it out of the Bible. A Catholic reading scripture straight through still meets all 31 verses. Both churches were facing the question this page is about: what a person is doing when they say these words aloud to God.

Psalm 109 has been prayed against real people for a long time. John Calvin, commenting on verse 6, complains that friars in his day were engaged to curse a man's neighbour by repeating this psalm daily, and writes: "I know a lady in France who hired a parcel of these friars to curse her own and only son in these words." Calvin was a hostile witness against the friars, and the story is his. The practice he describes treats the psalm as a spell.

The modern version is verse 8 used as a political jab. In 2009 news reports covered Pastor Wiley Drake and other preachers using the line about a man's days being few against President Barack Obama, and in 2010 a Florida sheriff's deputy was suspended after writing The Obama Prayer beside the verse in another deputy's Bible. By 2017 bumper stickers were applying the same verse to President Donald Trump. The joke depends on stopping at verse 8. Verse 9, one line later, asks that the man's children be fatherless.

Most people who reach for this psalm are not joking. Someone has been lied about at work and watched the lie cost them the job. A parent has watched the person who hurt their child walk out of a courtroom. Verses 2 to 5 describe that experience exactly: lying tongues and love repaid with accusation.

For those readers the psalm does something useful. It says the furious thing out loud and addresses it to God. Nowhere does the speaker say he will act on any of it himself. He asks God to speak in verse 1 and to act in verses 21 and 26, so that the enemies will know "that this is thy hand." Verse 28 gives the whole posture in one line: "Let them curse, but bless thou."

Christians reading this psalm also have Matthew 5:44 in front of them: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Romans 12:14 is just as direct: "Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not." Romans 12:19 gives the reason: "avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."

Christians fit these together in different ways, and they disagree. Augustine's reading takes Psalm 109 as prophecy about Judas, so a Christian prays it as a warning of judgment. Calvin allowed its curses only to a speaker free of personal passion, and called its use against a private enemy sacrilege. A third reading starts from the shape of the psalm: the speaker hands the whole case to God and does nothing with his own hands. On that reading the psalm is a place to put anger, and Romans 12:19 says the same thing in a different key.

None of these readings supports praying verse 9 over a named person and waiting for it to happen. That is the use Calvin condemned, and it is the use Matthew 5:44 and Romans 12:14 speak against most directly. Your own pastor or priest can tell you where your church stands on praying the cursing psalms at all. PrayWithJesus.ai is software, made by a company and approved by no church, so it cannot settle that for you.

If the person you want to curse is still hurting you, this psalm is not the next step. Advocates at the National Domestic Violence Hotline pick up day and night at 1-800-799-7233, and texting START to 88788 reaches them too. If you are thinking about hurting yourself or someone else, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is reachable by call or text at 988. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911. Then tell one person you trust what happened.