How Do We Explain the Imprecatory Psalms?

Question 1117.

The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us Psalm 23. I understand why the imprecatory psalms feel like they do not belong in a book about worship and prayer, and I want to explain why I think they belong there precisely, and why removing them would leave our own prayer life poorer rather than purer.

I am not going to explain the imprecatory psalms away or pretend the language is gentler than it reads. I want to take the words seriously, set them in their historical and literary setting, and show what these prayers are actually doing theologically, because I think that is very different from what a first, uncontextualised reading suggests.

What the imprecatory psalms actually say

The imprecatory psalms form a recognisable group within the Psalter, including Psalm 35, 69, 83, 109, and most famously 137, where the exiled psalmist prays, ‘Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock’ (Psalm 137:9). These are prayers of imprecation, meaning invocation of judgement or curse upon an enemy, and they appear not as isolated outbursts but as a formal category of prayer within Israel’s inspired worship life, sanctioned for use in corporate and personal devotion for centuries.

It is worth being precise about what the imprecatory psalms are not. They are not the psalmist taking a weapon in hand and acting on his anger. Every single one of these prayers hands the matter to God rather than to human violence. That distinction, easy to miss on a first reading, is the key to understanding what is actually happening in this material, and it is the distinction the rest of this article will keep returning to.

The historical setting behind the anger

Psalm 137 was written, or at least reflects the experience of, Israelites exiled in Babylon after watching Jerusalem burned, the temple destroyed, and, in all likelihood, their own children murdered before their eyes by an occupying army whose soldiers are described in Babylonian and Assyrian records themselves boasting of exactly this kind of atrocity against conquered populations. The imprecatory psalms did not emerge from comfortable circumstances or petty grievance. They emerged from a community that had suffered real, documented atrocity and was crying out to God rather than taking up arms in retaliation.

Reading the imprecatory psalms without that context strips them of the very thing that makes them theologically significant. This is not casual cruelty dressed up as prayer. It is the rawest possible grief and outrage, brought honestly before God rather than acted out against the people who caused it.

Handing vengeance to God rather than taking it

The single most important thing to understand about the imprecatory psalms is what they are asking God to do instead of doing it themselves. Paul later commands exactly this pattern for believers: ‘Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’ (Romans 12:19), quoting Deuteronomy 32:35. The imprecatory psalms model precisely this discipline centuries before Paul writes it down as apostolic instruction. The psalmist wants justice, believes justice matters, and refuses to become the agent of it personally.

This is a genuinely healthy pattern, not simply a permitted one. Suppressing anger at real injustice, or worse, pretending it does not exist, tends to produce either denial or eventual explosion. The imprecatory psalms show a better way: bringing the anger fully into the light of God’s presence and leaving the response entirely in His hands.

Are these prayers compatible with loving your enemies

This is the objection I hear most often, and it deserves a direct answer. Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44), which seems, at first glance, to sit uneasily beside the imprecatory psalms. I think the tension eases considerably once we see that loving an enemy and desiring that justice ultimately be done are not the same thing, and are not actually in conflict. Loving an enemy means not taking vengeance into my own hands, not wishing them harm out of personal spite, and actively seeking their good and their repentance. It does not require pretending that unrepented evil carries no consequence.

Even within the imprecatory psalms themselves, the request is consistently for God’s justice, not personal revenge executed by the psalmist. That is entirely compatible with loving an enemy in the sense Jesus means it. I can genuinely desire someone’s repentance and salvation while also trusting that if they refuse to repent, God’s justice will eventually be done, and I do not have to be the one to carry it out.

What the New Testament does with this material

The New Testament does not discard the imprecatory psalms as an embarrassing relic. Revelation shows martyrs under the altar crying out to God as Lord, holy and true, asking how long it will be before He judges and avenges their blood on those who dwell on the earth (Revelation 6:10), using language that echoes the imprecatory psalms directly. Paul quotes imprecatory material from Psalm 69 in Romans 11:9-10 without apology or qualification. The pattern of crying to God for justice against genuine, unrepented evil continues right through to the closing pages of Scripture.

This tells me the imprecatory psalms are not a primitive stage of revelation that Jesus supersedes. They are a permanent feature of how God’s people respond to real injustice, carried forward into the New Testament’s own vocabulary of prayer and worship.

How the church has handled this material across history

Many modern lectionaries and hymnals quietly omit the harshest verses of this material, printing Psalm 137 without its final lines, for instance. I understand the pastoral instinct behind that choice, but I do not think it serves congregations well in the long run. Removing the difficult verses does not remove the difficulty. It simply means believers encounter real grief and real desire for justice without any inspired model for bringing it honestly to God, and are left instead with only their own instincts, which are frequently worse guides than Scripture itself.

The early church, by contrast, prayed the whole Psalter regularly, difficult sections included, as part of ordinary corporate worship. Monastic communities for centuries recited every psalm in rotation without selective editing. This was not because earlier generations were less sensitive to the difficulty of the language. It was because they trusted that inspired Scripture, even its hardest edges, served the church better than a curated version designed to avoid discomfort.

How I use the imprecatory psalms pastorally

In my own ministry I have found the imprecatory psalms genuinely useful, particularly with people who have suffered real abuse or injustice and feel unable to admit, even to themselves, how angry they are. Christian culture sometimes pressures people to skip straight to forgiveness without ever naming the wound honestly, and the imprecatory psalms give permission to name it fully, in the safest possible place, before God, rather than in a way that harms anyone else.

I do not encourage anyone to use this language against a specific person in casual conversation, and the psalmists themselves never do. But as prayer, spoken to God alone, the imprecatory psalms provide a vocabulary for grief and outrage that much of contemporary Christian devotional writing simply does not offer, and I think that is a loss the church has largely inflicted on itself by quietly setting this material aside.

I remember sitting with a woman in my congregation years ago who had been badly wronged by a family member and felt guilty for the depth of her anger, believing a good Christian should simply forgive and move past it without ever naming the wound. Reading Psalm 109 together, slowly, and letting her see that this kind of raw honesty is actually modelled in inspired Scripture, did more for her healing in that one conversation than months of being told to simply let it go. She did eventually reach a place of genuine forgiveness, but she reached it by way of honesty, not by skipping past it.

New Testament echoes beyond Revelation

Revelation is the clearest New Testament parallel to the imprecatory psalms, but it is not the only one. Paul writes, ‘If anyone is proclaiming to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians 1:9), invoking judgement on false teachers in language that functions very similarly to Old Testament imprecation, even if the vocabulary differs. He also names Alexander the coppersmith and states plainly, ‘The Lord will repay him according to his deeds’ (2 Timothy 4:14), a direct echo of the pattern found throughout the Psalter of naming a wrong and entrusting the response to God rather than pursuing it personally.

Even Jesus pronounces woes on unrepentant cities, ‘Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!’ (Matthew 11:21), language that carries real weight of judgement rather than gentle disappointment. None of this contradicts the call to love enemies. It confirms that naming evil clearly and trusting God to deal with it justly runs consistently from the Old Testament Psalter through to the words of Jesus Himself and on into apostolic teaching.

I find this continuity reassuring rather than troubling. It tells me that the impulse behind this part of the Psalter was never a primitive stage that later revelation quietly corrected. It was, and remains, a legitimate and even necessary feature of how God’s people respond to genuine, unrepented evil in a world where full justice has not yet arrived.

Imprecatory psalms and the doctrine of final judgement

Underneath the imprecatory psalms sits a settled conviction that final justice is real and that God will not allow persistent, unrepented evil to go unanswered forever. This connects directly to the doctrine of eternal judgement. If there were no final reckoning, the psalmist’s prayer would be an empty appeal to nothing. Because Scripture teaches a real, final judgement, the psalmist’s confidence that God will act is not wishful thinking but grounded hope, and that hope is precisely what allows the psalmist to set down his own desire for revenge rather than carry it himself.

This is worth remembering whenever the imprecatory psalms feel uncomfortable to modern ears trained to avoid any language of judgement altogether. The alternative to a God who judges is not a kinder universe. It is a universe with no ultimate answer to the worst things done to the most vulnerable people, and I do not think that is a more comforting picture, whatever its surface appeal. A universe without final justice is not a gentler place to live. It is simply a place where the strong get away with everything and the weak have no recourse at all.

Common misreadings worth correcting

Some assume the imprecatory psalms teach that God delights in violence for its own sake. Nothing in the text supports that. The consistent ground given for the requested judgement is persistent, unrepented wickedness, exactly as with the wider category of harsh passages I discuss elsewhere. Others assume these psalms model personal vendetta as an acceptable Christian practice. The opposite is true, since the entire structure of imprecatory prayer depends on handing the matter to God rather than acting on it oneself.

A further misreading treats the imprecatory psalms as psychologically primitive, something a spiritually mature believer eventually outgrows. I would push back on that. Job, arguably the most spiritually mature sufferer in Scripture, prays in remarkably similar terms at points, and the New Testament martyrs in Revelation do too. Maturity is not the absence of righteous anger. It is bringing that anger to the right place.

I would add one further correction. Some assume this material was written in cold blood, calculated rather than felt. The Hebrew poetry itself argues otherwise. The parallelism, the repetition, the raw intensity of the imagery all suggest prayer written from genuine anguish rather than detached theological reflection. Treating these psalms as a controlled literary exercise misses the very thing that makes them useful to us today, which is that they were written by people whose pain was every bit as real as ours.

So, now what?

If you carry real anger toward someone who has genuinely wronged you, I do not think the answer is to bury it under a forced, premature forgiveness that never deals with the wound honestly. This material gives you permission to bring that anger to God exactly as it is, trusting Him with the outcome rather than carrying the burden of enacting justice yourself.

Read Psalm 137 in full, not just the final verse people quote out of context. Read what precedes it, the grief of exile, the mockery of captors demanding songs of joy from a broken people. Then bring your own grief to God in the same honest terms, and trust Him, as the psalmist ultimately does, to be the one who sets things right.

I would also say this to any believer who feels they ought to have moved past their anger faster than they have. Grief and outrage over genuine injustice do not run on a schedule other people can set for you. Give yourself the same honesty the psalmists gave themselves, and give God the same trust they placed in Him, that the wrong done to you has not gone unnoticed and will not go unanswered forever, even if the answer is not visible yet. That kind of patience is hard to sustain, but it is the very same patience Scripture asks of us everywhere else in the Christian life.

I have also found it helpful, over years of pastoral conversations, to distinguish between the desire for justice, which Scripture affirms repeatedly as right and good, and the desire for personal revenge, which Scripture consistently forbids. Learning to tell the difference in your own heart takes time and honesty, and this part of the Psalter is one of the best tools Scripture gives us for doing exactly that work carefully rather than pretending the distinction does not matter.

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

Romans 12:19 (ESV)

For Further Study

For deeper study of the imprecatory psalms, I would recommend Millard Erickson’s treatment of the problem of evil and divine justice in his systematic theology, alongside Charles Ryrie’s notes on the Psalter’s place within progressive revelation. J. Dwight Pentecost’s writing on the eschatological hope embedded in Israel’s prayers for justice is also worth consulting, as is Lewis Sperry Chafer’s discussion of the relationship between divine patience and divine judgement across the whole canon. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s notes on Messianic readings of the Psalms are a further helpful resource for readers wanting to trace this theme into its New Testament fulfilment.