Psalms 109
Psalm 109 is one of the hardest prayers in the Bible, and it is honest about why. A man has been encircled by lies - the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me (v. 2) - attacked by people he had treated with love, betrayed without any cause he can name. The bulk of the psalm is a long, unsparing call for judgment to fall on the chief accuser, and modern readers often flinch at it. But read it carefully and notice what the sufferer is actually doing. He is not picking up a weapon; he is not slandering back; he is not plotting revenge. He is handing the entire matter - his pain, his accusers, his longing for things to be set right - up to God, and asking God to be the judge. That is the difference between vengeance and this prayer: the wronged man refuses to repay, and refers the whole case to the One who judges righteously.3
The psalm moves in clear stages. It opens with the cry of a man hated without a cause, whose only answer to the slander is to pray: For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer (v. 4). Then comes the long imprecation against the ringleader - let Satan stand at his right hand (v. 6), let his days be few; and let another take his office (v. 8), and much more - the language of a man laying the full wrong before God and asking Him to deal with it. He gives the reason the judgment fits: this was a man who remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy (v. 16), who loved cursing (v. 17). And then, at verse 21, the whole prayer turns on two small words: But do thou for me, O GOD the Lord, for thy name's sake.
From there the tone changes entirely. The man who has been calling down judgment now lays bare his own weakness: For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me (v. 22); my knees are weak through fasting (v. 24); I became also a reproach unto them (v. 25). He asks not for the power to strike back but for rescue - Help me, O LORD my God: O save me according to thy mercy (v. 26) - and he wants it done in a way that makes God's hand unmistakable: That they may know that this is thy hand; that thou, LORD, hast done it (v. 27). The closing note is quiet trust: while his enemies curse, he leaves the blessing to God - let them curse, but bless thou (v. 28) - and rests on the conviction that God Himself takes the side of the wronged: For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those that condemn his soul (v. 31).2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 109:1-5 · To the chief Musician, A Psalm of DavidHated Without a Cause
1Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise; 2For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue. 3They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause. 4For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer. 5And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love.
The psalm begins with a cry against silence: Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise. The man praying is being talked about - surrounded, as the next verses show, by mouths opened against him with lies - and the one voice he longs to hear is God's. To ask God not to hold his peace is to ask Him to break His silence, to speak and act where for now there has been no answer. And notice how the sufferer names God: not “O God of my rescue” or “O God of my vengeance,” but O God of my praise. Even encircled by slander, this is the God he praises; even now, his mouth is full of God rather than full of his enemies. That title sets the whole tone. The lies are loud, but they have not displaced God from the centre of his speech. He has been wronged, and he is about to say so without flinching - but he opens by addressing the God he still adores, the One whose praise is the steady ground beneath a life that has otherwise come under attack.
The attack is described with painful precision: lying tongues, words of hatred, a crowd compassed… about him, and at the centre the wound that aches most - they… fought against me without a cause (v. 3). There is a particular kind of pain in being hated for no reason you can find. If a man knew what he had done, he could repent of it, or at least understand it; but to be surrounded by hatred you did not earn leaves nothing to hold on to. The sufferer can locate no offence on his side, only love - which makes the malice baffling as well as cruel. This phrase, without a cause, will prove to be one of the deepest notes in the psalm, because there was One whose enemies hated Him with no cause at all, and who said so in almost these very words. For now it simply names the injustice plainly: this is not discipline the man is suffering for some hidden fault. It is causeless hatred, and the Bible does not pretend such a thing is rare, or that it does not cut to the bone.
Verse 4 holds the hinge of the opening movement: For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer. Read it slowly. He had given them love; in return they had become his adversaries - the Hebrew is a courtroom word, the language of those who stand up to accuse. And his response to being made the target of accusers is not to assemble a defence, hire his own accusers, or repay slander with slander. His response is prayer. The phrase is striking in the original: literally, I - prayer, as though the man has become prayer, has turned himself wholly into an appeal to God. Here, at the very start, is the key to everything that follows, including the hard words to come. Whatever he is about to ask God to do, he is asking God to do it. He has handed the case over. The accused will not become an avenger; he becomes a man of prayer, laying the entire matter - the lies, the hatred, the longing for justice - into the hands of the only One who can judge it rightly.
Psalm 109:6-15Let Another Take His Office
6Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand. 7When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin. 8Let his days be few; and let another take his office. 9Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. 10Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. 11Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour. 12Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children. 13Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out. 14Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. 15Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.
Here begins the long, hard heart of the psalm - a string of petitions calling down judgment on the chief accuser, and it is worth facing honestly rather than skipping past. The first thing to see is the courtroom imagery. Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand (v. 6); when he shall be judged, let him be condemned (v. 7). The picture is of a trial: a wicked man set as judge over the accuser, and an adversary standing at his right hand - the place where an accuser stood - to bring the charge. The man who has been falsely accused asks that the accuser himself be brought to account before the bar of God's justice. The second thing to see is that every verb is a request of God. “Set thou”; “let his days be few”; “let… let… let.” This is not the sufferer announcing what he will do to his enemy. It is the sufferer asking God to be the judge - refusing to lift his own hand, and referring the entire matter, with all its heat, to the One who repays. The curses are severe because the wrong was severe; but the wronged man is on his knees, not on the attack. Some readers hear in verses 6-19 the very curses the enemies had hurled at the psalmist, now asked to fall back on their own heads - the accuser caught in his own accusation. Either way, the judgment is left with God.
The petitions of verses 8-15 are sweeping and hard: that the man's days be cut short, his office passed to another, his family left destitute, his name blotted out of memory. To modern ears this can sound like vindictiveness, and it is important to read it inside its own world. In the law God had given Israel, sin had consequences that ran through a household and a lineage; to ask that a wicked man's line be cut off was to ask that the chain of his evil be broken, that it not propagate down the generations and go on producing victims. The sufferer is not gloating; he is asking God to bring a thorough end to a thoroughly destructive man. And still - this cannot be said too often - he is asking, not acting. He does not lift a hand against the man's children or seize the man's goods; he lays the request before God and leaves the verdict and its measure entirely to Him. There is a kind of restraint hidden inside even these fierce words: the most furious thing the wronged man does is pray. He will not be the executioner. He hands the wrong up to the only Judge who can weigh it without error and repay it without sin - and then he waits for God to act.
Psalm 109:16-20As He Loved Cursing
16Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart. 17As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him. 18As 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. 19Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually. 20Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the LORD, and of them that speak evil against my soul.
Now the psalm gives its reason - the “because” that lies under the whole imprecation: Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart (v. 16). The judgment asked for is not arbitrary spite; it answers a specific kind of wickedness. This was a man who could have shown mercy and chose not to - who, far from helping the weak, hunted them; who looked at someone already broken in heart and moved in to finish him off. That is the cruelty God hates most in Scripture: the strong preying on the helpless, the well-off treading down the poor, the hard-hearted crushing the already-crushed. Set this verse beside what the sufferer says of himself later - I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me (v. 22) - and the picture is complete. The accuser is a man who pursued the very kind of person the accused has now become: poor, needy, broken-hearted. The psalm's logic is the logic of God's own concern. A God who cares about the poor and needy cannot be indifferent to those who make a sport of destroying them, and the wronged man appeals to exactly that care.
Verse 20 closes the imprecation and tells us, in one phrase, where the whole thing has been aimed all along: Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the LORD, and of them that speak evil against my soul. Two words carry the weight. First, reward - the idea is recompense, wages, what is fairly owed; the sufferer is asking not for excess but for a just return, that the evil done come back upon the doer in righteous measure. Second, and decisive, from the LORD. This is the phrase the whole long, hard section has been building toward. The reward is to come from the LORD - not from the psalmist's sword, not from a mob he has stirred up, not from any plan of his own. He has poured out fierce words, but he ends by placing them, and the men they concern, squarely in God's hands and asking God to do the repaying. That single phrase is what separates this prayer from a vendetta. The wronged man wants justice; he does not appoint himself to deliver it. He asks the righteous Judge to give his adversaries their due - and then, in the very next verse, he turns away from them entirely and begins to pray for mercy on himself.
Psalm 109:21-31But Do Thou For Me
21But do thou for me, O GOD the Lord, for thy name's sake: because thy mercy is good, deliver thou me. 22For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me. 23I am gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and down as the locust. 24My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness. 25I became also a reproach unto them: when they looked upon me they shaked their heads. 26Help me, O LORD my God: O save me according to thy mercy: 27That they may know that this is thy hand; that thou, LORD, hast done it. 28Let them curse, but bless thou: when they arise, let them be ashamed; but let thy servant rejoice. 29Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame, and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a mantle. 30I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth; yea, I will praise him among the multitude. 31For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those that condemn his soul.
Everything pivots on two words at the start of verse 21: But do thou for me, O GOD the Lord. The long catalogue of judgment is over; the sufferer turns his face away from his enemies and toward God, and the contrast is the whole point. They have done their worst; but thou - do something altogether different. And see how he asks. Not “deal with me as I deserve,” and pointedly not “repay me for all the good I did.” His grounds are entirely outside himself: for thy name's sake, and because thy mercy is good. He appeals to God's reputation and God's mercy, not to his own merit. The form of address is solemn - O GOD the Lord, a doubling of the divine names that gathers up God's full majesty and covenant nearness in a single breath. After all the heat of the imprecation, this is where the wronged man finally rests his weight: not on the justice of his cause, real as it is, but on the goodness of God's mercy and the honour of God's name. The accusers have a case to make against him; he answers it by appealing past himself entirely, to the One whose mercy is good.
The petitions of this closing movement are remarkably free of self-assertion. Help me, O LORD my God: O save me according to thy mercy (v. 26) - not according to my innocence, though he is innocent, but according to thy mercy. And the goal he names is not his own glory but God's: That they may know that this is thy hand; that thou, LORD, hast done it (v. 27). He wants to be rescued in such a way that no one can mistake who did it - so that the deliverance points unmistakably to God. Then comes one of the gentlest lines in this fierce psalm: Let them curse, but bless thou (v. 28). He will not match his enemies curse for curse. He simply leaves their cursing to run its course and asks God for the one thing that outweighs it all - God's blessing. The contrast says everything: they curse; thou, bless. And the section ends not in bitterness but in praise: I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth; yea, I will praise him among the multitude (v. 30). The mouth that opened the psalm calling God the God of my praise (v. 1) closes it doing exactly that - praising, in public, the God who hears the poor.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 109 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for satan (v. 6, the ordinary word for “an adversary” or accuser), for the pairing 'aniy and 'ebyon (“poor and needy,” vv. 16, 22), and for qelalah (“cursing,” vv. 17-18).
- Psalm 109 ↔ Acts 1 · John 15 · Luke 23Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Psalm 109 to the rest of Scripture - above all the line Peter lifts from verse 8 onto Judas (his bishoprick let another take, Acts 1:20), the hatred without a cause Jesus applies to Himself (John 15:25), and the betrayed sufferer who answers His own accusers not with this psalm's curses but with Father, forgive them (Luke 23:34).
- Psalm 109 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 109 - the structure of the long imprecation (vv. 6-19) and whether it quotes the enemies' own curse, the sense of satan as a human accuser at the right hand in verse 6, and the legal courtroom imagery that runs through the psalm.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Hated Without a Cause
- John 15:25that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.The causeless hatred of verse 3 named by Jesus of His own enemies - the psalm fulfilled in the One hated for no reason.
- Psalm 35:11-12False witnesses did rise up... They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul.The same wound as verses 2-5 - slander and evil returned for good - in another of David’s laments.
- 1 Peter 2:23Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again... but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously.The pattern of verse 4 perfected - answering accusation not with counter-accusation but by entrusting the case to God.
- Romans 12:19avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.Why the wronged one prays instead of striking back - judgment belongs to God, not to the injured.
Let Another Take His Office
- Acts 1:20For it is written in the book of Psalms... his bishoprick let another take.Peter reads verse 8 of Judas, the betrayer of Jesus - the betrayed sufferer of the psalm prefiguring the betrayed Christ.
- John 13:18He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me.The betrayal by a near friend that verse 8 foreshadows - fulfilled in the one who shared Jesus’ table.
- Zechariah 3:1and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.The accuser at the right hand of verse 6 - the same courtroom picture of an adversary standing to bring a charge.
- Deuteronomy 32:35To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence... for the day of their calamity is at hand.The conviction beneath the whole imprecation - that the repaying of evil is God’s to do, and may be left to Him.
As He Loved Cursing
- Proverbs 14:31He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker: but he that honoureth him hath mercy on the poor.Why the cruelty of verse 16 is so grave - to crush the poor is to insult the God who made them.
- Matthew 5:7Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.The opposite of the man in verse 16, who would shew no mercy and so is given none.
- Galatians 6:7Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.The principle beneath verses 17-20 - the cursing a man loves and sows comes back as his own harvest.
- Psalm 7:15-16his mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.The same justice as verse 17 - the evil a man devises recoiling upon himself, left for God to bring about.
But Do Thou For Me
- Luke 23:34Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.The One hated without a cause answering His accusers not with this psalm’s curses but with prayer for their forgiveness.
- Luke 6:27-28Love your enemies... Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.Where the road of refusing personal vengeance (v. 28, “let them curse, but bless thou”) finally leads.
- Psalm 110:1The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.The right hand of verse 31 lifted higher - the Lord enthroned at God’s right hand over every accusing power.
- Romans 8:33-34Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth... It is Christ that... maketh intercession for us.The answer to every accuser the psalm longed for - God Himself standing at the right hand of the poor to save.