Psalms 35
Psalm 35 is a cry for vindication from a man who is innocent and surrounded by people who are not. It belongs to a kind of psalm that can unsettle a reader at first - David asks God to deal with his enemies in vivid, even violent, terms. But notice carefully who he asks to do the dealing. From the very first word he is not sharpening his own sword; he is handing the quarrel to God: Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me. The whole psalm is a man stepping back and putting his case - and his enemies - into the hands of the one Judge who sees everything and gets nothing wrong.3
And the trouble he is in is the particular agony of being lied about. False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not. This is not open warfare where you can see the blow coming; it is the slow poison of slander, of accusations you cannot answer because they were never true to begin with. Worse still, the people doing it are not strangers. David tells us that when these same people were sick, he had prayed and fasted and grieved for them as though he had been my friend or brother. He had loved them, and they have repaid the love with knives. The psalm is honest about how much that costs - they rewarded me evil for good - and it does not pretend the wound is small.
Yet the remarkable thing about Psalm 35 is the direction it finally faces. It does not end in bitterness, and it does not end in revenge taken. It ends in worship. Twice over, the singer promises that when God acts, his response will be praise - I will give thee thanks in the great congregation - and the last line stretches that praise out with no horizon on it: my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise all the day long. Here is a sufferer who refuses to let his accusers turn him into one of them. He commits the judging to God, and he gives himself to praise. And in that posture - innocent, slandered, loving his enemies, trusting the Judge - he stands as one of Scripture's clearest foreshadowings of the One who was hated without a cause and prayed for the men who killed Him.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 35:1-10 · A Psalm of David.Plead My Cause
1Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me. 2Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help. 3Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. 4Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul: let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my hurt. 5Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the LORD chase them. 6Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the LORD persecute them. 7For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul. 8Let destruction come upon him at unawares; and let his net that he hath hid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall. 9And my soul shall be joyful in the LORD: it shall rejoice in his salvation. 10All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto thee, which deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him, yea, the poor and the needy from him that spoileth him?
The psalm opens like a man throwing the doors of a courtroom wide and calling for the Judge to take the bench. Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me. Read that opening line slowly, because everything hangs on it. David does not say let me at them; he does not say give me strength to pay them back. He says Plead my cause - You argue it, You take my side, You be my advocate. The verb is a legal one: it pictures a lawsuit, a formal contending before a judge. And in the same breath he reaches for a second image, the battlefield: fight against them that fight against me. So God is summoned in two roles at once - as the Advocate who will argue the case, and as the Warrior who will win the fight. What David will not do is take either role for himself. The whole moral weight of the psalm rests right here, in the first verse: a wronged man who hands his wrong to God instead of avenging it. That single decision is what keeps the fierce prayers that follow from being mere revenge. He is not the executioner. He is the plaintiff, and he has come to the only court that never errs.
Verses 2 and 3 pile up the gear of an ancient soldier - Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me. The shield and the smaller buckler are for defense; the spear drawn out and the road blocked are for going on the attack. David is asking God to arm Himself, to step physically between him and the men hunting him. It is bold, almost startling imagery - the LORD pictured strapping on armor - but it is the natural cry of someone who knows he cannot win this fight alone and has stopped pretending he can. He is not asking for a weapon to put in his own hand; he is asking the LORD to be the one who stands in the gap. And then, at the very center of the armor and the spears, comes the line that changes the whole temperature of the prayer. After all the talk of shields and battle, what David most wants is not a tactical victory but a word: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. Beneath the fear of his enemies is a deeper need - to hear God Himself speak reassurance straight into his soul. The whole armory of verses 2 and 3 turns out to be in service of one quiet sentence the soul is aching to hear.
The imprecations begin in earnest now - let them be confounded… let them be as chaff before the wind - and they are easier to read rightly once we remember verse 1. David is not planning to confound anyone himself. Every one of these is a petition, handed up: let God do it, let the wind scatter them, let the angel of the LORD chase them down the dark and slippery road. He is asking God to reverse the trap - the very net they hid… in a pit he prays will catch himself. Twice he summons the angel of the LORD, the same mighty messenger who once stood with drawn sword in Balaam's path and who struck the camp of an army in a night (2 Kings 19:35). David wants that figure on the road behind his pursuers. We should not soften the heat of these verses, but we should locate it correctly: this is the prayer of a man who genuinely longs for justice, who wants the wicked stopped, and who is determined that the stopping be God's work and not his own. He is handing the sword to the only One who can be trusted to wield it without sin.
After the storm of petitions, verses 9 and 10 leap ahead to the day of the answer, and the mood breaks open into anticipated joy: And my soul shall be joyful in the LORD: it shall rejoice in his salvation. Notice that David is already rehearsing his thanksgiving before the rescue has arrived. He is so sure God will act that he begins celebrating in advance - and notice, too, exactly where the joy is aimed. It is not my soul shall be joyful that my enemies are crushed. It is joyful in the LORD… rejoice in his salvation. The gladness terminates on God, not on the downfall of his foes. This is the deep difference between a prayer for justice and a thirst for revenge: the avenger's heart is fixed on the suffering of his enemy, but David's is fixed on the rescuing character of God. And when he reaches for words big enough to praise that God, his whole body gets involved: All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto thee? Even his skeleton will join the song. It is a wonderful picture of praise welling up from the very frame of a person - gratitude so total that bone and marrow seem to cry it out.
The question David's bones cry out - LORD, who is like unto thee? - is one of the oldest songs of the people of God. It is the very wonder Israel sang at the edge of the sea: Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? (Exod. 15:11). And the answer David gives is telling. What makes the LORD incomparable is not raw power in the abstract; it is the direction that power runs: which deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him, yea, the poor and the needy from him that spoileth him. God is matchless precisely because He sides with the overmatched. He rescues the one who is outgunned, the person facing an enemy too strong for him. This is why David, hemmed in by accusers more numerous and more powerful than he is, can pray with such confidence. He is appealing to a God whose signature is exactly this kind of rescue - the deliverance of the weak from the strong. To be poor and needy is not, in this psalm, a disqualification; it is precisely the condition God is famous for answering. David's very helplessness is his argument.
Psalm 35:11-18Evil for Good
11False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not. 12They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul. 13But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting; and my prayer returned into mine own bosom. 14I behaved myself as though he had been my friend or brother: I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother. 15But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew it not; they did tear me, and ceased not: 16With hypocritical mockers in feasts, they gnashed upon me with their teeth. 17Lord, how long wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions. 18I will give thee thanks in the great congregation: I will praise thee among much people.
Now the psalm tells us what kind of attack this is, and it is the cruelest kind: False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not. This is not an enemy army at the gate; it is a courtroom turned into a weapon. False witnesses - people willing to stand up and swear to lies - have accused David of things he did not do, things he knew not, charges with no root in anything real. There is a peculiar helplessness to being lied about. Against an honest accusation you can repent; against an open attack you can defend yourself. But against a fabricated charge there is often nothing to grab hold of, no fact to correct, because the whole thing was spun out of nothing. The accusers are not interested in the truth; they are interested in the damage. And the damage is real: the next verse names it. This kind of slander does something to a person on the inside, and David will not pretend otherwise. But mark again where he has placed himself - back in verse 1, he has already handed this case to the only court where false witnesses cannot win, where the Judge knows the things he knew not are lies before they are ever spoken.
Verse 12 names the precise shape of the wound, and it is a phrase that has become almost proverbial for betrayal: They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul. This is worse than being attacked by an enemy. An enemy's hostility at least makes sense; you expect blows from someone who hates you. But these are people to whom David had done good, and who have paid that good back with evil. The kindness was real, and it has been answered with cruelty - and the next verses will spell out exactly how much kindness David had shown. The closing phrase is the most poignant: to the spoiling of my soul. The betrayal has not merely damaged his reputation or his circumstances; it has gone down into his soul and left it desolate, plundered, bereaved. This is the particular grief of being wronged by those you have loved - it does damage that a stranger's hatred never could, because it turns your own goodness into the very thing that gets used against you. The psalm does not rush past this pain or spiritualize it away. It lets it stand in all its bitterness, because only a wound named honestly can be honestly carried to God.
Here the psalm does something that should stop us in our tracks. Having named the betrayal, David now tells us how he had treated these very people before they turned on him - and it is the opposite of everything they did to him. But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting. When his now-enemies had been ill, David had grieved for them as if for his own family. He had put on the sackcloth of mourning, gone without food, prayed for their recovery with the kind of intensity normally reserved for one's own losses. This is the great hidden hinge of the psalm. The man asking God to deal with his enemies is the same man who fasted and wept for those enemies when they were suffering. His prayers for them, he says, returned into mine own bosom - an image likely meaning his intercession came back to bless his own soul even when it did them no visible good, the way a prayer offered in love is never truly wasted. Whatever else is true of David's fierce petitions, this much is clear: they do not rise from a heart that hated first. They rise from a heart that loved, and was betrayed for it.
The picture of David's former love deepens into something almost unbearably tender: I behaved myself as though he had been my friend or brother: I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother. He reaches for the closest human bonds he can name - friend, brother, and finally mother - to measure the depth of grief he had felt for these people in their trouble. He had mourned for them as a man mourns for his own mother, bowed down under the weight of it. And these are the people who now tear at him and gnash their teeth and gather to celebrate his downfall. The contrast could not be sharper or sadder. Here is love poured out, and hatred returned. And it is precisely this pattern - deepest love met with deepest betrayal - that makes Psalm 35 reach forward across the centuries. For there was One who loved His own to the end, who wept over the very city that would kill Him, who washed the feet of the man who would betray Him - and was repaid with a cross. David, mourning for his enemies as for his mother and receiving knives in return, is walking, without knowing it, a road that Another would walk all the way to its bitter end.
After describing the mockers who gnashed at him and ceased not, David lets out the cry that every sufferer eventually prays: Lord, how long wilt thou look on? There is real anguish in the question. It is addressed to a God who is looking on - who sees the whole thing, the false witnesses, the gloating, the tearing - and who has not yet acted. How long? The delay is its own kind of pain. And yet listen to what the question assumes. It is not the cry of someone who has concluded God is absent or indifferent; it is the cry of someone who is certain God sees and certain God will act, and who cannot understand the wait. The very complaint is soaked in faith. He calls God to rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions - my darling being his own precious life, his one and only soul, exposed to beasts. And then, before any rescue has come, verse 18 makes a promise: I will give thee thanks in the great congregation: I will praise thee among much people. He vows his praise in advance. Even mid-anguish, even with the lions still circling, he is already planning the thanksgiving service. That is what faith looks like in the long wait: still asking how long, and already rehearsing the song of praise.
Psalm 35:19-28Hated Without a Cause
19Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me: neither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause. 20For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land. 21Yea, they opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it. 22This thou hast seen, O LORD: keep not silence: O Lord, be not far from me. 23Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, even unto my cause, my God and my Lord. 24Judge me, O LORD my God, according to thy righteousness; and let them not rejoice over me. 25Let them not say in their hearts, Ah, so would we have it: let them not say, We have swallowed him up. 26Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together that rejoice at mine hurt: let them be clothed with shame and dishonour that magnify themselves against me. 27Let them shout for joy, and be glad, that favour my righteous cause: yea, let them say continually, Let the LORD be magnified, which hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant. 28And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise all the day long.
The final section opens with a vivid little gesture of malice: let not them… wink with the eye that hate me without a cause. The wink is the secret signal of conspirators - the sly glance exchanged across a room between people who share a private cruelty, gloating to one another while keeping a straight face for everyone else. David has seen it: the smug, knowing looks his enemies trade when they think their scheme is working. And he names their hatred for what it is - without a cause. There is the word again, chinnam: a hatred with no justification behind it, aimed at a man who has given them no reason. Verse 20 sharpens the indictment: they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land. Their targets are quiet people - those minding their own business, wanting no quarrel. And verse 21 catches their open contempt: they opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha. That mocking Aha, aha is the sound of an enemy who thinks he has won, the jeer of someone savoring another's ruin. It is ugly - and David lays it all out before God rather than answering it himself.
Against all that mocking noise, David makes an appeal built on a single, steadying fact: This thou hast seen, O LORD. Everything his enemies have done in secret - the winking, the whispered schemes, the open jeers - God has seen. Nothing has escaped Him. And on the strength of that, David asks for two things that sound almost contradictory: keep not silence… be not far from me. He wants God to speak and to draw near. The hardest thing about the wait has been the sense of God's silence and distance - the feeling that the Judge sees but says nothing, is present but feels far. So David pleads, Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment. The language is daring - as if God were asleep and needed rousing - but it is the boldness of intimacy, not irreverence. He even doubles the address with tenderness: my God and my Lord. Whatever the silence has felt like, David has not let go of the relationship; God is still his. This is how the faithful pray through God's apparent silence - not by concluding He is gone, but by pressing in harder, asking Him to speak, insisting on the nearness that the silence seemed to deny.
In verse 24 David finally states the verdict he is asking for, and it returns us to where the psalm began: Judge me, O LORD my God, according to thy righteousness. This is the rib of verse 1 coming to its hearing. He is not asking to be judged according to his own goodness - he asks to be judged according to thy righteousness, by God's own perfect standard of what is right. He is so confident in the justice of his cause that the last thing he fears is a fair trial; what he dreads is injustice - that his enemies should get to rejoice over him and crow We have swallowed him up (v. 25). The image of being swallowed is total destruction, a man devoured whole. And so he prays that the shame they intended for him would land instead on them: let them be clothed with shame and dishonour that magnify themselves against me (v. 26). Read rightly, this is not personal spite; it is a longing for the moral order to be set right - for the proud who exalt themselves to be brought low, and for the quiet and wronged to be lifted up. David trusts that a righteous God cannot finally let the slanderer triumph over the innocent. He is asking the Judge to be true to His own character.
Then the psalm turns a corner that tells you everything about David's heart. Having prayed about his enemies, he turns to think about his friends - the people who favour my righteous cause - and his prayer for them is not that they would celebrate his victory but that they would say continually, Let the LORD be magnified. Watch the redirection. The whole vindication, when it comes, is meant to swell into the praise of God, not the praise of David. He wants his rescue to make people think bigger of the LORD. And he describes the God he is appealing to with a phrase of startling warmth: the LORD hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant. God is not reluctant or indifferent toward David's welfare; He delights in it. The peace and flourishing of His servant gives God pleasure. That is the bedrock under the whole psalm - not a grudging deity who must be talked into helping, but a God who genuinely takes joy in the good of those who are His. David is not trying to twist God's arm. He is appealing to a God whose own pleasure runs in exactly the direction David is praying.
The psalm that began in a courtroom ends in a sanctuary. Its very last line is pure praise: And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise all the day long. Trace the whole arc one more time. It opened with plead my cause - a man under attack, hemmed in by liars, crying for a defender. It travels through fierce petitions, raw betrayal, the long ache of how long, the bold summons for God to awake. And where does it land? Not on the downfall of his enemies. Not even on his own rescue, strictly speaking. It lands on thy righteousness and thy praise - on God's character and God's glory - rehearsed by a tongue that will not stop, all the day long. This is the final proof that David never wanted revenge; he wanted vindication, and beyond vindication he wanted God. The endpoint of all his suffering, the thing the whole storm was driving toward, is a mouth full of praise that never runs dry. The man who handed his cause to God at the start receives, at the end, the only reward that outlasts every enemy: a heart so taken with the righteousness of God that praising Him becomes the steady occupation of every hour.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Psalm 35 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for the legal verb rib (v. 1, “to plead, to contend a case”), for chinnam (vv. 7, 19, “without cause, for nothing”), and for yeshu'ah (v. 3, “salvation”), the word God speaks into the singer's soul.
- Psalm 35 ↔ John 15 · the Passion narrativesIntertextual BibleTraces the verbal threads tying Psalm 35's hate me without a cause (v. 19) to John 15:25, where Jesus applies the line to Himself, and its false witnesses (v. 11) to the false testimony at His trial in the Passion accounts of Matthew and Mark.
- Psalm 35 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Psalm 35 - the military imagery of the opening appeal, the legal framing of plead my cause, the difficult force of the imprecations, and the way verses 13-14 describe the singer's prior kindness to the very people now turned against him.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Plead My Cause
- Exodus 15:11Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness?The song David’s bones cry out in verse 10 - Israel’s ancient wonder at the incomparable 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.The New Testament posture behind verse 1 - handing the case to God rather than taking revenge.
- Isaiah 12:2Behold, God is my salvation... for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation.The cry of verse 3 answered - God Himself becoming the salvation the soul longs to hear named.
- Psalm 7:1-2Save me from all them that persecute me... lest he tear my soul like a lion.The same plea of an innocent man hunted by enemies, committing his cause to the righteous Judge.
Evil for Good
- Matthew 26:59-60The chief priests... sought false witness against Jesus... yea, though many false witnesses came, yet found they none.The false witnesses of verse 11 rising again at the trial of the truly innocent One.
- Luke 23:34Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.David’s love for his enemies (vv. 13-14) carried to its furthest reach on the cross.
- Psalm 109:4-5For my love they are my adversaries... they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love.The same wound as verse 12 - kindness repaid with hatred, love answered by betrayal.
- 1 John 2:1If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.David asked God to plead his cause; in Christ the falsely accused gain an Advocate of their own.
Hated Without a Cause
- John 15:25But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.Jesus takes verse 19 onto His own lips - the hatred without a cause fulfilled in His Passion.
- 1 Peter 2:23Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again... but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously.The posture of verses 22-24 perfected - the wronged One committing His cause to the righteous Judge.
- Romans 12:17Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.The refusal to repay evil that undergirds the whole psalm - the wrong handed to God, not avenged.
- Psalm 37:5-6Commit thy way unto the LORD... and he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light.The vindication David asks for in verse 24 - God Himself bringing the innocent cause to light.