Psalms 58

Verse-by-verse explanation

1. Psalms 58:1The word translated "congregation" comes from a difficult Hebrew term, which other versions render as "rulers" or even "gods" — perhaps an ironic way of addressing human judges who were supposed to represent divine justice but fail at it.
2. Psalms 58:2"Ye weigh the violence" uses the image of the marketplace scale: it suggests these judges calculate injustice the way someone measures out goods, a premeditated violence, not a passing fit of rage.
3. Psalms 58:3"From the womb" is Hebrew poetic exaggeration, not a literal statement about newborn babies. The idea is that the tendency toward evil in certain people seems so deeply rooted that it sounds as if it had been there since birth.
4. Psalms 58:4Comparing the speech of the wicked to serpent's venom turns words into something physically lethal: just as venom kills by degrees, the wickedness of these people works unseen, yet destroys all the same.
5. Psalms 58:5The image of the snake charmer was a well-known practice in the ancient Near East, attempting to calm snakes with music. Comparing the enemies to a viper that stops its ears is saying they are deaf to any appeal to reason, no matter how skillful.
6. Psalms 58:6"Break their teeth" is an imprecation, a direct plea for punishment against enemies. The image comes from wild animals: pulling a lion's teeth leaves it unable to do harm, so the request is for the enemies to lose their power to wound.
7. Psalms 58:7Asking for enemies to "melt away as waters" is wishing they vanish without a trace, the way water disappears into dry ground. Arrows broken in pieces are the image of an enemy already disarmed.
8. Psalms 58:8"That they may not see the sun" is one of the harshest images in the Psalter, comparing the enemies to something that never actually came to exist. It belongs to the same genre of shocking imprecation found in other laments — the outcry of someone suffering injustice, not a model prayer to imitate literally.
9. Psalms 58:9This is one of the hardest verses in the Psalter to translate: the image seems to be a pot set over thorns that haven't even caught fire yet — a way of saying the punishment will arrive fast, before their plans have time to "cook."
10. Psalms 58:10It is a hyperbolic image of total victory over evil, common in the war poetry of the ancient Near East, not a literal instruction about washing one's feet in "the blood of the wicked." The point of the psalm is to affirm that there is a justice finally vindicated, after so much apparent impunity.
11. Psalms 58:11The psalm closes with the conclusion anyone would draw upon seeing the wicked punished: the certainty that there really is justice and a God who judges what happens on earth, not an indifferent world.