"Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" The line is from Psalm 137. It is one of the most disturbing sentences in Scripture, and Christians have been wrestling with it for two thousand years. It is also not alone. The Psalter contains roughly a dozen psalms — and prayers within other psalms — that openly call down God's judgment on enemies. Modern Christians often skip past these passages or let the lectionary quietly omit them. The ancient church did not.
Imprecatory psalms (from the Latin imprecatio, "calling down") are prayers asking God to act in judgment against the wicked. The most famous are Psalms 35, 58, 69, 109, and 137. They are blunt, sometimes brutal, and unmistakably part of Israel's worship. They raise a question Christians cannot honestly avoid: how should followers of Jesus, who told us to love our enemies, pray a Psalter that prays against them?
What the texts actually say
It helps to read these psalms before theorizing about them. Psalm 109 prays that an enemy's days be few, his children orphaned, his memory cut off. Psalm 58 calls for the wicked to be like stillborn children that never see the sun. Psalm 137 is a lament from Babylonian exile: the Israelites, hung up by their captors and mocked for their broken songs, end with the line about the rock.
Two things should be said before any reading is offered.
These prayers are addressed to God. They are not curses uttered directly at enemies. The supplicant hands the matter over to God rather than picking up the sword. That distinction matters morally and theologically, even if it does not dissolve every difficulty.
These psalms are saturated with covenant. Israel's enemies in these psalms are not generic foes; they are oppressors of God's covenant people, people who have shed innocent blood, mocked God himself, and arrogated to themselves the violence due only to divine judgment. The prayers presuppose a moral universe in which justice matters and unaddressed evil is itself an evil.
Three classical readings
The penitential reading. Some early commentators, including Augustine in places, read imprecatory psalms allegorically — the "enemies" are sin, vice, and the devil, and the violent imagery is the spiritual war the believer wages against them. There is something to this. Paul does spiritualize warfare in Ephesians 6. But the move can become evasion. The psalmist clearly has flesh-and-blood enemies in mind, and pretending otherwise lets us off the hook the text wants us on.
The covenant-justice reading. Most modern Old Testament scholarship reads these psalms in their covenantal frame. God promised in Genesis 12 to bless those who blessed Abraham's line and curse those who cursed it. The imprecatory psalms are not personal vendetta; they are appeals to God's covenant promises in extreme circumstances. The pray-er is not asking for permission to take revenge. He is asking God to act, precisely so that he himself does not have to. This is closer to what Paul says in Romans 12:19 ("Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord") than it first appears.
The honest-prayer reading. A third tradition, particularly developed by figures like Walter Brueggemann and C. S. Lewis, emphasizes that the Psalter is not a manual of prescribed feelings but a school of honest ones. Lewis, who admitted he found these psalms "devilish" on a first reading, came to see them as a refusal to lie before God. Better to bring rage into the sanctuary and lay it on the altar than to leave it festering at home.
How the New Testament handles them
Jesus did not retire the imprecatory psalms. He took them up himself.
The New Testament quotes imprecatory psalms in important places. Acts 1:20 cites Psalm 69 and Psalm 109 in connection with Judas. Romans 11:9-10 cites Psalm 69 against Israel's hardened opposition. Revelation 6:10 records the souls of the martyrs crying out, "How long, O Sovereign Lord, until you judge and avenge our blood?" — a prayer in the imprecatory tradition placed in the mouths of the saints in heaven. Jesus himself prays Psalm 22 from the cross — a psalm that moves from anguish through imprecation to vindication. He is not separating himself from the Psalter. He is praying it.
This complicates the easy contrast between the "loving" New Testament and the "vengeful" Old. The imprecatory psalms persist through the New Testament, mostly transposed: from prayers against earthly oppressors to prayers for God's final judgment on evil itself.
What Christians can do with these psalms
Several practices have helped Christians inhabit these texts without bypassing them.
Pray them honestly. When someone you love has been deeply wronged — a child abused, a friend betrayed by a system, a neighborhood broken by violence — the imprecatory psalms give a vocabulary that polite prayer does not. They permit you to bring the rage somewhere it can be held. Paradoxically, that often softens it. The psalmist's fury becomes the psalmist's release.
Pray them generously. The covenant-justice reading prevents these psalms from becoming little personal grievance lists. The proper objects of imprecatory prayer are oppressors, not annoyances. The proper occasions are atrocities, not slights. Reading the psalms within the long history of God's people — including those still being persecuted today — reframes them.
Pray them eschatologically. From the cross outward, Christians read all unresolved evil in light of the final judgment. The imprecatory psalms become, in this light, prayers for that final judgment to come — for the day when injustice will not stand. In the meantime, the same gospel that promises judgment also commands us to love our enemies and offers them mercy. The two are not contradictions but the structure of Christian hope.
Let them disturb you. Some readers in the early Eastern church suggested that these psalms work in part by their unbearableness. They are hard to pray, and that hardness is itself a sermon: human evil is real, divine justice is real, and shallow piety will not survive a serious encounter with either.
The honest grace
What the imprecatory psalms refuse to do is sentimentalize. They do not pretend that the pain of the persecuted is mild or that injustice sorts itself out without anyone's intervention. They take the shape of a fallen world and hand it back to God — bloodied, shocked, refusing to let go until something is done. That refusal is, in its way, a form of faith. The dark, awkward power of these psalms is that they will not let us forget it.
