Like the saints of Revelation 6, Christians today are free to desire and invite the vengeance of God. Contrary to popular opinion, Romans 12:19 does not prohibit Christians from desiring vengeance—it commands them to leave it to the wrath of God.

Imagine: You are the leader of a small Iranian house church. The police have just arrested, tortured, and interrogated someone from a sister house church, and there are rumors that you have been named, along with your spouse and children. Though you are accustomed to fear and anxiety, the paranoia is now full-blown. You experience severe mood swings, from profound grief to seething anger. And you’re not the only one, you’ve got a church to pastor. Here is the question: what resources has God given you to help you through your suffering?

A big part of that answer includes the Psalter, the prayers of God’s people. In the case of poems like Ps. 23, Christian appropriation is fairly straightforward. But what of the so-called imprecatory Psalms, where the Psalmists invoke curses and judgment on their enemies? For example, consider the final six verses of Ps. 139:

^[19] Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
O men of blood, depart from me!
^[20] They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain.
^[21] Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
^[22] I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
^[23] Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
^[24] And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting! (ESV)

May Christians pray such passages today? Could you, in the scenario above, use such a Psalm to vent your rage at the injustice of evil? We commonly read or hear that Christians should not. For example, Bruce Waltke argues that the imprecatory Psalms are “inappropriate for the church” because “ultimate justice occurs in the eschaton” and we should be more focused on forgiving than condemning.¹ This approach has become attractive to modern evangelicals, finding endorsements in popular-level works such as Ian Vaillancourt’s recent Treasuring the Psalms—overall, an excellent resource. The problem is that Waltke’s view has hermeneutical, historical, and theological problems. And the stakes are not small: while in the West, the Christian response to persecution is often a theoretical exercise, in other parts of the world it is viscerally practical.

In what follows, I would like to give some historical and theological context to imprecations and malediction as a form of speech, address some hermeneutical inconsistencies applied to these texts, and then make the case for Christian appropriation of these Psalms. The persecuted church needs all the help she can get in the face of violent evil, and the imprecatory Psalms are a gift to her from our Heavenly Father.

Putting Imprecations in Context

The imprecatory Psalms (those that invoke curses, calamity, or judgment) are often directly or indirectly tied to what may be called the “retribution principle”: those who are righteous should flourish, and those who are wicked should suffer, both in proportion to their virtue or vice.² Thus, the imprecations are, in one sense, prayers for the enforcement of the retribution principle: may the wicked get their just desserts. This was, however, not a distinctively Israelite impulse—the principle can be found throughout the literature of the Ancient Near East (ANE) and within the Mesopotamian religions, in particular. However, non-Israelite religious systems did not depend on the justice of the gods (for the gods could be wicked) but on mutual incentives: gods and people needed one another.³ Life outcomes were determined by one’s pleasing or offending of the gods, knowingly or not.⁴ In contrast, the Israelites believed God to be utterly just and without wants. It is his holiness, rather than his neediness, that informs the Biblical idea of retribution.

In another sense, imprecations are curses. Curses of many kinds can be found throughout ANE literature, nearly always invoking deities: “execration texts” that name specific enemies to be destroyed, treaty texts that specify punishments of disobedient vassals, and so on.⁵ However, where ANE curses (and blessings) were often understood to be magical formulas, Israelite versions of both were better understood as prayers to God in which the power resides in him and not the words themselves.⁶

We moderns are quite unaccustomed to imprecations and curses, though in that sense we are certainly a minority across human history. It has been observed that “malediction [the use of curses] was a speech-form in the ancient world . . . and a widespread phenomenon.”⁷ We can go further and suggest that malediction has likely been a part of social discourse universally until the modern world. As it existed throughout the ANE, so it also exists within the Hebrew OT and the Greek NT, which will be seen below. From councils of the early church, which addressed heretics with the biblical term anathema, to the fiery polemics of the Reformation, church history has been no stranger to curses. Modern aversion to this form of speech may have more to do with what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” than with Christian piety.

A Biblical Theology of Imprecations

Of the sixty laments in the Psalter, nearly all mention an enemy.⁸ Not only that, but a rich vocabulary—94 different words!—is used to describe them. “In fact, hatred, enmity, violence, retaliation, and even revenge are not sub-motifs in the psalter: they are substantive parts of it.”⁹ Though the Psalter is generally considered a book of praises, the enemies in the life of God’s people take an outsized role. The Psalmists do not merely lament over bad things; they cry out against bad people. Justice must be served.

An attentive Bible reader will readily note that justice is hardly a peripheral idea within the OT writings; justice and righteousness were central to the Israelite religion.¹⁰ Furthermore, they serve as the basis for scriptural judgment and imprecations: justice must be served because God is just. He is also coherent and unchanging—his attributes are not at odds with one another or expressions of various moods. In Jer. 9:24, God says, “I am Yahweh, showing steadfast love, justice and righteousness on the earth.” This view of God is at the heart of Ps. 139 and all other prayers like it: for the wicked to receive less than they deserve would compound the injustice and call into question the goodness, righteousness, and even love of God.

Outside of the Psalms and wisdom literature, imprecations are found in three OT contexts: sanctions for covenantal disobedience, prophetic judgments, and oath-taking.¹¹ The Mosaic law used curses as a warning against disobedience, which are detailed in Lev. 26 and Deut. 28-32. Doug Stuart identifies twenty-seven types of curses found in those passages that will come upon the Israelites if they violate the covenant but consolidates them with six terms: “defeat, disease, desolation, deprivation, deportation, and death.”¹² Throughout the Torah, those things and people that are meant to be “devoted to destruction” (e.g., the Canaanites in Deut. 20:16ff.) are often translated by the Septuagint as anathema, “cursed things.” This informs the context of Paul’s NT use of the word, to which we will return.

In the prophets, imprecations may be made against the nations, the wicked, and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, but it is always on account of disobedience before God, not because of personal injury experienced by the prophet. In the case of Israel and Judah, the breaking of the covenant is generally the basis for the curse. For example, Jeremiah 11:3 says, “You shall say to them, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Cursed be the man who does not hear the words of this covenant.” But even Gentile nations are guilty of disobeying God. Jeremiah 10:25 contains an imprecation on nations that do not know God because they have oppressed God’s people. Isaiah 13-23 includes a series of oracles against the nations, which is justified in 24:5: “The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.” Therefore, Israel may enjoy a special status within its covenant with God, but all of creation bears the responsibility of obedience to God, even if some are unaware of their obligation.

But what about the NT? It is not as different a picture as some might assume. Jesus himself issues a curse on a fig tree in Mk. 11:12-14 and Mt. 21:18-22. I share the view of many others that the fig tree represents Jerusalem and the religious establishment, which suggests that the curse is not merely for the tree. Fruitlessness and spiritual barrenness are the result of covenantal disobedience and thus become the subject of Christ’s malediction: “And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’” (Matt. 7:23).

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