Catholic Commentary
The Great Imprecation: Curses Against the Wicked (Part 1)
6Set a wicked man over him. Let an adversary stand at his right hand.7When he is judged, let him come out guilty. Let his prayer be turned into sin.8Let his days be few. Let another take his office.9Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.10Let his children be wandering beggars. Let them be sought from their ruins.11Let the creditor seize all that he has. Let strangers plunder the fruit of his labor.12Let there be no one to extend kindness to him, neither let there be anyone to have pity on his fatherless children.13Let his posterity be cut off. In the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Psalms 109:6–13 contains imprecatory curses invoking divine judgment against an enemy, including a wicked judge, legal condemnation, shortened life, fatherless children, loss of property, and severing from covenant community protection. The curses draw on Old Testament legal logic and communal values, using the imagery of orphans, debtors, and social displacement to express the ultimate spiritual consequence of rejecting divine mercy and covenant loyalty.
The psalmist brings his unedited rage before God, turning it into justice rather than poison—and the Church has always read this as prophecy, not as permission for personal revenge.
Commentary
Psalms 109:6 — "Set a wicked man over him" The Hebrew rāšāʿ ("wicked man") is the term used throughout the Psalter for the morally corrupt adversary of the righteous. The psalmist is not simply asking for a bad judge; he is invoking the logic of lex talionis in its most dramatic form: let a man whose very life has been an instrument of wickedness toward others now find himself subject to that same wickedness from above. The verb hap̄qaḏ ("set," "appoint") carries covenantal weight — God is the one who appoints rulers and judges (cf. Rom 13:1), and to invoke this appointment of a wicked overseer is to ask God to withdraw the shield of providential protection. In the ancient Near Eastern legal setting, a śāṭān (accuser) standing at one's right hand (v. 6b in some versifications) was a formal legal figure in the heavenly court — an adversary whose task was prosecution, not mere slander.
Psalms 109:7 — "When he is judged, let him come out guilty" The word rāšāʿ recurs here as a verdict term. In Hebrew jurisprudence, a court declared a man rāšāʿ (guilty/wicked) or ṣaddîq (righteous/innocent). To be declared rāšāʿ before God is the ultimate judicial catastrophe. The second half — "let his prayer become sin" — intensifies this: even his cry for mercy becomes an act of presumption or hypocrisy, unaccepted before the throne because it is not grounded in true repentance. This reflects the theology of Proverbs 28:9: "If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination."
Psalms 109:8 — "Let his days be few" This is the verse cited directly in Acts 1:20, where Peter applies it to Judas Iscariot after his betrayal and death. The apostolic community read this not as vindictiveness but as divinely revealed prophetic pattern: the one who betrays the anointed of God forfeits the covenantal blessings of long life (cf. the Fifth Commandment's promise). "Let another take his office" follows in the full verse — the word peqūddâ ("office," "position") is the same root used for priestly appointment, deepening the Judas typology.
Psalms 109:9 — "Let his children be fatherless" In the ancient world, to be fatherless (yātôm) was among the most desperate of social conditions. The widow and orphan were paradigmatic cases of the vulnerable whom Israel's covenant law expressly commanded to protect (Ex 22:22–24; Deut 27:19). The psalmist invokes this curse not out of hatred for innocent children per se, but because in the corporate and dynastic worldview of the Old Testament, a man's legacy was bound up in his offspring. The loss of covenant protection extends generationally.
Psalms 109:10 — "Let his children be wandering beggars" The image of children forced to nûdû ("wander," "roam") echoes the curse of Cain (Gen 4:12) — a severing from the stability of land, community, and divine protection. They seek bread "from their ruined homes" (the Hebrew is difficult but suggests displacement from the ancestral household). This continues the communal/corporate dimension: the destruction of the bêt-āb (father's house) is total.
Verses 11–12 — Creditor, Stranger, Kindness Nōšeh ("creditor," "one who lends at interest") represented a legally entitled but socially feared figure. To have the creditor seize everything recalled Levitical warnings about debt-slavery (Lev 25:39–40). Verse 12 deepens the desolation: ḥesed — the great covenant word meaning steadfast love, loyalty, mercy — is withheld. No one shows him ḥesed. In a world defined by covenant solidarity, to be cut off from ḥesed is to be cut off from the human community itself. The orphaned children find no ḥōnēn (one who is gracious to them) — even this elemental human compassion is absent.
Psalms 109:13 — "Let his posterity be cut off" Aḥărîṯ ("posterity," "future," "end") is a pregnant word: it encompasses both descendants and destiny. To have one's name "blotted out" in a subsequent generation (baddôr haššēnî, "in the second generation") is the ultimate negation of the Abrahamic promise of innumerable descendants. The name (šēm) in Hebrew thought was the bearer of identity and memory. To be nameless is to be as though one had never existed — the precise opposite of God's covenant promise to make Abraham's name great (Gen 12:2).
Typological and Spiritual Senses The Fathers, following Peter's lead in Acts 1:20, read this passage Christologically and ecclesially. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 108) identifies the speaker as Christ Himself — not expressing personal hatred, but voicing on behalf of the Body the just consequences of betrayal and apostasy. What appears as vengeance is, on the spiritual level, the self-chosen consequence of rejecting Mercy Incarnate. The curses are not arbitrary cruelties but the logical unfolding of a life that refused ḥesed and thus forfeits ḥesed in return.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition brings a uniquely layered hermeneutic to this most difficult of passages. The Catechism teaches that "the Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture" and that its texts, even the darkest, "bear witness to the living God" (CCC 121–122). The imprecatory psalms are not an embarrassment to be excised but a school of total honesty before God.
Augustine's Christological Reading: In his Enarrationes in Psalmos, Augustine argues that the whole Psalm is spoken in persona Christi — the Head speaking through and for the Body. The curses express not private revenge but the prophetic declaration of what happens to those who, like Judas, reject the covenant of love while pretending to observe it. The curse is the consequence they choose for themselves; God simply confirms it.
The Problem of Imprecation and Catholic Moral Theology: Vatican II's Dei Verbum §15 acknowledges that the Old Testament contains "things imperfect and provisional," not yet fully illuminated by the New. The Church does not teach that Christians should pray these verses literally against personal enemies — indeed, Christ's command to "love your enemies" (Mt 5:44) represents a novum that transforms how we read them. The Liturgy of the Hours, in its reform following Vatican II, deliberately omits the most severe imprecatory verses from public recitation, not to deny their canonical authority but to acknowledge the pastoral prudence required in their use.
Thomas Aquinas on Imprecation: Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 25, a. 6) distinguishes between desiring evil for a person qua person (which is always wrong) and lamenting the effects of sin and praying that justice be served on those who harm the innocent (qua sinner). The psalmist's prayer, properly understood, belongs to the second category.
The Catechism on Justice: CCC 2302–2306 teaches that legitimate defense, the restraint of evildoers, and the pursuit of justice are not incompatible with Christian charity. The curses of Psalm 109 voice the cry of every victim who has no other recourse than God, and Catholic social teaching consistently affirms that God hears this cry (cf. CCC 2448).
For Today
Contemporary Catholic readers encounter Psalm 109 most directly in two settings: personal suffering at the hands of a genuinely wicked person, and the Church's liturgical life. For those who have been betrayed by someone in power — abused, defrauded, slandered, or systematically oppressed — these verses offer something no therapeutic language can: permission to bring the full, unedited weight of one's outrage before God. The Catechism teaches that "prayer is the life of the new heart" (CCC 2697), and authentic prayer begins in truth, not in sanitized emotion.
The practical invitation is this: do not perform calmness before God that you do not feel. Bring the cry. Then, crucially, do not stop there. The Psalm's own canonical context — and especially Christ's citation of Ps 109:1 in the Synoptics — points the prayer toward entrusting judgment to the One who judges justly (1 Pet 2:23). This is not passive resignation; it is the active surrender of vengeance to the only Just Judge, which simultaneously frees the pray-er from the spiritual poison of personal vindictiveness.
For Catholics engaged in advocacy for justice — in legal, social, or ecclesial contexts — these verses legitimize the demand that wrongdoing have consequences, that accountability structures exist, and that the powerful not escape the weight of what they have done to the vulnerable.
Cross-References