Catholic Commentary
Separation from the Wicked
4I have not sat with deceitful men, neither will I go in with hypocrites.5I hate the assembly of evildoers, and will not sit with the wicked.
Psalms 26:4–5 expresses the psalmist's steadfast refusal to associate with deceitful and wicked people, having deliberately shaped his life through righteous associations. He moves from stating what he has not done (sitting with the dishonest) to declaring active hatred of the assembly of evildoers, using strong language that parallels God's own hatred of wickedness.
Holiness is not just what you avoid—it's who you refuse to dwell among, and every choice of company shapes your soul.
Catholic tradition reads these verses not as Pharisaical self-congratulation but as an expression of discretio — the virtue of spiritual discernment that orders one's life rightly. St. Augustine, commenting on Psalm 26, notes that the psalmist speaks here not in pride but in grief: to hate the assembly of evildoers is to mourn what they are missing, not to exult over them. Augustine connects this to 1 Corinthians 5:11, where Paul commands separation not from sinners in the world but from those who claim membership in the Church while living wickedly — a distinction the Catechism preserves in its teaching on scandal (CCC §2284–2287).
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Expositio in Psalmos, draws attention to the ordered nature of the psalmist's hatred: it is directed at the assembly and its spirit, not at the persons themselves, echoing the Church's perennial principle of hating the sin and loving the sinner. This is not mere sentiment but a disciplined spiritual posture.
The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium (§14) teaches that full incorporation into the Church requires a spirit that conforms to Christ's holiness. These verses implicitly support the Church's teaching on the "communion of saints" as a genuine moral and spiritual ecosystem: with whom we dwell shapes who we become. The Catechism (CCC §1827) reminds us that charity "bears all things" but does so from a place of ordered love — ordo amoris — which necessarily means some things are loved less, and some assemblies are refused entirely.
For a contemporary Catholic, these two verses challenge the cultural assumption that all association is morally neutral — that one can immerse oneself in any social environment, digital community, or friendship circle without spiritual consequence. The psalmist's example calls Catholics to examine concretely: Where do I habitually "sit"? Which online spaces, social groups, or media ecosystems am I dwelling in, and do they form me toward truth or toward shav' — emptiness and deceit?
This is not a call to sectarian withdrawal from society; the Church explicitly rejects that. But it is a call to what the spiritual tradition calls custody of the heart — an active, willed refusal to let the spirit of the world's "assembly of evildoers" set the terms of one's imagination, desires, and moral reasoning. Practically, this might mean leaving a social media group that traffics in contempt and mockery, stepping back from a friendship that consistently draws one toward dishonesty, or simply being honest about which voices one habitually allows to form one's conscience. The psalmist's "hate" is not passive: holiness has a shape, and that shape includes chosen absences as much as chosen presences.
Commentary
Psalms 26:4 — "I have not sat with deceitful men"
The Hebrew word translated "deceitful" (שָׁוְא, shav') carries a range of meanings: vanity, emptiness, falsehood, and worthlessness. It is the same root used in the Third Commandment's prohibition against taking the Lord's name "in vain" (Exodus 20:7). To "sit with" (yashav) in Hebrew idiom implies settled, habitual companionship — it denotes not a passing encounter but a deliberate, sustained fellowship. The psalmist is not claiming never to have been in the physical presence of dishonest people; he is asserting that he has never made a home among them spiritually or socially. The verb form is perfect, indicating a completed and consistent pattern of conduct. This opening line thus establishes the positive premise of the whole psalm (cf. v. 1–3): his life has been shaped by deliberate choices of association, not just by individual moral acts.
Psalms 26:5 — "I hate the assembly of evildoers"
The shift from the negative statement of verse 4 to the active declaration of "hate" is theologically significant. The Hebrew sane' (שָׂנֵא) is the same strong verb used to describe God's own hatred of wickedness (cf. Ps 5:5; Prov 6:16–19). The psalmist does not merely avoid the "assembly" (qahal) of evildoers — a word that in the Old Testament is often used for Israel's own sacred assembly before God — he actively detests it. The contrast with the qahal of the righteous, the assembly of worship, is pointed: there are two kinds of gatherings in human life, and one's deepest loyalties are revealed by where one chooses to sit. The word "evildoers" (mĕrēʿîm, from the root ra', evil) refers to those who persistently choose moral disorder.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological sense, these verses prefigure Christ's own radical separation from the spirit of the world, even as He entered fully into human society to heal and redeem it. Unlike the Pharisees' separation, which was external and self-aggrandizing, the psalmist's separation is interior and ordered toward God. In the allegorical reading favored by the Fathers, the "deceitful men" and "assembly of evildoers" foreshadow all that opposes the Kingdom — including heresy and schism, which form false assemblies that mimic the Church's qahal while rejecting its Lord. In the anagogical sense, this double refusal points to the final separation of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31–46), when those who have chosen God's assembly are ultimately and irrevocably distinguished from those who have not.