Catholic Commentary
Imprecation Against the Treacherous
15Let death come suddenly on them. Let them go down alive into Sheol. For wickedness is among them, in their dwelling.
Psalm 55:15 expresses the psalmist's desperate prayer for sudden divine judgment against a betrayer—likely David's unfaithful counselor Ahithophel. The verse invokes covenant justice, asking God to strike down the treacherous friend immediately, reflecting the Hebrew understanding that sudden death signifies divine judgment rather than gradual punishment.
When a trusted friend betrays you, God gives you permission to bring the raw death-wish inside that wound directly to Him—without acting on it.
Is this truly a prayer? The imprecatory psalms trouble modern readers, but the verse's force lies in its honesty before God. The psalmist does not take vengeance into his own hands (cf. Romans 12:19); he brings his rage, grief, and desire for justice directly to God. This is itself an act of faith — a refusal to let injustice have the final word while surrendering the outcome to the divine Judge.
Catholic tradition has never excised the imprecatory psalms from the liturgy or from theology, though it has always read them through a carefully calibrated hermeneutic. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the prayer of the Psalms is always sustained by praise" (CCC §2589) and that the Psalter is "the masterwork of prayer in the Old Testament" (CCC §2585) — yet the Church is clear-eyed about their disturbing passages.
St. Augustine provides the foundational Catholic interpretive key: the enemies cursed in the imprecatory psalms are, in their deepest sense, our vices and the spiritual forces of evil — not individual human beings who are always objects of charity. In Enarrationes in Psalmos 54, Augustine writes that we may wish death upon our sins even as we desire the conversion of sinners. This is not a license for hatred of persons but a cry for the destruction of evil itself.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.25, a.6) further clarifies that imprecations in Scripture function in one of three legitimate ways: as prophecy (foretelling what will befall the wicked), as expression of justice (affirming that evil deserves punishment), or as desire directed toward the vice rather than the person. None of these constitutes sinful hatred.
Pope John Paul II, in his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (2001), reminds us that the Psalms teach us to bring our whole humanity — including its darkest impulses — before God. The imprecatory psalms, properly prayed within the Church's liturgy, are a school of radical honesty before God, not a manual for vengeance. The Liturgy of the Hours, while omitting the most severe imprecatory verses from the Office, preserves their theological witness in study and private prayer precisely because they are the inspired Word of God and speak to real human suffering.
Every Catholic who has experienced betrayal by a trusted friend, a fellow parishioner, a spiritual mentor, or a family member knows the interior violence that Psalm 55:15 gives voice to. The temptation is either to suppress that anger (pretending to a serenity we do not feel) or to act on it (seeking revenge). The psalm offers a third way: bring it to God, raw and unfiltered.
Concretely, a Catholic today can use this verse as a gateway prayer in moments of deep hurt — not to genuinely wish death on another person, but to name the death-wish that lives inside every serious wound: the desire for this evil to be annihilated. Pray it aloud. Let God hear the ugliness. Then, in the manner of the psalm itself (which swings in verses 16–23 toward trust: "Cast your burden on the Lord"), allow the imprecation to give way to surrender.
This is also a passage for spiritual direction. Directors working with those who have suffered abuse, spiritual manipulation, or betrayal by Church figures should not rush past this verse. It validates the victim's experience with the full authority of inspired Scripture, while channeling it toward God rather than toward destructive action.
Commentary
Verse 15 in Context: "Let death come suddenly on them."
The Hebrew underlying this verse (יַשִּׁי מָוֶת, yashshi mavet, or in some manuscript traditions נָשָׁא שָׁאוֹל, "let Sheol take them") carries an urgency bordering on desperation. The Septuagint renders it ἐλθέτω θάνατος ἐπ᾽ αὐτούς — "let death come upon them" — a formulaic curse echoing the solemn imprecations of the ancient Near Eastern treaty tradition, where violation of covenant loyalty (hesed) called forth the curses of the covenant itself. This is not arbitrary hatred; it is the voice of one who has watched the sacred bonds of friendship and oath shattered.
Who speaks, and to whom? Tradition, both Jewish and Christian, identifies the speaker as David — most probably in connection with the betrayal of Ahithophel, his trusted counselor who defected to Absalom (2 Samuel 15–17). Psalm 55:13-14, immediately preceding, makes this explicit: "It is not an enemy who taunts me… but you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend." Verse 15, then, is not an outburst against a stranger but a lamentation against a covenant-breaker — someone who walked with the psalmist "in the house of God" (v.14). The depth of the imprecation is proportional to the depth of the intimacy betrayed.
"Let death come suddenly on them" — The adverb of suddenness (peta'im, "suddenly" in the fuller Hebrew text) is critical. It is not a measured judicial sentence the psalmist demands, but an immediate, overwhelming divine intervention. In the Hebrew moral universe, sudden death could be understood as divine judgment — as in the fate of Korah (Numbers 16), who was swallowed suddenly by the earth. The psalmist is essentially asking God to act as the ultimate enforcer of covenant justice, not the psalmist himself.
The descent to Sheol: Many commentators note that the verse continues in some traditions: "Let them go down to Sheol alive" — a phrase mirroring the punishment of Korah's company. Sheol here is not fully hell in the New Testament sense, but the realm of the dead, a place of divine exclusion. To go there "alive" — with full consciousness of one's guilt — intensifies the image of just retribution.
The Spiritual-Typological Sense: The Church Fathers heard in this psalm not only David's voice but Christ's. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, reads Psalm 55 as spoken by Christ the Head together with His Body, the Church — and the betrayer is unmistakably Judas. The imprecation against the treacherous friend then becomes, for Augustine, not a personal vendetta but a prophetic utterance: the Word of God pronouncing the consequence of freely chosen betrayal. Judas went to his "own place" (Acts 1:25) — a sudden death, self-inflicted, that the Church has always read in the shadow of this psalm.