Psalms 60:9–10

In these two pivotal verses, the psalmist pivots from a recollection of God's sovereign promises over the nations (vv. 6–8) to a raw, urgent cry of dependence and bewilderment. Verse 9 asks who is powerful enough to lead Israel into the fortified enemy city — implying no merely human champion can do so. Verse 10 confronts God directly with the apparent contradiction between His covenant promises and the bitter experience of military defeat and abandonment. Together they form a hinge between confident proclamation and anguished petition, modeling the honest, persevering prayer of a people who refuse to abandon God even when God seems to have abandoned them.

Verse 9 — "Who will bring me into the strong city?"

The "strong city" (Hebrew ʿîr mibṣār, literally "city of fortification") almost certainly refers to Petra, the rock-hewn Edomite capital also called Bozrah — the same Edom whose subjugation God had just proclaimed in v. 8: "Over Edom I cast my shoe." Petra was legendarily impregnable, carved into rose-red cliffs. The rhetorical question is therefore not a mere logistical query; it is a theological challenge. Having heard God name Edom as His conquered territory, the psalmist now asks: but who will actually make that conquest happen on the ground? The shift from third person ("God has spoken," v. 6) to first person ("who will bring me") marks the transition from received revelation to lived reality. The psalmist stands between the word of God and the hard facts of warfare, and feels the distance acutely.

Crucially, the question is not answered explicitly. It hangs in the air, a space deliberately left open — a rhetorical device that forces the reader toward the only possible conclusion: only the God who promised can be the one who fulfills. No human general, no military alliance, no clever strategy suffices. The "strong city" thus becomes, in the psalm's architecture, the symbol of every obstacle that stands between God's declared will and its historical realization.

Verse 10 — "Haven't you, God, rejected us?"

This verse (Hebrew hălōʾ-ʾattāh ʾĕlōhîm zĕnaḥtānû, "Is it not You, O God, who have cast us off?") is one of Scripture's most striking examples of what scholars call lament as theological argument. The psalmist does not accuse God abstractly; he holds God's own earlier self-disclosure up against present experience and demands an accounting. The verb zānaḥ ("to reject," "to cast off") is a covenantal term — it describes the severing of a relational bond. Its appearance here is jarring precisely because it echoes the warnings of Deuteronomy: rejection is what happens when Israel abandons God. Yet here Israel uses it of God's apparent abandonment of them.

The second half — "You don't go out, O God, with our armies" — deepens the lament. The image of God going out with the armies (ṣěbāʾôt) is ancient Israelite holy-war theology: the LORD of Hosts marches at the vanguard of His people (cf. Numbers 10:35). To say He is not doing so is to say the cosmos has been turned upside down. Yet — and this is critical — the very act of bringing this complaint to God, rather than away from Him, is itself an act of faith. The psalmist does not curse God or defect to foreign gods; he argues God, which is the posture of the covenant partner who trusts the relationship is real enough to bear the weight of honest protest.

Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to these verses.

The Theology of Lament as Prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Psalms are the "masterwork of prayer in the Old Testament" and that in them, the People of God learn "to pray not only with words but with the whole heart" (CCC 2585–2586). Verses 9–10 exemplify what the Catechism calls the "battle of prayer" — the struggle against our own discouragement and the apparent silence of God (CCC 2725–2728). Far from treating complaint as faithlessness, Catholic tradition reads it as a form of fiducia (trust): only one who genuinely believes in God's covenant faithfulness would bring such a charge to Him at all.

Christological Fulfillment. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, reads the entire psalm in the voice of the totus Christus — the whole Christ, Head and Body. For Augustine, the "rejection" of v. 10 is the cry of the Church suffering in history, united to the cry of Christ on the Cross. The "strong city" is the human heart hardened by sin, which only Christ the conqueror can breach. Pope John Paul II, in Novo Millennio Ineunte (§20), echoes this Augustinian tradition when he reflects on Gethsemane and Golgotha as the place where God enters the deepest human darkness precisely in order to redeem it.

Anagogical Sense. The "strong city" of Edom, read anagogically (toward final eschatological realities), points to the New Jerusalem. The question of v. 9 is ultimately answered by the Book of Revelation: the Lamb who was slain has conquered, and the gates of the holy city stand open (Rev 21:25). The Church's hope is not in human military power but in the Parousia of Christ, who leads His people to final victory.

Contemporary Catholics know exactly what it feels like to stand between God's promises and a reality that seems to contradict them — a diagnosis, a marriage in crisis, a child who has left the faith, a Church wounded by scandal. Psalm 60:9–10 gives us permission to name that gap honestly before God without pretending it away.

Practically: When you find yourself asking "where is God in this?", resist the temptation to manufacture a pious answer too quickly. The psalmist's raw question — "Haven't You rejected us?" — is a form of prayer, not a failure of faith. Bring the contradiction to God explicitly in your daily prayer: name what He has promised, name what you are experiencing, and hold them both before Him.

For Eucharistic spirituality: At Mass, when we pray "deliver us from evil" and "protect us from all anxiety," we are doing exactly what the psalmist does — reminding God of His covenant in the teeth of experience. The Eucharist is God's answer to the question of v. 9: Christ Himself has entered the "strong city" of death and returned victorious. We receive that victory sacramentally even while we await its full historical unfolding.