Catholic Commentary
Imprecation Against Enemies
2Let them be disappointed and confounded who seek my soul. Let those who desire my ruin be turned back in disgrace.3Let them be turned because of their shame who say, “Aha! Aha!”
Psalms 70:2–3 contains a petition in which the Psalmist asks God to confound and shame those who seek to harm him, with their own malice becoming the instrument of their downfall. The passage employs passive constructions to emphasize God's role as the sole active agent of justice, leaving no room for personal vengeance.
When you pray for God to confound your enemies, you're not seeking revenge—you're betting everything on the fact that injustice will collapse under its own weight.
Catholic tradition offers a uniquely layered reading of the imprecatory psalms that rescues them from both sentimental dismissal and moralistic embarrassment. The Catechism explicitly affirms that the Psalter remains the Church's own prayer (CCC 2585–2589), and the Liturgy of the Hours preserves imprecatory verses precisely because they voice authentic human experience before God.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 25, a. 6) clarifies that wishing harm to enemies is licit when directed not at persons as such, but at the evil in them — the sin, the malice, the project of destruction — and when the intent is justice, not personal malice. This is exactly what Psalm 70:2–3 models: the grammar itself ensures God remains the subject, the Psalmist a petitioner.
Pope John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (§43), called Catholics to the "school of the saints" in prayer — to pray with the full range of human emotion, including anguish and protest. These verses exemplify precisely that honest prayer which does not sanitize suffering into piety.
Furthermore, the Church Fathers — especially Origen — read the "enemies" of these psalms as demonic powers (cf. Eph 6:12), and this demonological interpretation safeguards charity toward human persons while preserving the psalm's force as spiritual warfare. The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (§12) affirms that the full meaning of Scripture includes typological senses discovered in the light of Christ, which is exactly how the Church unlocks these verses in her liturgy.
Contemporary Catholics often feel awkward praying the imprecatory psalms, tempted to skip them as spiritually "unsafe." Yet these verses offer two concrete gifts for today. First, they model the honest externalization of anguish: when enemies — whether a workplace betrayal, a family rupture, a public attack on one's faith — feel overwhelming, these words give the believer permission to bring that raw experience directly to God rather than suppressing it in performative calm. The prayer does not license bitterness; it redirects it upward.
Second, read in the context of spiritual warfare, these verses are a powerful daily prayer against the interior enemies of the soul: pride, despair, and the subtle confusions that "seek the soul" through temptation. A Catholic could legitimately pray Psalm 70:2–3 each morning as a declaration that whatever forces — spiritual or circumstantial — conspire against their growth in holiness will be confounded by God's providential care. This transforms the imprecation from a relic of ancient conflict into a living act of theological hope.
Commentary
Verse 2: "Let them be disappointed and confounded who seek my soul."
The Hebrew verb underlying "disappointed" (bōsh) carries the sense of being put to shame, of having one's confidence exposed as hollow — a particularly weighty concept in the ancient Near Eastern honor-shame culture in which the Psalms were composed. Those "who seek my soul" (mevaqshê nafshî) are not merely social rivals or critics; the phrase denotes active, mortal enemies pursuing the Psalmist's very life-breath (nephesh). The plea is not that the enemies suffer arbitrary punishment, but that their predatory project collapse in on itself — that the very scheming by which they hope to triumph becomes their humiliation.
The structure is important: the Psalmist does not say "let me defeat them" but "let them be confounded" — a passive construction that implicitly places God as the active agent. The Psalmist removes himself from the role of avenger. This is precisely what the Catechism of the Catholic Church, following St. Augustine, recognizes as the proper orientation of imprecatory prayer: it is not hatred of persons, but an appeal to God to vindicate justice. The "enemies" in this spiritual reading become the embodiment of evil forces, not merely individual humans (CCC 2091).
Verse 3: "Let them be turned because of their shame."
The verb "turned" (shûv in its causative sense) evokes a reversal — a routing, a being driven back from their advance. Critically, the cause of their turning is "their shame" (bōshtām), a word that echoes verse 2 and creates an intensifying parallelism. The double use of the shame-root is no accident: what the enemies intended to heap upon the innocent becomes the very thing that overtakes themselves. This is the lex talionis not of personal revenge but of divine moral order: the pit dug for another becomes one's own trap (cf. Ps 7:15–16).
Typological and Spiritual Senses
St. Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos identifies the Psalmist throughout the Psalter as a figura Christi — a type of Christ — and these verses as the voice of Christ's human soul crying out during the Passion. Those "seeking his soul" find their fulfillment in the chief priests, scribes, and the mob crying "Crucify him!" Yet the Cross becomes the great reversal: the very death the enemies engineer becomes their confusion, for the resurrection exposes their malice as powerless against divine life. The shame of the Cross (Heb 12:2), which Christ "endured" and "despised," is simultaneously the shame of those who engineered it.
By extension, these are the prayers of the Church — the Corpus Christi extended through time — praying in her members who are persecuted (Col 1:24). The "enemies" in the spiritual sense are also the interior powers of sin and the demonic, which "seek the soul" of every baptized Christian. The prayer becomes eschatological: a cry for the final confounding of every power that sets itself against God's reign.