Catholic Commentary
The Apparent Prosperity of the Wicked (Part 1)
4For there are no struggles in their death, but their strength is firm.5They are free from burdens of men, neither are they plagued like other men.6Therefore pride is like a chain around their neck. Violence covers them like a garment.7Their eyes bulge with fat. Their minds pass the limits of conceit.8They scoff and speak with malice. In arrogance, they threaten oppression.9They have set their mouth in the heavens. Their tongue walks through the earth.10Therefore their people return to them, and they drink up waters of abundance.11They say, “How does God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?”
Psalms 73:4–11 describes the apparent prosperity and moral corruption of the wicked, who die peacefully, escape human suffering, and wear pride as an ornament while their moral blindness grows. Asaph observes that the wicked attract followers through their unchecked arrogance, blasphemously exalt themselves to heaven's level, and spread practical atheism by living as though God is ignorant or powerless.
The wicked prosper without struggle because they have learned to mistake the absence of immediate punishment for the presence of divine approval.
Commentary
Psalms 73:4 — "For there are no struggles in their death" The Hebrew ḥarṣubbôt (translated "struggles" or "pangs") refers to the bonds or convulsions of dying. Asaph's bitter observation is that the wicked seem to die as they lived — unbothered. They escape the deathbed anguish, the prolonged suffering, the visible judgment that the righteous might expect God to impose. This was a profound stumbling block in ancient Israelite theology, where visible prosperity and peaceful death were often read as signs of divine favor (cf. Deut 28). The psalmist is not asserting a universal fact but voicing a perception — a dangerous one — that disorder has overtaken the moral universe.
Psalms 73:5 — "They are free from burdens of men" The wicked are exempt from the common lot of humanity: labor, sorrow, oppression, the grinding weight of a life lived in fear of God and consequence. The word 'āmāl ("burdens" or "trouble") echoes the vocabulary of human toil inherited from the Fall (Gen 3:17). That the wicked seem immune to this is deeply disorienting: they have, apparently, bypassed the penalty imposed at Eden.
Psalms 73:6 — "Pride is like a chain around their neck" A brilliant and biting image. ʿănāqâ (a necklace or chain) is ordinarily an ornament of honor (cf. Prov 1:9). But here pride (gāʾăwâ) has become their jewelry — their defining adornment. What should be a mark of shame has become, in their eyes, a trophy. St. Augustine, commenting on this psalm, notes that the wicked wear their vice as an ornament, inverting the moral order entirely: "They are not ashamed of their pride; they glory in it." The "garment of violence" in the second half of the verse compounds this: cruelty is not hidden but displayed as clothing — their public identity.
Psalms 73:7 — "Their eyes bulge with fat" A viscerally physical image of excess and moral obesity. The eyes are the windows of the soul in biblical anthropology; eyes "covered with fat" (ḥēleb) suggest a soul so gorged on earthly abundance that it can no longer perceive spiritual reality. The Septuagint renders this as their iniquity "proceeding from fatness," linking physical excess to moral blindness. This anticipates the New Testament warning about the heart grown "dull" (Matt 13:15) and Ezekiel's condemnation of Israel's spiritual torpor.
Psalms 73:8 — "They scoff and speak with malice" The Hebrew yāmîqû ("mock" or "scoff") and yĕdabbĕrû bĕrāʿ ("speak wickedness") describe speech weaponized against the vulnerable. Scoffing is, in the wisdom tradition, the terminal stage of moral corruption (cf. Prov 1:22; Ps 1:1). They have moved beyond indifference to active contempt — contempt for the suffering, the righteous, and ultimately for God. "Oppression" (ʿōšeq) from on high: they speak of crushing others from a position of assumed security.
Psalms 73:9 — "They have set their mouth in the heavens" This is the theological climax of the catalogue. Their mouths reach to heaven — claiming a domain that belongs only to God — while their tongues strut through the earth. The image is that of a figure who has declared themselves a rival to the divine. The Fathers saw in this verse a prophetic portrait of all human hubris, from Babel (Gen 11) to the Antichrist. Their speech is not merely arrogant; it is deicidal in aspiration — they seek to occupy the space of God.
Psalms 73:10–11 — "Therefore their people return to them… 'How does God know?'" The conclusion to the observable portrait: the wicked attract followers. Their apparent impunity becomes socially contagious. "How does God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?" — this is not the theoretical atheism of the philosopher but the practical atheism of the comfortable: a functionally godless life dressed in the rhetoric of divine ignorance. The Catechism calls this "practical atheism" — living as if God did not exist, not necessarily denying Him in the abstract (CCC 2125–2126). The scoffers of verse 8 have become the theologians of verse 11, and they are recruiting.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to this passage. First, the Church's teaching on concupiscence and the disordering of the will (CCC 405, 1264) illuminates what Asaph is describing: the wicked are not simply fortunate — they are in the grip of a disordered freedom that mistakes the absence of immediate punishment for divine approval. Their "fat eyes" and pride-chains are symptoms of the soul turned in on itself (homo incurvatus in se), a condition Augustine diagnosed as the root of all sin.
Second, Catholic theodicy, rooted in Job, the wisdom literature, and Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 87), insists that temporal prosperity is not the measure of divine favor. Thomas explicitly teaches that God permits the wicked to prosper in this life both to allow for conversion and to make their final judgment more manifest. The apparent peace of the wicked in verse 4 is therefore, in Aquinas's framework, not evidence of divine indifference but of divine patience.
Third, the patristic tradition saw in verses 9–11 a typological portrait of all who set their will against God — from Pharaoh to Herod to the persecutors of the early Church. St. John Chrysostom read this psalm as a meditation on the martyrs' temptation: to abandon fidelity when the godless seem to win.
Finally, the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes 19) identifies practical atheism — the lived denial of God's relevance — as one of the gravest spiritual crises of the modern age. The wicked of Psalm 73:11 are its ancient archetype.
For Today
A contemporary Catholic reading these verses should resist the temptation to locate the "wicked" only in some distant other. The psalm's power is that Asaph nearly became one of them — he almost succumbed to the logic of verse 11 himself (v. 2–3). The real spiritual danger today is not theoretical atheism but the subtle drift into practical atheism: the professional who cuts ethical corners because the honest colleague is passed over; the Catholic who quietly abandons Sunday Mass because the "successful" people around them clearly don't bother; the young person who concludes that integrity is economically irrational. Psalm 73's verses 4–11 are an invitation to name this temptation clearly, before it metastasizes. The Examen prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola is one concrete Catholic tool for exactly this: daily, honest examination of where we have begun to reason like the scoffers of verse 11 — measuring God's activity by what is immediately visible and profitable.
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