Catholic Commentary
Intercession for the Captives and Justice Against the Oppressors
11Let the sighing of the prisoner come before you. According to the greatness of your power, preserve those who are sentenced to death.12Pay back to our neighbors seven times into their bosom their reproach with which they have reproached you, Lord.
Psalms 79:11–12 portrays the psalmist petitioning God to hear the groans of captive Israelites exiled in Babylon, presenting their suffering as a formal complaint before the divine court. The passage then shifts to demanding that God repay the surrounding nations sevenfold for their violence, entrusting full justice entirely to God rather than seeking personal vengeance.
The cry of the broken reaches God not automatically, but through the prayer of those who refuse to let the vulnerable be forgotten.
Catholic tradition has engaged these verses on multiple levels. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, reads the "prisoner" (son of death) as the human race itself, held captive under the sentence of original sin — making verse 11 a prayer that humanity's groaning, typified by the Babylonian exiles, would rise before God and elicit the Incarnation. Christ, he argues, is God's answer to the anqat of the human condition.
St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the imprecatory verses of the Psalms, distinguishes between desiderium vindictae (a desire for personal revenge, which is sinful) and desiderium iustitiae (a desire that God's justice be enacted, which is lawful and even virtuous). Verse 12 belongs to the latter category. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that "it is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession" (CCC 2843). These verses model precisely that movement: the hurt is not suppressed but sublimated into prayer.
The Church's tradition of praying for prisoners draws directly on verse 11. The Catechism teaches that works of mercy include visiting and praying for those in prison (CCC 2447). More broadly, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (§402) affirms the dignity of every person deprived of liberty. Finally, verse 12's "sevenfold" recompense reminds Catholics that justice belongs to God alone — a corrective against both despair (God does not notice injustice) and vigilantism (we must take justice into our own hands).
For the contemporary Catholic, verse 11 is a mandate to practice intercessory prayer on behalf of those who cannot pray effectively for themselves: the incarcerated, migrants held in detention, the chronically depressed, those enslaved in trafficking networks. The psalmist does not wait for these prisoners to ask for help — he brings their groan before God on their behalf. Catholics are called to do the same, whether through the Rosary, the Divine Office, or Mass intentions offered for those forgotten by the world.
Verse 12, meanwhile, offers a spiritually healthy channel for the anger we feel at systemic injustice. Rather than nursing resentment or pursuing reckless confrontation, the psalm shows us how to hand the desire for justice back to God — not as a form of spiritual bypassing, but as a genuine act of faith that God sees, weighs, and will act. This is the posture of martyrs and advocates alike: unwavering conviction that evil will be answered, combined with the discipline not to become what we oppose.
Commentary
Psalms 79:11 — "Let the sighing of the prisoner come before you."
The Hebrew word translated "sighing" (אַנְקַת, anqat) carries the sense of a groan forced out of the body by unbearable weight — not a polite lament, but the involuntary cry of someone crushed. The "prisoner" (בֶּן תְּמוּתָה, literally "son of death") almost certainly refers to Israelites taken captive by Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem, the national catastrophe Psalm 79 mourns throughout. These are people condemned to die in exile, stripped of land, temple, and identity.
Yet the verse is a petition, not merely a description. The psalmist is asking God to let this cry ascend — to not block or ignore it. This reflects a profound Israelite theology of prayer: the groaning of the oppressed is not automatically received; it must pierce the heavens. The verb "come before you" (תָּבוֹא לְפָנֶיךָ) is the same idiom used when a legal case is presented before a judge. The prisoners' suffering is, in effect, lodged as a formal complaint before the divine court. The psalmist is acting as their advocate, ensuring their voice reaches God.
Typologically, this verse prefigures every soul in any form of bondage — spiritual, physical, or moral — who cannot pray for themselves and needs the intercession of the community. The Church's own intercessory prayer, especially in the Liturgy of the Hours, has always understood this cry as universal.
Psalms 79:12 — "Pay back to our neighbors seven times into their bosom."
The tone shifts sharply. "Neighbors" (שְׁכֵנֵינוּ, shekhenenu) is bitterly ironic — these are the surrounding nations, the Babylonians and their allies, who were geographically proximate but covenantally alien, and whose violence against Judah was all the more treacherous for that proximity. "Seven times" is a biblical formula for completeness and perfect proportion (cf. Genesis 4:15; Proverbs 6:31), not arithmetical literalism. The psalmist is not tallying seven precise punishments but asking for total, thorough, divinely proportionate justice.
"Into their bosom" (אֶל חֵיקָם) is a vivid image: the fold of a garment at the chest used to carry goods or money — here the recompense is literally pressed back into the oppressor's own carry-sack. What they have hoarded through violence, they will receive in kind. The phrase also echoes the divine declaration in Isaiah 65:6–7, where God promises to "measure into their bosom" the full payment for ancestral sins.
This is not private vengeance — the psalmist does not claim the right to execute justice. It is entirely handed over to God. The imperative "pay back" (הָשֵׁב) is addressed to the Lord. This distinguishes imprecatory psalmody from mere vindictiveness: the speaker is not acting but , surrendering the desire for justice to the only One competent to deliver it rightly.