Catholic Commentary
God's Rebuke of Unjust Judges
2“How long will you judge unjustly, and show partiality to the wicked?” Selah.3“Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.4Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”
Psalms 82:2–4 contains God's rebuke of human judges for perverting justice by favoring the wicked while neglecting the vulnerable, followed by a command to defend, vindicate, and rescue the weak, poor, and fatherless from oppression. The passage uses the same Hebrew root for "judge" in both its condemnation and correction, emphasizing that magistrates must invert their practice from corrupt judgment to righteous judgment.
God indicts those in power: favoritism toward the wicked is the same as complicity in their oppression of the poor.
Psalms 82:2 — "How long will you judge unjustly?"
The rhetorical question "How long?" signals not merely frustration but divine ultimatum. The Hebrew 'ad-matay carries the force of a judicial indictment already in process — God is not asking for information but issuing a charge. The verb shafat (to judge) is the same root used for the great judges of Israel, reminding the accused that their vocation was sacred and specific. To judge unjustly (avel, meaning crookedness, perversity, moral deviation) is not merely a professional failure; it is a theological one.
The second half of the verse — "and show partiality to the wicked" (u-fene resha'im tis'u) — uses the idiom "to lift the face," which in Hebrew means to show favoritism. This phrase appears in legal contexts throughout the Torah (Lev 19:15; Deut 1:17), where God explicitly forbids it. Judges who lift the face of the wicked invert the moral order: they privilege those who exploit and abandon those who suffer. The indictment thus mirrors the Mosaic law they were sworn to uphold.
Psalms 82:3 — "Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless"
This verse shifts from accusation to command. Three categories of the vulnerable are named: dal (the weak or socially powerless), ani (the afflicted poor), and yatom (the fatherless). Each carries specific legal weight in Israelite society. The poor lacked resources to bribe or advocate for themselves. Orphans had no paternal authority — the most important legal protector in the ancient Near East — to speak on their behalf. The Psalter returns repeatedly to these categories because they represent those most likely to be crushed by systemic injustice.
The command shiftu-dal — "judge for/defend the weak" — uses the same root (shafat) as verse 2, creating a sharp contrast: the judges have been judging, but unjustly. Now they are commanded to judge rightly. The verb tzaddeku ("vindicate" or "do justice for") applied to the afflicted carries the connotation of restoring right order, not merely of procedure.
Psalms 82:4 — "Rescue the weak and needy"
The final command escalates: paltu — rescue, deliver, snatch to safety. This is the language of emergency intervention. The word often describes God's own saving action (cf. Ps 22:8; 71:2), which here is being delegated to human magistrates. "Deliver them from the hand of the wicked" (mi-yad resha'im) returns to the word used in verse 2, forming a tight moral arc: the wicked whose face the judges have been lifting are the very ones oppressing those the judges are supposed to protect. The complicity is complete.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers, following the lead of Jesus himself (John 10:34–35), understood the "gods" of Psalm 82:1 to have an expanded reference. St. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 82) interprets the assembly as including all who hold authority — civil, ecclesiastical, and domestic — under God's supreme lordship. The rebuke of verses 2–4 thus extends to every human institution that exercises power over others. Origen saw in this psalm an anticipation of the eschatological judgment, where all earthly authority is weighed against the standard of the divine justice.
The literal commands of verses 3–4 — defend, vindicate, rescue — form a triad that maps onto what the Catholic tradition calls the three dimensions of justice: commutative (rendering what is owed), distributive (ensuring fair share of common goods), and social (structural reform of unjust systems). No single act of charity exhausts the command; the passage calls for systemic as well as personal response.
Catholic social teaching finds in Psalm 82:2–4 one of its deepest scriptural roots. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the duty of making oneself a neighbor to others and actively serving them becomes even more urgent when it involves the disadvantaged" (CCC 1932). These verses supply the prophetic warrant: God himself, as supreme judge, indicts those who fail in this duty.
Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum (1891), grounded the Church's defense of workers and the poor in precisely this tradition: authority is not absolute but derivative, and those who hold power answer to a higher moral law. Pope John Paul II in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis identified the "option for the poor" not as a political ideology but as a theological imperative rooted in God's own preferential concern for the vulnerable (SRS §42). Psalm 82 is a primary biblical locus for that claim.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 63) treated respect of persons in judgment as a grave sin against distributive justice — the exact sin named in verse 2. Aquinas taught that judges who favor the rich commit a double wrong: they deprive the poor of their right and they corrupt the image of divine judgment that human courts are meant to reflect.
The passage also illuminates the Church's teaching on the universal destination of goods (CCC 2402–2406): the resources of the earth belong ultimately to all, and structures that concentrate power at the expense of the poor contradict divine law. The "fatherless" and "needy" of this psalm are not incidental — they represent the structural victims of every age whom God explicitly names as under his protection.
For the contemporary Catholic, Psalm 82:2–4 is an examination of conscience embedded in Scripture. The question "How long will you judge unjustly?" is addressed not only to ancient Israelite magistrates but to anyone who participates — even passively — in systems that disadvantage the poor.
This means concrete examination: Does my parish actively engage with those who cannot reciprocate — the elderly, the incarcerated, the undocumented, the homeless? Do I, as a voter and citizen, attend to how laws affect those with no political voice? Do I, in my workplace or family, "lift the face" of the powerful at the expense of the powerless?
The three commands — defend, vindicate, rescue — suggest a graduated engagement. Defense is ongoing advocacy. Vindication is restoring what was wrongly taken. Rescue is urgent emergency action. Catholics are called to all three levels, not just to sporadic acts of charity. Organizations like the Catholic Worker movement, St. Vincent de Paul Society, and Catholic Charities incarnate this psalm institutionally — but the psalm calls each individual judge, employer, parent, and parishioner to account personally before the God who "rises to judge the earth."
Commentary