The sting in the Psalms,Part 2

The contemporary use of the imprecatory psalms

In Part 1, Kathleen referred to the plight of the Darfuri people. Last year was the tenth anniversary of the partial genocide in Sudan, which involved the deaths of several hundred thousand of the Darfuri. Many who escaped that atrocity, perhaps another two hundred thousand, fled to Chad and have been in refugee camps there ever since. My step-daughter Katie-Jay and her husband Gabriel have spent most of these ten years seeking to get the West to recognize the Darfuri’s plight and to take action on their behalf. When I married Kathleen, four years ago, we started praying for the Darfuri as part of our prayer routine. When we are home, we use the Episcopal form of prayer for early evening before we have dinner, and Kathleen has noted that we added to that liturgy the saying of a psalm on the Darfuri’s behalf. We began at the beginning of the Psalter, and prayed the Psalms one after each other, one a day.

The idea came from my previous experience of praying the Psalms when I taught in St John’s College, Nottingham, where we worshiped together every day and followed the Church’s lectionary for reading Scripture, and read through the Psalms one-by-one. We were not choosing a psalm to read each day because it corresponded to our current situation but reading (say) Psalm 47 because we read Psalm 46 yesterday and we will read Psalm 48 tomorrow. That practice made me ask what we were doing, and I came to two conclusions. One was that by reading the entire Psalter we were shaping our habit of praise and prayer. The other was that, in praying prayers or praises that didn’t correspond to our own circumstances, we were identifying with other parts of the Christian community, and the world community, whose circumstances corresponded to those out of which a particular psalm prayed. In other words, in our prayer we were involved in intercession.

This realization provided me with an answer to another question about the Psalms. The Psalms model the nature of supplication – of praying for oneself. But how did Israelites pray for other people – how did they intercede? There are only one or two explicitly intercessory prayers in the Psalter, and only a few elsewhere in the Old Testament. But some of those explicitly intercessory prayers pray in the first person, even though they are interceding. In these, someone is praying for other people, but identifying with them, so not praying for them, but for us. Intercession involves putting oneself in someone else’s place. This understanding fits nicely with the fact that etymologically ‘intercession’ links with ‘intervention’. It means acting as a ‘go-between.’ It implies interposing between two parties so as to bring them together. It entails identifying with one party and representing it to another. For a prophet, intercessory prayer involved identifying with people and representing them before God. One therefore speaks as ‘we’ or ‘I’ not as ‘they’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’. I realized that the apparent absence of intercessory prayers from the Psalter pointed to using the ‘I’ and ‘we’ psalms as intercessions as well as supplications. Perhaps Israel used them that way; certainly we might do so. In praying the psalms, one need not be praying for oneself.

Specifically, in praying the prayers in the Psalms that speak out of oppression, affliction, persecution and tyranny, we might be praying not for ourselves but for people who experience oppression, affliction, persecution, and tyranny, with whom we identify. We pray for God to put down tyrants and oppressors. In connection with the Darfuri, one might think of President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, for whose arrest the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant on counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

A feature of the Psalms is that they virtually never speak of taking violent action to put down oppressors (the major exception is the royal psalms which assume that God works via the human king in putting down resistance to God in the world). They do not give reasons for this omission. I am tempted to describe the Psalter as the most pacifist book in the Bible, though I try to resist the temptation because speaking in terms of pacifism is anachronistic; pacifism implies a framework of thinking that does not appear in Old Testament or New Testament.

I suspect that two different considerations underlie the Psalms’ stance. One is the practicality that the people who prayed the Psalms were usually in no position to take action against their oppressors. Prayer was all they had. But what a powerful weapon they knew it was! That fact links with the other consideration. Prophets such as Isaiah frequently insist that the vocation of the people of God is to trust God for their destiny. Their vocation is not to take action in order to safeguard that destiny. The Psalms’ stance fits with that emphasis. ‘Praying the Psalms is an audacious act of trust.’ ²

Praying against the superpower

The imprecatory Psalms, then, provide the oppressed with a means of urging God to take action against evil in the world, and they give people who identify with the oppressed a means of praying for them. It may well be that there is a therapeutic value in expressing anger, though it is also possible that expressing anger may only feed the flame. ³ Perhaps the question is whether the anger has truly been given to God. But the main point about imprecation is not to get things off one’s chest so that one feels better but to urge God to take action. And in this connection it is possible that these psalms are more significant for the brothers and sisters of the oppressed than for the oppressed themselves. The Old Testament is aware that people who are wronged may recognize a call to turn the other cheek and not desire the punishment of the people who have wronged them. It is the stance that Joseph takes in relation to his brothers. There is a version of Psalm 137, reworked by Zephania Kameeta in the midst of Namibia’s struggle for independence from South Africa. It asks that the apartheid system may be smashed on the rock, but not that white South African politicians may have that experience. ⁴

In contrast, perhaps it is the responsibility of people who care about the victims of wrongdoing and about the vindication of right in the world to pray for God to put wrongdoers down and to deliver their victims, which is what Kathleen and I were doing. The imprecatory psalms are then for praying by people who are not the victims of oppression. Indeed, if we do not want to pray them, it raises questions about the shallowness of our own spirituality, our theology and our ethics. Do we not want to see wrongdoers put down and punished?

One reason for our not wanting it is that we may be on the receiving end of the putting down. That possibility is raised by another contemporary use of the imprecatory pslams, by Rastafarians.

Rastafarianism emerged in Jamaica nearly a century ago. Among its many biblical influences, it has especially used the imprecatory psalms in protesting against colonialism and in striving for national identity and social change. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell described the way Rastas used the imprecatory psalms as a ‘linguistic political tool to chant down the enemy’. ⁵ ‘Babylon’ comes to mean the West and its economic system.

Psalm 137 is the most notorious imprecatory psalm. There is a reggae version called ‘Rivers of Babylon’; it actually omits the closing verses that Western Christians find offensive, and replaces them by the closing line from Psalm 19 that asks for our words to be pleasing to God. I imagine the point of that last line is to underscore the prayer and urge God to respond to its plea for freedom. The song was written and first recorded in 1970 by a Jamaican band called The Melodians, but it was covered in 1978 by a slightly manufactured European-based group called Boney M. ⁶ This version was a long-running number one record in the United Kingdom, though it was only a minor hit in the United States. The irony lies in the fact that we British who listened to and sang along with the song never realized that it was about us, that we were Babylon. Perhaps the BBC would have banned it if they had realized.

Scholars in countries such as Britain and the United States are therefore wise to support the view of ordinary Christians that nobody should use such psalms. It would be dangerous if people prayed them. God might listen and respond.

Christians commonly justify their opposition to the use of such psalms by suggesting that they are out of keeping with the New Testament, but that is hardly so. While the New Testament does not quote Psalm 137, it does utilize imprecatory parts of Psalm 69 which as a whole is more extensively imprecatory. ⁷ Further, Revelation 6.10 reports an imprecatory prayer by the martyrs, who ask, ‘How long, Lord, holy and true, will you not judge and take redress for our blood from earth’s inhabitants?’ God’s response is not to point out that such a prayer is inappropriate in the light of Jesus’ exhortation to forgive enemies; it is to promise them that the time of redress will soon come. Since it has not done so two thousand years later, perhaps this promise provides further reason for praying in imprecatory fashion and/or further reason to avoid doing so if you allow for the possibility that you will be its victims.

Jesus himself declares, ‘Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!’ for not responding to his teaching, and goes on to describe the terrible punishment that will come on these cities (Matt. 11.21–24; cf. e.g., 23.13–32). Paul, too, declares curses on various people (1 Cor. 16.22; Gal. 1.8–9). ⁸ It looks as if Jesus and Paul want to see wrongdoers put down and punished.

Allegorical interpretation

The New Testament thus suggests a critique of the comments of two well-known scholars who have been uncomfortable with Psalm 137. The first is C. S. Lewis, who wonders how a Christian can use the imprecatory psalms, and reverts to an allegorical approach:

We know the proper object of utter hostility—wickedness, especially our own … From this point of view I can use even the horrible passage in 137 about dashing the Babylonian babies against the stones. I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become dipsomania [what we would now call alcoholism] or settled hatred … Against all such pretty infants … the advice of the Psalm is best. Knock the little bastards’ brains out. ⁹

Lewis published his Reflections on the Psalms during the period when people from different parts of the British Empire were being encouraged to immigrate into Britain to drive buses, work in factories, staff hospitals, and so on. His book came out two years before the speech in South Africa by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan about the ‘wind of change’ blowing through Britain’s empire in Africa. ¹⁰ There is a link between Lewis’s avoidance of the literal meaning of Psalm 137 and the Psalm’s postcolonial implications (as we would now put it). An allegorical interpretation of the psalm avoids these implications.

The other scholar is David C. Steinmetz. In a classic text for recent interest in recovering the significance of pre-critical interpretation of Scripture, he speaks of the difficulty raised for Christians by Psalm 137 with its talk of baby-bashing, the difficulty raised by the fact that we are ‘expressly forbidden’ to avenge ourselves on our enemies. ‘Unless Psalm 137 has more than one meaning,’ he says, ‘it cannot be used as a prayer by the Church and must be rejected as a lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel.’ Allegorical interpretation, he goes on,

made it possible for the church to pray directly and without qualification even a troubling Psalm like 137. After all, Jerusalem was not merely a city in the Middle East; it was, according to the allegorical sense, the church; according to the tropological sense, the faithful soul; and according to the anagogical sense, the center of God's new creation. The Psalm became a lament of those who long for the establishment of God's future kingdom and who are trapped in this disordered and troubled world, which with all its delights is still not their home. They seek an abiding city elsewhere. The imprecations against the Edomites and the Babylonians are transmuted into condemnations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you grant the fourfold sense of Scripture, David sings like a Christian. ¹¹

Prayer and ethics

We have noted that the problem with allegorical interpretation is usually not what it says but what it fails to say. Christians who undertake allegorical interpretation are unlikely to make the text say something that disagrees with Christian faith, with biblical faith. The problem is that allegorical interpretation makes it possible to rework the text’s meaning so that it says something that fits with the interpreter’s understanding of what counts as Christian and biblical, and to prevent the text from saying something that conflicts with that understanding. ¹²

The most worrying tropological implication of allegorical interpretation of the psalms is that they stop the Psalms having an ethical impact on us. Kathleen has noted in the first part of this paper that the Psalms illustrate the way poetry can evoke an atmosphere and an emotion, entice people into its midst before they find out what role they are playing, put the users of the Psalms into the shoes of other people in an emotional and not merely a rational way, help them identify themselves as perpetrators, do so by sneaking up on them rather than relating to the Psalms as if they were people taking part in a court of law or even as people listening to a story, give them a way of expressing their desire for redress, give them a way of seeking redress without actually taking action, nevertheless give them God’s point of view on their lives, and show them a path from anguish to healing.

The imprecatory psalms illustrate those insights with particular force. These psalms enable us to take up our role as intercessors for the victims of oppression. It is a role that is crucial when we are in no position to do anything about the oppression. It is just as crucial when we are in a position to do something, because they remind us that what we do is not decisive. Then second, the imprecatory psalms have the capacity to scare the pants off us as oppressors and pull us to a change of life.

Kathleen’s points undergird those two comments in expounding the thesis that poetry makes a unique contribution to ethics because it performs moral correction on us as we perform it. The world of the Psalms is an ethical place, a place of truth. It defines the unfairness, instability and despair of the world we live in. As the words of the Psalms come out of our mouths, we are yoked to moral principles and concerns. The Psalms’ words are human words, but they are human words that the people of God recognized as acceptable to God, as reflecting God’s perspective. During the singing of a psalm, God’s justice thrives, because God is in charge, not us. Evildoers who seem to flourish are actually doomed. We can look around at a situation where God’s justice is not thriving and say, ‘I want what I hear and see in the Psalms.’ And when we meet an attacker, we can threaten them with, ‘Have I got a psalm for you!’