Imprecatory-psalms
Short answer: The imprecatory psalms are prayers in which a suffering believer asks God to judge, defeat, or remove his enemies. Psalm 69 is a chief example; it opens with a drowning cry, Psalm 69:1 says, "Save me, God, for the waters have come up to my neck!" and later asks God to break the enemies' strength and pour out indignation. These are not outbursts of private revenge. They are appeals to God as the rightful judge, spoken by people who are being crushed and have nowhere else to take their case. The New Testament does not delete them. It quotes them (Psalm 69 is cited of Jesus and of Judas), and it teaches disciples to love enemies while still leaving vengeance to God. So the imprecatory psalms remain Christian Scripture: prayers to pray honestly, with a cross-shaped heart.
What exactly counts as an imprecatory psalm
The word imprecatory comes from a Latin term for invoking a curse or calamity. In practice, scholars apply it to psalms, or portions of psalms, where the speaker asks God to act against his enemies in direct and severe ways. Psalm 69 is often placed in this category because it moves from a plea for rescue into a request that the adversaries' own table become a trap and that God's anger overtake them. Psalm 109 and Psalm 137 are usually named alongside it. Not every lament is imprecatory. Many laments simply pour out grief and trust. The imprecatory psalms add a specific request: God, deal with them.
It helps to see these prayers as legal language before they are emotional language. The psalmist is not a vigilante; he is a plaintiff. He brings his case before the only court that cannot be bribed, and he asks the judge to rule. Psalm 69 repeatedly grounds the plea in God's own character: God knows the reproach, the shame, and the dishonour that has fallen on his servant. What looks like uncontrolled rage is often tightly argued theology: if God is just, then injustice cannot stand forever unaddressed.
Recognising the genre also keeps us from flattening the Psalter into a single mood. The same book that says to delight in God's law also says to ask God to break the arm of the wicked. Real faith is not monotone. Scripture gives God's people words for terror, betrayal, and the ache for justice, not only for calm gratitude. Reading an imprecatory psalm as if it were a devotional slogan misses what kind of prayer is actually on the page.
Psalm 69 and the shape of the cry
Psalm 69 begins in the mud of a flood rather than in a rage. The speaker is exhausted from crying, his throat is dry, and he is hated without cause. He is a stranger to his own brothers, and he is mocked for his devotion. That context matters enormously when we arrive at the hard petitions near the end. The curses are not the opening move. They arise out of sustained, documented suffering and a repeated appeal to God to act because no human court will help.
Psalm 69:22-28 says, "Let their table before them become a snare. May it become a retribution and a trap." That image of the table turning against its guests is striking. A place of fellowship becomes the site of judgment. The speaker asks that their own security and prosperity betray them, that their eyes be darkened, and that they be blotted from the book of the living. Whatever else we say, these are not gentle requests. They are prayers for God to end the reign of the wicked, and they are spoken directly to God, not to the enemies.
Notice where the psalm then lands. It does not end in bitterness. It ends in praise, with the humble seeing it and rejoicing, because Yahweh hears the needy. The imprecation is not the psalm's final note; the psalm's final note is worship and the confidence that God saves Zion. The structure teaches something important. Honest exposure of pain and a demand for justice can exist inside a life of praise. The psalmist never stops addressing God. That, more than the intensity of the language, is what makes this a prayer rather than a rant.
Why the curses are directed to God, not to people
One of the most important observations about these psalms is grammatical. The psalmist does not say, I will break their teeth. He says, God, break their teeth. He does not vow to hunt down his enemies. He asks God to rise up. The whole energy of the prayer heads upward, to the throne, not outward to the neighbour's door. Whatever we conclude about the desire behind the words, the form of address submits the case to God's decision. It leaves the timing and the method with him, and it forbids the speaker from taking the sword into his own hand.
This is exactly the pattern Paul later stills with. Romans 12:17-21 says, "Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men." Paul goes on to say not to avenge ourselves but to leave room for God's wrath, because it is written that vengeance belongs to the Lord. Paul is not inventing a new ethic out of nowhere. He is drawing on the same conviction that shapes the imprecatory psalms: justice belongs to God, not to us. The imprecation is the cry; the apostle's command is the posture. Both agree that the offender's fate is God's business.
This distinction between appealing to God and avenging yourself is not a small loophole. It is the hinge of the whole discussion. A psalm that hands the case to God is doing something different from a self-appointed vendetta. It can still be fierce. It can still ask for dreadful things. But it refuses to make the sufferer the judge, the jury, and the executioner. It leaves God free to be God, which is precisely the freedom Paul later leans on when he tells the church to overcome evil with good.
Do the imprecatory psalms fit the teaching of Jesus
At first the gap looks unbridgeable. Matthew 5:43-44 says, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" Jesus goes on to command love of enemies and prayer for persecutors. If Jesus tells us to bless those who curse us, what do we do with a psalm that asks God to curse them? Some readers conclude these psalms are simply sub-Christian and should be left unread. Others read them as a warrant for bitterness. Both moves are too quick.
First, praying an imprecatory psalm is not the same as hating a neighbour in my own heart. I can bring my rage to God, name the injustice plainly, and ask him to vindicate what is right, while also praying for the person's repentance and refusing to take revenge. Second, Jesus is not squeamish about judgment itself. He speaks more about hell than any other New Testament figure. The difference he makes is about my posture, not about whether God ever judges. Third, Jesus himself stands inside these psalms. The Gospels apply Psalm 69 to his rejection and to the hatred he endured; he drank the cup of suffering the psalm describes. The hardest prayer in the Psalter becomes, in Christian reading, part of the story of the one who bore enmity without returning it.
So the honest answer is that faithful Christians have genuinely differed here. Some treat the imprecatory psalms as prayers fully usable by the church, with the understanding that we ask God for justice and leave outcomes to him. Others treat them mainly as a record of what saints under the old covenant felt and said, instructive but not a template for our prayer. Scripture does not spell out which reading is required. What it forbids is using the psalms to justify personal revenge, and what it commands is love of enemies. Any reading that produces hatred in the praying heart has misread the text.
How the New Testament uses an imprecatory psalm
The New Testament does not quietly drop Psalm 69. It quotes it in settings that matter. When Jesus cleanses the temple, his disciples remember the line about zeal for God's house consuming him. When the early church prays for boldness under threat, it quotes the Psalm's opening cry about the waters. When Judas's betrayal is described, Psalm 69's request that another take his office is cited. And Romans 15 cites the psalm's closing note, that the nations will praise the Lord, as a basis for Gentile inclusion. The same psalm that asks for judgment is also read as a prophecy of Christ and a warrant for mission.
Paul's own language in 2 Timothy 4:14 has the same texture. He writes, "Alexander, the coppersmith, did much evil to me. The Lord will repay him according to his deeds." Paul does not announce a plan to ruin Alexander. He names the harm truthfully and hands the repayment to the Lord. That is the posture of the imprecatory psalms carried into the apostolic church: clear-eyed naming of evil, refusal of personal vengeance, and confidence that God keeps accounts. If Paul can speak this way without violating the command to love enemies, the Psalter's cries cannot be flatly out of bounds for Christians.
There is also a caution here. New Testament citation of Psalm 69 does not mean every verse of it becomes a model prayer for every occasion. Scripture can quote a line as fulfilled prophecy, or as a description of Jesus' experience, without saying, pray this about your difficult coworker. We have to read carefully what the New Testament is doing with each citation. Sometimes it authorises the prayer. Sometimes it uses the psalm as testimony about Christ. Sometimes it does both. The discipline of looking at the context will keep us from both ignoring these psalms and weaponising them.
Praying an imprecatory psalm without becoming bitter
The first practical step is to read the whole psalm, not just the sharp verse. Psalm 69 begins with drowning and ends with praise. If I only read the curses, I will conclude that the Psalter blesses rage. If I read the arc, I see suffering brought into the presence of a holy God and transformed into worship. Praying the psalm means travelling that road, not camping out at the darkest petition. The psalms give me permission to say hard things to God; they also refuse to let me stop there.
The second step is to pray for the person while praying the psalm. This is not hypocrisy; it is the shape of Christian prayer. I can ask God to stop an abuser, to defend the weak, to bring justice to a corrupt system, and at the same time ask that the wrongdoer be brought to repentance rather than destruction. Praying imprecation without praying for repentance is a way of nursing hatred. Praying for repentance without ever naming the harm is a way of pretending injustice does not matter. The psalms let us hold both together before God.
The third step is to put the psalm in the mouth of the church, not just the individual. These are the prayers of the people of God, and most of the church's worst suffering is inflicted on the vulnerable, not on us personally. Many of us have little to complain of. Praying Psalm 69 on behalf of the trafficked, the persecuted, and the abandoned gives the psalm its proper weight. It becomes a prayer against real evil, not a settling of personal scores. That is a far safer and more faithful use of the psalm than applying its curses to whoever annoyed us this week.
Where these psalms belong in preaching and worship
Imprecatory psalms are usually skipped, and skipping them has a cost. A congregation that never hears them learns that God cannot handle anger, that faith means pretending pain is small, and that the Bible is a tidy book. But God's people suffer violence, betrayal, and injustice, and they need words that are strong enough for what they have lived through. Preaching these psalms requires context, patience, and honesty, but the payoff is a congregation that trusts God with its worst material, and that no longer assumes the spiritual life is a permanent smile.
The safest way to preach them is to walk the psalm's whole movement, from the flood, through the plea for justice, to the closing praise. Preachers should name the moral difference between asking God to judge and taking revenge ourselves, and should show how the New Testament both uses and reshapes these prayers around the cross. It also helps to distinguish the imprecation from personal hatred in the pulpit, so that no hearer leaves thinking God has authorised them to curse a family member. Clarity here protects both the wounded and the tempted. The aim is not to tame the psalm but to set it in the frame of Scripture as a whole.
In worship, these psalms widen the church's vocabulary. They give voice to those who have been silenced, they call God's justice to mind, and they press the congregation to love enemies in a way that is honest about real evil. Some traditions omit them from public reading. Others include them with careful explanation. Scripture does not prescribe which practice is required, and faithful churches differ here. What matters is that we neither suppress them out of embarrassment nor brandish them out of resentment. Handled well, they teach a church to pray about the things it has always been afraid to say out loud.
Biblical fidelity check
What Psalm 69 does establish is clear. It gives a faithful pattern of bringing suffering and the demand for justice to God. It shows that God's people may speak to him with raw honesty. It reveals that the psalmist refuses to take revenge into his own hands; the appeal is always upward to God. It also shows that such prayer can coexist with praise; the psalm does not end in bitterness but in worship and hope for Zion. These are real and valuable things, and they stand on the text.
What the psalm does not establish is equally important. It does not authorise personal vengeance, it does not make the sufferer the judge of his enemy's soul, and it does not command Christians to pray curses over every annoying person in their lives. A common misreading treats the imprecatory psalms as permission to hate, as if the Bible were sanctifying grudges. That reading contradicts Romans 12 and Matthew 5, and it mistakes the psalm's direction of address. The psalmist speaks to God; he does not dispatch himself. Any use of these psalms that produces relish for another's ruin has misread them and has also misread the cross.
Other passages that speak to Psalm 69
Reading Psalm 69 well means reading it alongside the rest of Scripture. For help with the genre and its imagery, see How do I preach biblical poetry and Psalms? For a full method of handling the Psalter faithfully, see How To Preach The Psalms: A Scripture-First Sermon Academy Guide. To trace how the New Testament reads psalms like this one around the person of Christ, see Psalms Bible Study: Seeing Jesus in Psalms. And for the often overlooked question of how biblical poetry was performed and sung, see Music and instruments in the Psalms: A Biblical Guide.
Frequently asked questions
Are imprecatory psalms sinful to pray?
They can be prayed faithfully when the person praying is asking God for justice rather than nursing personal vengeance. The psalmist brings his case to God, not to a weapon, and he ends in praise. The danger is in the human heart, not the text. If praying a curse produces delight in another person's destruction, that is a signal to stop and pray for their repentance instead. Read alongside Romans 12 and Matthew 5, these psalms can give honest voice to real pain without authorising hatred.
Why does Psalm 69 ask God to curse the enemies?
The speaker has been hated without cause, mocked, and abandoned, and no human court will vindicate him. So he appeals to the judge of all the earth. The plea assumes that God is just and that unrepented evil cannot simply be ignored. Psalm 69:22-28 asks that the enemies' own security become a trap and that they be removed from the land of the living. It is a request for God to act, not a vow that the psalmist will act himself.
Does Jesus contradict the imprecatory psalms?
Jesus commands love of enemies and prayer for persecutors in Matthew 5:43-44. That command governs the disciple's own posture and forbids personal revenge. It does not deny that God will finally judge. Jesus himself is the one to whom Psalm 69 is applied in the Gospels, and he bore hostility without returning it. Faithful Christians differ over how directly to pray these psalms, but all agree that the teaching of Jesus rules out using them to justify bitterness or retaliation in the praying heart.
