Trevor Laurence
Psalm 58 is a battle-by-prayer.
David’s opening interrogation indicates that Israelite judges—authority-bearers tasked with leading and executing justice in God’s covenant community according to the law of the Lord—have failed in their commission, multiplying injustice instead.
Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?
Do you judge the children of man uprightly?
No, in your hearts you devise wrongs;
your hands deal out violence on earth. (vv. 1–2)
The “gods”1 who are called to mediate God’s righteousness and wisdom in their decisions abuse their office and the people under their care. Entrusted to preserve and promote the peace and right ordering of Israelite society, they utilize their position to subject those in need of protection to further violence, undoubtedly reaping certain personal benefits through their exploitation of others. With leaders like this—who decree what is evil and judge the children of man falsely—the kingdom of God becomes a place of predation, where the innocent and vulnerable are at the mercy of the wicked and the self-serving systems they craft.
But in Israel, judicial injustice is never merely judicial injustice. Political malfeasance is never merely political malfeasance. Israel is the temple-kingdom of the Lord—the people over whom he reigns and with whom he resides in holiness—and the unholy judges who proliferate unholiness through Israelite society spread corruption through God’s sacred dwelling.
The Lord had promised his people, “If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them…I will make my dwelling among you” (Lev 26:3, 11) but had warned that a nation characterized by disobedience, oppression, and the idolatry that fuels them would receive the covenant curses and be vomited out of his land (e.g., Lev 20:22; Deut 28:15–68). The “gods” of Psalm 58 threaten the holiness of God’s temple-kingdom, and in so doing they threaten Israel’s shalom, her experience of blessing, her witness to the nations, and her very existence in God’s land as the people with whom he abides.
Echoes of Eden
Throughout Psalm 58, the judges who defile God’s temple-kingdom are allusively framed in terms drawn from the first infiltrator of sacred space.
When the serpent entered the temple-kingdom of Eden’s garden with his poisonous lies, the priest-king—the image-bearing son of God2—charged with serving and guarding God’s dwelling (Gen 2:15)3 should have driven him out. Instead, Adam and Eve heeded his false words and were themselves expelled from the land of God’s holy presence. In his curse upon the serpent, the Lord promised that his evil seed would be opposed by the seed of the woman until the day Eve’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15) as an obedient royal priest and son of God. Israel’s calling as a son of God (Exod 4:22–23; Ps 80:15) and royal priesthood (Exod 19:6) to reestablish an Edenic sanctuary by driving out the serpentine nations grows out of this trajectory-setting word from the Lord.
David’s prayer in Psalm 58 identifies Israel’s unjust rulers as the seed of the serpent. They are “estranged from the womb” (v. 3), wicked offspring who strike at the “children of ‘ādām” (v. 1) just as the first serpent struck at Adam and Eve.4 And like their father, who utilized deception to reap destruction in God’s garden-temple, these serpents (נָחָשׁ, v. 4; cf. Gen 3:1) speak venomous lies to deal out violence “in the land” (בָּאָרֶץ, v. 2) where God has made his holy home with humanity.
Fittingly, David petitions for head-oriented judgments upon the serpent’s seed—broken teeth and torn out fangs (v. 6)—reminiscent of the skull blow promised in Gen 3:15, and the confident declaration that the righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked (v. 10) evokes the hope that the striking of the serpent and his offspring will come from the feet of the woman’s seed.5 Psalm 58 and Genesis 3 agree: serpents will be crushed beneath the feet of faithful.
Israel’s unjust judges are serpents in God’s garden—intruders in sacred space—and David prays for head-striking, foot-stomping judgment according to the promises of God. But the allusions to Genesis 3 do more than clarify the content of Psalm 58’s pleas. They also illuminate David’s identity and the vocation that legitimates his cry for expulsive justice.
David, like Adam, is a son of God (Ps 2:7)—a priestly king (cf. 2 Sam 6–10)6—whose calling is to protect God’s holy dwelling among his people by shattering the enemies who seek its desecration (Ps 2:9). With his psalm, David takes up the mantle of the Adamic priest-king, guarding the Lord’s temple-kingdom by prayer, driving out the unholy corruption of the serpent’s seed by imprecation.
Psalm 58 is a royal-priestly petition, a fitting prayer for a son of God. By pleading for a divine vengeance that removes serpentine unholiness from God’s garden-people, David plays his commissioned part in God’s unfolding story, enacting a provisional fulfillment of the good news of Gen 3:15, embracing his Adamic vocation where the first Adam failed.
The Songs of David and Moses
The song of David in Psalm 58 also echoes the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32.
Before Israel journeys into the promised land, the Lord commands Moses to sing as a witness against Israel’s future idolatry (Deut 31:16–22). Moses’ song reveals the rhythm of Israel’s subsequent history: in spite of God’s faithfulness, Israel will be unfaithful, and the Lord will judge his people through invading nations until he judges the nations themselves to effect Israel’s deliverance.
The parallels between the songs are significant: a concern with the cleansing of the land (Deut 32:43; Ps 58:2), references to the teeth of beasts (Deut 32:24; Ps 58:6), serpentine depictions of enemies (Deut 32:24, 32–33; Ps 58:4–6), assurances of God’s vengeance (Deut 32:41, 43; Ps 58:10), the rejoicing of God’s people (Deut 32:43; Ps 58:10), graphic imagery of head-striking and enemy blood (Deut 32:42; Ps 58:6, 10), and an emphasis on the exclusivity of the one true God among all other gods (Deut 32:39; Ps 58:1, 11).7
Intriguingly, Deuteronomy 32 depicts the assaulting nations as poisonous serpents (vv. 32–33) who “crawl in the dust” (v. 24; cf. Gen 3:14) and whose heads will be cracked by God when he spills blood “from the long-haired heads of the enemy” (v. 42; cf. Gen 3:15). Moses sings about Israel’s future in a tune drawn from the promises of the past. Israel’s history is an outworking of the protoevangelium.
Like the best of musicians, David works Moses’ old song into his new composition in a manner that communicates powerfully to the trained ear. As serpents whose heads are destined for smashing, Israel’s leaders are in reality no different from the invading nations, and their reign of terror is as defiling and horrific as military subjugation. With his judgment prayer, David subdues “the nations” within Israel as he subdued the nations without (1 Chron 22:18), driving out “the nations” from God’s holy people and his holy land in a petitionary recapitulation of the conquest, which was itself a cleansing of new Edenic ground.
Praying in Character
Jarring though David’s pleas may be, Psalm 58 is not an unethical exercise in uninhibited anger. It is not an individual’s vitriolic venting against persons who happen to offend him.
Read within the redemptive-historical story to which the song itself alludes, Psalm 58 comes into focus as the righteous prayer of the faithful seed of the woman against the corrupting seed of the serpent. David “prays in character,” answering the obligations of his divinely appointed vocation as a royal-priestly son of God, guarding the holiness of God’s temple-kingdom by petitioning for expulsive vengeance upon the surreptitious snakes in the garden of the Lord.
David prays as a new Adam, and David’s son emerges as the last Adam. Jesus indicts Israel’s leaders as a brood of vipers who speak from the abundance of their wicked hearts (Matt 12:34), offspring of the serpent who follow in the pattern of his murderous lies (John 8:44). Christ cleanses God’s temple of defiling intrusion (Matt 21:12–13), removes unholy leaders and gives God’s vineyard to a fruitful people (Matt 21:43), and creates a renewed garden-temple (Acts 2:1–4). And having triumphed over the serpent in his first advent (Col 2:15; 1 John 3:8), he will soon return to make the cosmos the sacred dwelling place of God when he drives out every uncleanness and permits the righteous to share in definitively crushing the serpent beneath their feet (Rom 16:20).
Until then, the royal priesthood (1 Pet 2:9) composed of the sons of God (Rom 8:14, 19; Gal 3:26) keeps on praying in character for God’s promised justice (Luke 18:1–8; Rev 6:9).8 God’s ecclesial priest-kings protect by petition the Lord’s temple-kingdom from every enemy threat to its holiness, flourishing, and preservation—and not least from those venomous shepherds who, like the serpents of Psalm 58, abuse truth and trust and authority to prey on God’s garden.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute
Image: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake
- The MT reads אֵלֶם (“silence”), but most scholars emend the term to אֵלִם, translating the term either “gods” (ESV) or “rulers” (NIV). In any case, the term is best understood as a reference to human judges or authorities.[
] - Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 45–46: “Since the Spirit’s act of creating man is thus presented as the fathering of a son and that man-son is identified as the image-likeness of God, it is evident that the image of God and son of God are mutually explanatory concepts.” And cf. Gen 5:1–3.[]
- The terms עבד and שׁמר are paired later in the Pentateuch to refer to priestly duties with regard to the tabernacle. E.g., Num 3:7–10, 31–32; 8:25–26; 18:5–7. They carry a decidedly cultic connotation here.[]
- Cf. Konrad Schaefer, Psalms, Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry, ed. David W. Cotter (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 143.[]
- Cf. James Hamilton, “The Skull-Crushing Seed of the Woman: Inner-Biblical Interpretation of Genesis 3:15,” SBJT 10, no. 2 (2006): 41.[]
- See esp. Deborah W. Rooke, “Kingship as Priesthood: The Relationship between the High Priesthood and the Monarchy,” in King and Messiah in Israel and the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar, JSOTSup 270, ed. John Day (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 187.[]
- Cf. Samuel Terrien, The Psalms: Strophic Structure and Theological Commentary, ECC (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 441.[]
- See “The Prayers of the Saints and the Judgment of God.”[]