6) Cursing Psalms - Conclusions

Grand Duke Dmitry Ioannovich (Donskoy) prays
for the sending down of victory before the Battle of Kulikovo

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Of this there should be no doubt: these allegorical interpretations were not the originally intended meanings of the curses. I do not believe, however, that these meanings should be somehow less valuable to the one praying these Psalms. God’s inspiration is not limited to author’s intent. If one does not wish to harbor against human enemies the hatred expressed in these Psalms, yet does wish to react prayerfully to bona fide injustices in need of restitution, one solution is to make this hatred, allegorically understood, one’s own.

This is not to say that there is not also value and something to be learned from what the Psalmist did intend. There are real evils in the world and in our own lives and desires. These should not be forgotten when we pray. We need to bring our whole selves and our whole situation to God, I believe, with all its difficulties. There is no value in trying to hide anything from God. While it is true that Jesus taught us to love our enemies, it is also true that he expressed outrage at injustice. Christians should also be aware of and outraged at injustice, but not hateful of the unjust.

5) Cursing Psalms - Who are the enemies?

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The Fathers of the Church allegorized the enemies cursed in the Psalms in various ways. The following is a list of some of their interpretations.

The enemy is death.

• “But who is such an enemy unless it is death, the enemy of life.” – Eusebius of Caesarea on the enemies in Ps 9:3

The enemy is the demonic.

• The enemy of Ps 9:6 who rules the cities is the devil. – Augustine


• The assailants of Ps 18:40 are demons. – Evagrius 


• “Pray the prayer of the present psalm, not against flesh and blood but against the spirits of the air who    daily harm us.... the invisible enemies.” – Arnobius the Younger on Ps 35


• “This has reference to the devil and his followers” – Cassiodorus on the enemies in Ps 35


• “I think this speaks about the cross on which the devil falls unknowingly.” – Evagrius of Pontus on the enemies in Ps 35:8


• "Hatred against the demons contributes greatly to our salvation and helps our growth in holiness. But we do not of ourselves have the power to nourish this hatred into a strong plant, because the pleasure-loving spirits restrict it and encourage the soul again to indulge in its old habitual loves. But this indulgence - or rather this gangrene that is so hard to cure - the Physician of souls heals by abandoning us. For He permits us to undergo some fearful suffering night and day, and then the soul returns again to its original hatred, and learns like David to say to the Lord: 'I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them my enemies'" (Ps. 139: 22). -Evagrius, Texts on Discrimination in Respect of Passions and Thoughts 

The enemy is iniquity.

• “Take up a love for justice and a hatred for iniquity…. It is possible at times to use hatred even praiseworthily.” - Basil the Great on hatred of enemies in Ps 139

The enemy is the self.

• “There is a war a person wages with himself” – Augustine on Ps 144

The enemy is sinful or filthy thoughts.

• The teeth which God breaks in Ps 3:7 are “the teeth of sinners [which] are thoughts foreign to reason coming to us on account of our nature by which our enemies approach us.” – Evagrius of Pontus


• “The ‘little ones’ of Babylon… are those troublesome sinful thoughts that arise in the soul.” – Origen on Ps 137


• The “little ones” are “all corrupt and filthy thoughts against Christ.” – Ambrose on Ps 137

The enemy is temptation.

• “While these temptations were still young, he caught hold of them and dashed them against Christ.” – Benedict on Ps 137

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4) Cursing Psalms - Allegorical Reinterpretation

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Roland Murphy, as demonstrated in the last post, is willing to acknowledge the importance of understandings of these Psalms other than the historical. He writes,

Recent hermeneutical theories have challenged the dominance of [the historical-critical] method, arguing that every interpreter begins with certain inevitable presuppositions…. Certainly, the historical-critical method does not exhaust the meaning of a text, which in fact acquires new meanings as it is passed from generation to generation (8). 

Murphy’s own method of coming to a new understanding of the cursing Psalms is not altogether dissimilar from the spiritualizing and allegorical interpretations found in the patristic commentaries. When the early Christians inherited these Psalms of cursing, many felt quite free to imbue them with new meanings. Arnobius the Younger (c. 460), reading the curses of Psalm 35, asks,

What are we to do with this psalm? If we curse our enemies, we disregard the gospel, in which we are ordered not to curse them but to bless them…. Pray the prayer of the present psalm, not against flesh and blood but against the spirits of the air who daily harm us, who daily commit wars….What do you pray…? That the Lord will war and fight those who are against you as you grasp the arms of his own help against invisible enemies.

 St. Marina smiting a demon with a hammer

Arnobius’ solution to the difficulty of praying these curses as a Christian is to allegorize the cursed enemies as “spirits of the air,” that is, the demons. Allegory is one answer to the question of what use can be made of the cursing Psalms by those who believe that all of the Scripture – somehow including these passages which freely express the most vile and evil inclinations of the human heart – is inspired by God and that the Psalms are particularly suitable for use in our worship of him in accordance with ancient Christian custom. This is just the approach that Arnobius and many other early fathers of the Church have taken. They understood the enemies cursed by the Psalms to be the demons that Jesus spent so much time casting out. Augustine, Evagrius, and Cassiodorus support the view of the enemies as demons.  The ancient Israelites were clearly not intending to curse demons, but some early Christians thus redirected the curses.

Other fathers identify the cursed enemy as death, injustice, or the self. Benedict (c.480–547) understands the particularly cruel curse against the Babylonian babies as an allegory concerning temptations (Ps 137:9). He writes, “While these temptations are still young, catch hold of them and dash them against Christ.” The Scriptural type of Christ as the rock already existed and so Benedict simply spiritualized the “little ones” as temptations and made sense of the curse in that way (1 Cor 10:4; 1 Pet 2:4-7).  Origen and Ambrose also support this interpretation.

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