Psalms 58

1. Do ye indeed in silence speak righteousness? Do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men? 2 Nay, in heart ye work wickedness; Ye weigh out the violence of your hands in the earth. 3 The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. 4 Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; 5 Which hearkeneth not to the voice of charmers, Charming never so wisely. 6 Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: Break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD. 7 Let them melt away as water that runneth apace: When he aimeth his arrows, let them be as though they were cut off. 8 Let them be as a snail which melteth and passeth away: Like the untimely birth of a woman, that hath not seen the sun. 9 Before your pots can feel the thorns, He shall take them away with a whirlwind, the green and the burning alike. 10 The righteous shall rejoice when he sceth the vengeance: He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. 11 So that men shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: Verily there is a God that judgeth in the earth.

A PSALM of stern reproof, such as a king might address to unrighteous judges, the great and permanent evil of Oriental despotisms. It belongs probably to the first year of David’s reign; the style is rugged and obscure, the tone solemn and earnest, such as might well become a prince succeeding to a period of anarchy and turbulence. He describes the wickedness as so great, so thoroughly identified with the nature of the oppressors, as to leave no hope of improvement, no resource but prayer for their extirpation. The obscurity of the language points to an early date, nor is there any sufficient reason for rejecting the inscription found in all the old versions. Cook.

The incomparable boldness of the language does not warrant us to deny it to David. In no Psalm are there found together within a similar brief space so many transcendent figures. To a certain extent, however, Psalms 64 and 140 are a guarantee that David speaks here. These three Psalms, whose similar closing verses of themselves challenge comparison, show that the same David who usually writes so elegantly, tenderly, and transparently can soar in a great variety of transitions to a sublimity in which his language, especially where it implores

(58 : 7) or announces (140 : 10) God’s judgment, rolls on like deep thunder through a gloomy mass of dark clouds. D.

This Psalm is a bold protest against unrighteous judges. It opens with an indignant expostulation on their deliberate perversion of justice, while they pretend to uphold it. It lays bare their character and that of those whom they favor as men thoroughly, habitually, by their very nature corrupt. And finally, because they are thus beyond all hope of correction or amendment, it calls upon God to rob them of their power and to bring all their counsels to nought. The Psalm abounds in bold and striking images, and is remarkable for a nervous force of expression. The title ascribes it to David, but without assigning it to any particular occasion in his life. Various guesses have been made as to the time of its composition, but the Psalm furnishes us with no data for any certain or even probable conclusion. It consists of three principal divisions: The forcible picture of unrighteousness in the seat of judgment (vs. 1-5); the swift punishment which is about to overtake these unjust judges, and for which the Psalmist prays (vs. 6-9); lastly, the joy of those who shall behold their overthrow, and who shall acknowledge that, however the name of justice may have been profaned by human judges who abuse their office, there is, nevertheless, a righteous Judge in the earth (vs. 10, 11). P.

1. The interrogation expresses wonder, as at something scarcely creditable. Can it be so? Is it possible? Are you really silent, you whose very office is to speak for God and against the sins of men? That the speaking here meant is judicial speaking appears from the more specific parallel expression. The address to them as sons of man reminds them of their own dependence and responsibility. A.—In silence. They are dumb when they ought to speak, as afterward they are said to be deaf when they ought to hear. P.

Do ye judge uprightly. He who is, or wishes to be, righteous in his Saviour’s righteousness is always the man who is also the most righteous in the discharge of all the duties of this present life. The question, therefore, takes an easy and necessary transit. In this very place, at this very moment, are you honest—honest to God and to your own souls in the work in which you are engaged? You have received the stewardship of many talents; where is the capital, and where is the interest ready to be given back to the Proprietor when He comes? “Are your minds set upon righteousness, O ye sons of man?” J. V.

2. Nay, in heart iniquities ye practise; in the land the violence of your hands ye weigh. Not contented with neglecting their official functions, they were guilty of positive injustice. The Hebrew for iniquities denotes various acts of injustice. The sense of weighing agrees well with the favorite idea of the scales of justice, which is found not only in the classics but in Scripture. The meaning, then, is that these wicked rulers, instead of weighing out justice to their subjects, weighed out, administered, dispensed the most violent injustice, and that, too, devised and practised by themselves. A.—So far from sustaining justice and right, they wrought wickedness, and this with the heart, through sympathy with wrong. How could the Lord endure that the courts of justice should themselves perpetrate monstrous iniquity in His own land! The fact gives the Psalmist a painfully keen sense of the terrible depravity of human hearts, as we see in the next verse. C.

3. Abandoning the form of address, he goes on to give a further description of their character in the third person. The object here is clearly not to insist upon the general truth of an innate depravity, but rather to mark the special character of these wicked men as men whose whole life has been one continuous, unchecked career of wickedness—bold, habitual, hardened transgressors, whose maturity in vice is what might be expected from their early depravity. P.

Go astray—speaking lies. Children can neither go nor speak as soon as born, but their first speaking is lying, and their first going is straying; yea, the first step they are able to take is a step out of the way. Caryl.—No sin can call Satan father like to lying. This sin of forging and lying is from the devil more than any; tastes of the devil more than any. Hence the very first depravation of our nature came in by lying, and our nature doth taste much still of this old block to be given to lying, the devil also breathing into us a strong breath to stir us up to lying. A liar, then, is as like the devil as ever he can look; as unlike to God as ever he can be. R. Capel.

As soon as they be born. This is saying in a very strong way that the race take to sinning as early as they can, and sin with their whole heart in it. The last words of the verse, “speaking lies,” fortunately guard us against imputing to David or to the inditing Spirit the idea that infants do in fact begin to sin from their very birth. Nothing in this passage justifies us in assuming that there is sin where there is no evidence of thought, of knowledge of God and duty, or of voluntary moral choice. C.

4,5. Their wickedness is desperate, for they are like the adder, which the subtlest charmer cannot tame. The adder is mentioned as peculiarly dangerous. P.—The “adder,” or “asp,” is the haje naja, or cobra of Egypt, according to Cuvier. The hearing of all the serpent tribes is imperfect, as all are destitute of a tympanic cavity and of external openings to the ear. The “deaf adder” is not a particular species. The point of the rebuke is, the pathen, or “adder,” here in question could hear in some degree, but would not; just as the unrighteous judges or persecutors of David could hear with their outward ears such appeals as he makes in vs. 1, 2, but would not. The charmer usually could charm the serpent by shrill sounds, either of his voice or of the flute, the serpent’s comparative deafness rendering it the more amenable to those sounds which it could hear. But exceptional cases occurred of a “deaf adder” which was deaf only in the sense that it refused to hear or to be acted on. Fausset.

The poison or virus of wickedness in man may be compared with the poison of the serpent in the points of its power of mischief and of its terrible malignity, yet with no assumption of moral quality in the serpent. The comparison cannot “go on all fours.” We need not suppose that in David’s view man’s poison of depravity runs in his blood—belongs to his physical nature in precisely the same sense as in the serpent’s. C.

6. There is an abrupt change in the image employed. As these men are incorrigible in their wickedness, as they cannot be tamed, the Psalmist prays God to destroy their power for mischief; but instead of continuing the figure of the serpent-charmer, who robs the serpent of his poison, he suddenly represents them as young lions, whose teeth he would see broken that they may no longer devour.

7. Then in a series of bold figures he draws further the picture of the destruction which he would fain see come upon them. The first is taken from water running away, and so wasted and lost (comp. 2 Sam. 14 : 14); the next from arrows shot, but with their points broken off and blunted, so that they fail to inflict a wound. P.

8. As a snail melts, let him go. The idea of speedy and entire disappearance is still more strongly expressed here. The meaning of the word translated snail rests upon rabbinical tradition and a doubtful etymology. A.—The allusion is to the slimy trail which the snail leaves behind it, so that it seems to waste away. Evidently this is nothing more than a poetical hyperbole. P.—Let his march be like the snail’s crawl—the point of the figure being the melting away of substance and power—according to the current notion that the snail used himself up by locomotion, perhaps depositing the slime of his body so as to exhaust the body itself. C.

9. The general sense of this difficult verse seems to be this: As a sudden whirlwind in the desert sweeps away the thorns which have been gathered for cooking almost as soon as they have been set on fire, and before the caldron has grown hot, so shall the wicked and all their yet incomplete designs be swept away by the wrath of God. P.—Feel, perceive the heat. The thorn, used as fuel, kindles quickly and immediately burns out, so that this comparison suggests the idea of a very sudden change. The verse may be paraphrased: “Before the seething pot of your contrivances begins to feel the quickly kindled heat which you apply to it, the tempest of Divine wrath carries you away, whether your mess be cooked or raw.” A.—Here we must think of cooking done in the open air, and the pots heated with the thorn-bush for fuel. Sudden gusts of wind sweep the fuel away before any heat is felt. So let the concocting of wicked schemes be suddenly blasted by the breath of the Almighty! Before your pot shall feel the heat of the thorn-fire, let Him (God) sweep the fuel, green or dry, away with His whirlwind. C.

10. A broad and vital distinction is to be made between desire for the gratification of personal vengeance and zeal for the vindication of the glory of God. “The glory of God” includes necessarily the real good of the offender and the well-being of society. Desire for retaliation is always wrong; desire for retribution may be in the highest degree praiseworthy. For personal motives only can I desire retaliation upon the wrong-doer; but for motives most disinterested and noble I may desire retribution. R. A. Bertram.

11. “Verily,” in very deed, “there is a reward for the righteous.” If nothing else be true this is. The godly are not forsaken and given over to their enemies; the wicked are not to have the best of it, truth and goodness are recompensed in the long run. “Verily He is a God that judgeth in the earth.” All men shall be forced by the sight of the final judgment to see that there is a God, and that He is the righteous Ruler of the universe. Two things will come out clearly after all—there is a God and there is a reward for the righteous. Time will remove doubts, solve difficulties, and reveal secrets; meanwhile, faith’s foreseeing eye discerns the truth even now, and is glad. S.

These manifestations of God’s righteous retribution will be so clear that the righteous cannot mistake His hand or His heart either. They will rejoice most assuredly, and most righteously, too; for ought they not to sympathize with righteousness, to mourn over abounding and mischievous wickedness, and be glad when God puts forth his strong arm to suppress it? Indeed they will have occasion to say, “Of a truth, there is a God! Most certainly He will reward the righteous”—the suffering and oppressed ones who stand with Him in right doing and in the love of righteousness. In His own time He will judge the earth and bring the wicked to an exemplary and righteous doom! C.