Psalm 58 is one of those troublesome hymns that seems much too honest for our polite, bourgeois church language. Other than the first couple of verses, it contains a string of invectives that seem to fantasize about a world in which evil people (“those with venom like the serpent”) get their due comeuppance. From the comforts of our upper middle class suburban dens, it all seems much to hot, too harsh to be something in the Bible. Except for the first two verses.
The first two verses, however, offer a different frame. The first line (not counting the superscription, which tags the psalm as a hymn for the choirmaster, perhaps sung to the ancient tune “Do not destroy,” whatever that was) reads in Hebrew: ha’umnam ‘elem tsedeq tedabberun (“Is it really so that you speak justice, ‘-l-m”). The three consonants aleph-lamedh-mem (the second word in Hebrew) can be read as an adjective meaning “silent” or an adverb meaning “silently” (Hebrew doesn’t really distinguish between adjectives and adverbs most of the time). Most medieval Jewish commentators read it that way. Thus Rashi, in the eleventh century, imagines that the psalm relates to the story of David entering Saul’s camp and sparing the king’s life. The proper response to such an act of mercy would be to search for a new level of justice in their relationship, which was not forthcoming. People were wrongly silent about fairness and equity.
Modern scholars have tended to read aleph-lamedh-mem differently, as the word for “gods,” which would have the same consonants. Thus the NRSV translates the opening line of the psalm as “do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?” If that is the right translation, as I think it is, then the psalm calls into question a social order in which various deities sit atop a social structure marked by injustice and oppression. Like Amos and Micah, and their much later descendant Marx, the psalmist thinks that religion can, under certain circumstances, go terribly awry and be used to support terrible injustice. Certainly there’s a lot to back up that assertion, as we have seen in our times with priest abuse scandals, fraud among televangelists, and the political coverage that some ministers have given to political leaders pursuing unjust wars. Religion can at times be the opiate of the people, and like all opiates, it can kill.
But the psalmist is no agnostic. He or she offers a religious alternative to religious corruption. It is faith in a God who does command justice and carries it out, and who is skilled enough at judging human beings to discriminate accurately between the just and the unjust. This God is not impressed by political propaganda that defines evil as what our enemies do and goodness as what we do. This God recognizes that torture is torture and humiliation of the vulnerable is always evil. This God does not relish being used for the narrow purposes of human powermongers seeking to defer the day of their own reckoning or divert the attention of others from their evil deeds. As the psalm ends, it imagines a state in which human beings can recognize that God brings about righteousness on earth. Surely, as Jesus himself said in the Sermon on the Mount, such a realization is a major goal of the faith of Israel and all its heirs, including us.
This psalm comes to my own life at a time when I am asking if I am radical enough in my pursuit of justice, or whether I am not too often selling out. There are many layers to that inquiry, and I will not bother you with them now. But I would recommend a book that is helping me, Terry Eagleton’s 2009 volume “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” (Yale University Press). He manages to take on critics of Christianity from his own perspective, which takes seriously Marxist insights into the corruptions of all political and social systems AND takes seriously the claims of Christianity. It’s a fun read, and even you’re not a Marxist (which I am not), you find yourself wanting to read more. Often you will disagree (why read a book you always agree with? that’s a waste of time if ever there was one), but you will not be bored. And your faith will be deepened. I think our psalmist would’ve liked it too. The banality of much of American culture, the secular indifference to the suffering of people, and the self-indulgence of so much of American Christianity all come under examination. That’s healthy. And I come under examination too. More on that another time.