Canter Bridge

‘Let death take my enemies by surprise’, the psalmist cries out in the fifty-fifth of the Bible’s one hundred fifty psalms …

Let them go down alive to the grave, for evil finds lodging among them. (Psalm 55:15 NIV)

We rightly wonder whether the Bible is a violent book, too full of holy war and vengeance for the tastes and needs of civilized moderns. We ask ourselves whether an honest reading of this book might well promote the kind of division and exclusion that we least want to characterize our life together.

The question must remain open, yet there is grist for that meditative mill in the psalms before us.

In each of these poems, the writer is preoccupied with severe conflict. When we read that ‘Strangers are attacking me / Ruthless men seek my life’, we are not wrong to assume that the situation may involve actual life and death. That is, urgency is shaped from the raw matter of survivability in a world where we discover that people hate us for who we are, for what we’ve done, for an identity that represents a deep contradiction of their own.

If the fifty-fourth psalm encourages that conclusion, Psalm fifty-five describes internecine conflict:

If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were reading himself against me,
I could hide from him.
But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
as we walked with the throng in the house of God.

Returning to the fifty-fourth, the psalmist’s ambitions for those who hate him are blunt and final:

Let evil recoil on those who slander me;
in your faithfulness destroy them. (Psalm 54:5 NIV)

Whether we imagine scenes of physical violence or merely the potent vitriol of words, the language of destruction on the biblical pray-er’s lips intends only the most terminal retribution for the heads of his adversaries.

Is this terrorism by another name, the willingness to terminate one’s enemies, a we-vs.-they moral architecture that leaves room for only one of two warring parties to exist? Lebensraum for one, anyone?

That would, alas, be a mistaken conclusion, one that takes too little account of the dynamics of prayer in the biblical psalms.

In a concrete sense, the psalmist either prays or slays. Because he lifts his rancorous burden to a God whom he considers tasked with the obligation to establish justice and punish the unjust persecutor, he no longer bears that unending burden on his own frail shoulders. There is an implicit option for pacificism in the biblical prayers, not a pacifism that denies that warfare ever has its rightful and terrible place, but rather a deliberate shifting of the burden of punishment and defense into the divine sphere.

The psalmist, one gathers, does not lay down his pen to pick up his sword. Rather he takes up pen in order to leave sword in its place.

This implicit dynamic of prayer is affirmed more explicity in more than one of these psalms. The fifty-fifth, for example, brings the most light to this question. It ends in almost pious repose:

Cast your cares on the Lord
and he will sustain you;
he will never let the righteous fall.
But you, O God, will bring down the wicked
into the pit of corruption;
bloodthirsty and deceitful men will not live out half their days.

But as for me, I trust in you.

In a day when religiously-inspired violence has long since left the safe confines of the theoretical, it is important that we consider with caution the moral leveling of religions that would see each of them as equally an exercise in violent power, the metaphenomenon of a more fundamental lust to survive and to survive alone.

The psalms interpose prayer into such unified theories. In so doing, they break the momentum and bend a spoke or two, requiring us to think again about those who kill, who might kill, who refuse to kill. And whether trust in YHWH somehow short-circuits the undying logic of blood spilt in the name of what is right.