Grant on the imprecatory psalms

My wife, a professional biblical scholar by trade, recently pointed me to this article by Jamie A. Grant: Crisis, Cursing and the Christian: Reading Imprecatory Psalms in the Twenty-First Century (Foundations: No.74 Spring 2018). Here is an excerpt:

Clearly, at least within contemporary Western brands of Christianity, we are uncomfortable with the imprecations. In most of our lectionary traditions, imprecatory voices are not read, and the same is true in traditions where psalms are sung. Equally clearly, many interpreters are sceptical about the continued validity of such expressions in the Christian era. What, therefore, are we to do with psalms such as Psalm 69 that calls for the death of enemies or Psalm 137 that appears to eulogise the killing of babies? While remaining troubled by these voices in Scripture, many Christian readers are instinctively cautious about removing, either literally or functionally, sections of Scripture simply because they make us uncomfortable or because they are difficult to understand. So, the question remains: should we, can we, adopt such words as our own in our experience of worship? . . .

[T]he imprecations bring attention to violence suffered by the weak. Perhaps our reluctance to appropriate the psalms of enmity is rooted in the comfort of our lives. We face no great harm and we seldom experience personal evils. Most of us would not consider ourselves as having “enemies” per se. Therefore the language of enmity seems alien and, in some sense, inappropriate. There are many people throughout this world – Christians and not – who experience the reality of enmity in ways unimaginable to the majority of us. The imprecations give us a prayer language to address such evil. Whether this is the persecuted church in parts of the Arab world or girls trafficked from abroad and abused on our own doorsteps, the imprecations encourage us, as readers, to personally embody the traumas of others and to declare before the Creator, “That’s not right! You must do something about it!” The wrongs in our world are flagrant, obvious and raw. The imprecations force us to side with the persecuted and to call for cosmic justice. . . .

The imprecatory voice is every bit as important to the community of faith today as it was in the days of the psalmists. Obviously, there is a teaching task related to this challenge. It would be wrong to appropriate the imprecatory psalms in public worship without first teaching what they are and how they work. Their interface with New Testament ethics is an interesting question and one that creates a slightly different dynamic. However, the essence of what imprecations are and what they do remains essentially unchanged. All of the psalms provide us with a spiritual vocabulary for encounter with God in every circumstance. The psalms of enmity provide the Christian reader with the means of dealing with the evils of human experience in a way that is true to the divine abhorrence of social injustice and to our own loathing of the moral abominations that are all too prevalent in our world. Far from removing ourselves from these psalms, given the world in which we live, we should embrace them as our own.

Several years ago, on a friend's recommendation, I read Grant's book, The King as Exemplar: The Function of Deuteronomy's Kingship Law in the Shaping of the Book of Psalms, a fascinating study of the canonical ordering of Psalms 19-21 based on the deliberate juxtaposition of wisdom and royal psalms. Jamie Grant is Vice-Principal (Academic) and Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Highland Theological College at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.