by Brian Allred
“A plague on both your houses.” So spoke the dying Mercutio about both the Montagues and Capulets in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The phrase can rightly be understood as an imprecation. An imprecation, from the Latin imprecatio, is a prayer invoking disaster or judgment upon an enemy or wrongdoer.
Long before appearing in Shakespearian tragedies, imprecations could be found in the Bible. While the New Testament is not devoid of imprecations [1], most occur in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms [2]. A sampling of imprecations from the psalms [3] includes:
“Repay them for their deeds and for their evil work; repay them for what their hands have done and bring back upon them what they deserve. Since they show no regard for the works of the LORD and what his hands have done, he will tear them down and never build them up again.” – Psalm 28:4–5
“Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive; for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart.” – Psalm 55:15
“O God, break the teeth in their mouths; tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord! Let them vanish like water that runs away; when he aims his arrows, let them be blunted. Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child who never sees the sun. Sooner than your pots can feel the heat of thorns, whether green or ablaze, may he sweep them away! The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.” – Psalm 58:6-10
“Pour out your indignation upon them, and let your burning anger overtake them. May their camp be a desolation; let no one dwell in their tents … Add to them punishment upon punishment; may they have no acquittal from you. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous.” – Psalm 69:24-25, 27-28
“May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow! May his children wander about and beg, seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit! May the creditor seize all that he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil! Let there be none to extend kindness to him, nor any to pity his fatherless children! May his posterity be cut off; may his name be blotted out in the second generation! – Psalm 109:9-13
“O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” – Psalm 137:8-9
“Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! … Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.” – Psalm 139:19, 21-22
These and other similar passages [4] can be quite unsettling, and they raise a number of questions. What are we to make of them? Are these kinds of prayers permissible for Christians today? Are these kinds of songs proper for Christian worship? How are they compatible with the teaching of Jesus to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, and to pray for —not against—those who abuse us? [5]
Some critics dismiss entirely the appropriateness of using imprecations today. In his Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis concludes: “The hatred is there… we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves… The reaction of the Psalmists to injury, though profoundly natural, is profoundly wrong” [6]. But it seems more likely to me that Lewis is the one with the wrong reaction when we remember that the psalms were more than individual reactions to injury—they supplied Israel as a whole with their songbook for worship. Additionally, when Paul writes that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” [7], this includes the imprecations in the psalms.
So how can imprecations be useful for teaching, correction, and training us today? When thinking about how we can best interpret and apply biblical imprecations, we should keep the following truths in mind.
1. We’re reading poetry when we read the psalms.
We do well to remember that the psalms are poetry, not prose [8]. This means we should expect to find language that is often strongly emotive, colorful, amplified, and elevated in intensity—this includes even passages that are not imprecatory. Consider the exaggerated language of Psalm 22:6: “I am a worm and not a man.” Note how the psalmist’s longing is put so vividly in Psalm 42:1: “As the deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” At times, the psalmist expresses a heightened sense of anguish, like in Psalm 102:3: “For my days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace.” A similar tone of despair at the thought of divine desertion is detected in Psalm 13:1: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”
That the psalms are poetry does not mean that the writers aren’t stating truth. It does mean, however, that they’re stating truth with a measure of lyrical license. It’s not that they aren’t communicating genuine feelings, only that they’re communicating (poetically) genuine feelings. We should keep this poetic element in mind when we read imprecations.
2. Imprecations in the Bible exhibit a valid concern for justice.
The imprecations in the psalms are sometimes mislabeled as curses. They are not curses. Rather, they are prayers—prayers for God to judge wrongdoers for crimes perpetrated. Think of family members of a murdered loved one seeking a sentence from the judge that punishes the guilty to the fullest extent of the law. That’s not a curse. Nor is it vengeance. It’s a desire for justice. Imprecations are analogous to that: they reflect a concern for right and wrong—and for wrong to be abolished and judged. The imprecatory prayers are petitions asking God to repay accordingly for wrongs committed.
One might conclude that such petitions are never appropriate. But what prayers might you be inclined to offer if you lived in Nigeria where recently Christians have been the victims of violence and cruelty. According to a June 2026 report from the United Nations, Christians in Nigeria have been the targets of killings, attacks on churches and villages, mass displacement, and mob violence linked to accusations of blasphemy. There are frequent reports of women being sexually assaulted, young children being abducted, coerced child marriages, and forced conversions [9].
Facing such hostility is a present reality for some Christians. Rory Prest rightly observes: “Most commentators read the psalms from the comfortable perspective of security and economic affluence. Few have experienced the agony of utterly unprovoked, naked aggression and gross exploitation. It is questionable whether such a detached discussion on responding to enemies would take place in the face of people with manifestly evil intentions” [10]. It’s much easier to disparage the imprecatory prayers in the Bible when we do so from the luxury of our couches.
3. The imprecatory psalms are impassioned appeals to God; they are not personal acts of revenge.
The imprecations we find in Scripture are prayers, not acts of revenge. The psalmist is not performing vigilante justice. Rather, he is bringing his concern before God and asking God to bring about justice. Christian author Federico Villanueva rightly recognizes that “it is much better to pray that God punish the wicked than to do it yourself. Rather than take the law into your own hands, go to the One who is righteous and just, and ask him to do something about the situation” [11].
We are invited, like the psalmists, to bring our concerns for justice to God in prayer—and then leave the matter in his hands. In a world gone wrong, we are taught to pray for God’s kingdom to come in its fullness [12]. In praying that, we are asking “that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed” [13]. It’s right to want to see everything opposed to God’s kingdom subdued, overthrown, and eliminated—but we ask God to do this. The psalmist, in fact, does what Paul instructs us to do in Romans 12:19: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”
It’s right to want to see everything opposed to God’s kingdom subdued, overthrown, and eliminated—but we ask God to do this.
Someone might object by pointing out that Paul immediately goes on to say: “To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” [14]. These additional instructions might seem to prohibit imprecations. And if we’re strictly talking about our enemies, perhaps they do. But the imprecations in the Bible are not spoken so much against our enemies as against God’s.
4. The imprecatory prayers in the Bible are primarily concerned with God’s enemies.
It’s important to realize that biblical imprecations aren’t provoked by petty personal grievances, nor are they directed first and foremost against personal adversaries. They are directed against the enemies of God, his kingdom, and, as a consequence, his people. The psalmist’s words are driven not by egocentric concerns but theocentric concerns. The targets of the imprecatory prayers are Satan and the seed-of-the-serpent activity opposed to God. This accent on the opponents of God is evident in Psalm 28:4-5: “Repay them for their deeds and for their evil work; repay them for what their hands have done and bring back upon them what they deserve. Since they show no regard for the works of the LORD and what his hands have done, he will tear them down and never build them up again.” We hear the psalmist plead in Psalm 83:1-2: “O God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still, O God! For behold, your enemies make an uproar; those who hate you have raised their heads.” It is their hatred for God that gives rise to their plots against his people in v. 3: “They lay crafty plans against your people. Consider again the words of Psalm 139:19-20: “Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me! They speak against you with malicious intent; your enemies take your name in vain.”
But what about psalms in which personal grievances are prominent? This would include something like Psalm 55:12-13: “For it is not an enemy who taunts me—then I could bear it; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—then I could hide from him. But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend.” He then prays in v. 15: “Let death steal over them; let them go down to Sheol alive; for evil is in their dwelling place and in their heart.” It would appear that the psalmist speaks imprecations against those who have wronged him personally. In these kinds of psalms, we need to remember that David is usually the author and David doesn’t stand for “everyman”; David is the king, God’s anointed one [15]. To be aligned against God’s anointed king is to be aligned against God and his kingdom. And as these imprecations should be interpreted as tightly connected to the king, they should be interpreted as tightly connected to Jesus.
5. The imprecatory prayers point us to Jesus Christ.
The imprecations point to Jesus as the true king, the Greater David, the righteous sufferer who looks to God to vindicate him, protect him, and deliver him in the face of torment at the hands of his enemies. The enemies chiefly in view for Jesus are death and the devil: his—and our—ultimate enemies.
At the same time, they also point to Jesus as the one who mercifully bears the punishment his human enemies deserve for their rebellion and opposition toward God. In our fallen condition, all of us live as enemies of God [16] and are redeemed only by Jesus bearing judgment in our place at the cross. Grace may come freely to us but it is merited for us by Jesus at great cost to himself. The divine judgment invoked in the imprecations falls on Jesus so that it doesn’t fall on us.
This truth bids us to curb our demands for justice by mingling them with prayers for mercy. For example, as Christians we can pray that God would act justly for our cause (his cause) and also that God might convert enemies into friends [17]. We should understand that divine judgment can be used as a tool to inflict temporal misery so that his enemies might turn to him for eternal salvation [18]. Asaph seems to have this in mind in Psalm 83:16 when he writes concerning the enemies of God and of his people: “Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek your name, O Lord.
As Christians we can pray that God would act justly for our cause (his cause) and also that God might convert enemies into friends.
Finally, the imprecatory prayers point us to Jesus as the one to whom final judgment is given. One day he is returning to judge the living and dead and to vanquish everyone and everything standing in opposition to God’s righteous objectives. The imprecatory prayers remind us that final judgment is coming.
6. The imprecations in the Bible look forward to the reality of final judgment.
Our prayers for divine justice against kingdom enemies should be tempered with pleas for God’s mercy to convert our adversaries. But given the outcome of final judgment revealed in the Bible, praying for the conversion of Satan is unwarranted and misguided. We are to pray, instead, for his complete and eternal destruction—and that of his seed [19]. It is good and right that final judgment is coming—as the psalmist proclaims: “Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth.” This is good not because justice will finally eliminate mercy, but because justice will finally eliminate injustice: “He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity” [20]. No one who orients himself to a life of evil, violence, immorality, and wickedness, or who persistently sets the trajectory of his life away from the fear of the Lord will, in the end, “get away with it.”
The Judge is coming to set things right—we should properly rejoice in that. And as we wait, the imprecations in the Bible provide us with divinely inspired language to express our longing for justice in a world of wrongs, our hope in the triumph of God’s righteousness over sin, and our grief in the face of wickedness. As Daniel Hyde points out: “Imprecatory psalms do not teach us how to hate. They teach us how to lament when evil feels unbeatable” [21]. If we can’t go to God with our sense of helplessness and grief in the face of pain inflicted by our enemies, if we can’t go to God to find hope, if we can’t go to God with our longings for righteous judgment, to whom shall we turn? The imprecations are examples of how we can go to God and pray “thy kingdom come,” and entreat him to intervene against every hindrance to his reign in the here and now so his glory can advance.
Conclusion
Divine judgment upon our enemies certainly isn’t all, or even mainly, what we pray for. We should note well that the imprecatory prayers aren’t the dominant tone in the Psalter so they shouldn’t be the dominant tone in our prayers either. But the biblical imprecations remind us that there is a legitimate place for righteous anger and a longing for justice in our prayers and worship. There were times when “out of zeal for God and abhorrence of sin, the psalmist called on God to punish the wicked and to vindicate His righteousness” [22], and there will be times we do the same.
But we should exercise caution. Differentiating between our desire for godly justice and our desire for personal vengeance is difficult, especially when we’re the ones directly impacted and afflicted with suffering. As cited earlier, we hear David testify to his hatred for those who rise up against God in Psalm 139:22: “I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.” But it’s instructive for our own practice that after these words, he prays: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! [23]
We should note well that the imprecatory prayers aren’t the dominant tone in the Psalter so they shouldn’t be the dominant tone in our prayers either. But the biblical imprecations remind us that there is a legitimate place for righteous anger and a longing for justice in our prayers and worship.
So what do we do in light of the imprecations we read in Scripture? With a proper zeal for God’s glory and honor, we express our righteous anger to God in the face of wrongs—and trustingly leave justice in his hands. We humbly ask God to expose our unrighteous anger—and ask for forgiveness. And we bring our uncertainty to God when we don’t know which is which—and ask for wisdom.
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[1] See Revelation 6:10: “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” See also Romans 11:9-10 and Acts 1:20 which quote imprecations from the Old Testament).
[2] In addition to the psalms, there are also imprecations in the prophetic writings. For example, see Jeremiah 11:18-20; 15:15; 17:18; 18:21; 20:12.
[3] Some psalms are labeled “imprecatory psalms,” though as Daniel R. Hyde points out, it is more accurate to speak of imprecations in the Psalms than to speak of “imprecatory psalms,” as imprecations constitute one feature of certain psalms. See Daniel R. Hyde, “Don’t Avoid Imprecatory Psalms: How to Preach the Cursing Prayers” https://www.logos.com/grow/min-how-to-preach-imprecatory-psalms/
[4] For other imprecations in the psalms, see 35:4-8; 79:6–7, 12, 83:9–17; 140:9–10.
[5] See Luke 6:27-28.
[6]. C. S. Lewis, “Reflections on the Psalms” in The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis (New York, NY: Inspirational Press, 1994), 143, 145.
[7] See 2 Timothy 3:16.
[8] Bruce Waltke and Fred Zaspel, How to Read and Understand the Psalms (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 311.
[10] Rory Prest, “Enemies in the Psalms” (unpublished paper, Regent College, 1980), 8; quoted in Bruce Waltke and Fred Zaspel, How to Read and Understand the Psalms, 311.
[11] Federico G. Villanueva, It’s OK to Be Not OK: Preaching the Lament Psalms (Carlisle, Cumbria: Langham Preaching Resources, 2017), 90.
[12] See Matthew 6:10; Luke 11:2.
[13] See Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 191.
[14] See Romans 12:20-21.
[15] The Hebrew term for “anointed one” is Messiah (מָשִׁיחַ). This is translated in the New Testament as “Christ” (Χριστός).
[16] See Romans 5:10.
[17] See Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 191: “that the ordinances of Christ may be purely dispensed, and made effectual to the converting of those that are yet in their sins.”
[18] We shouldn’t necessarily read all the imprecatory prayers in the Bible as if they are prayers for every enemy to be consigned to hell. Some imprecations could be uttered as a request for God to remove from the stage of history without a view to their eternal fate those who are – intentionally or unintentionally – hindering the advance of the kingdom or obscuring his truth. Prayers for temporal justice – even if severe – can (and should) be distinguished from prayers for someone’s eternal damnation.
[19] We should be tentative in identifying the seed of the serpent with specific individuals today because we do not know with certainty who they are. The apostle Paul appeared to be a sure bet before his Damascus road experience. So we can pray that our enemies be converted according to God’s mercy – like Paul – or temporally removed according to God’s justice – lie Pharoah – while leaving their state in the hereafter to God’s omniscient wisdom.
[20] See Psalm 98:8-9.
[21] Daniel R. Hyde, “Don’t Avoid Imprecatory Psalms.
[22] J. Carl Laney, “A Fresh Look at the Imprecatory Psalms,” Bibliotheca Sacra 138 (1981): 44.
[23] See Psalm 139:23-24.