Psalm Chapter 58

Psalm 58: The Deaf Adder and the God Who Judges

This is one of those psalms that makes the modern reader flinch, and perhaps it should. David turns his gaze upon corrupt judges — men entrusted with righteousness who deal out violence instead — and his imagery is ferocious: serpents with stopped ears, lions whose teeth must be broken, snails dissolving in their own slime. We want to look away. But before we do, we might ask why these images disturb us so. Is it not because we have grown comfortable with injustice, provided it does not touch us personally? The psalmist has not. He sees crooked power for what it is and refuses to call it anything else. The deaf adder is a particularly haunting image — a creature so committed to its own venom that it has made itself immune to any voice that might call it back. And the psalm ends not in despair but in a strange, fierce hope: "Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth." The world is not, in the end, a place where wickedness has the last word.

00:00 Do Ye Indeed Speak Righteousness?
01:00 Verily There Is a God That Judgeth