(director: of David, lyric)

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Psalms of vengeance have range because revenge itself has range. It stretches from cries for rescue with very little interest in penalties (e.g., Pss 20, 22, 26) to the call for an ordered and just society (e.g., Pss 5, 11, 94), to the cool utilitarian logic that roots bad outcomes in bad deeds (e.g., Ps 52), to the calculated plotting of getting even (e.g., Pss 12, 64, 137), to that whetstone of the sword of Macbeth, rage, that blinding fire in the eyes (e.g., Pss 58:10-11, 69:22-28, 78:44-51, 78:58-64, 79:10-12). Speakers in the book of Psalms express all of these at times, from lines of retribution like “return to them | their recompense” (Ps 28:4), “let lips that lie be tied” (Ps 31:18), and “fight | who fight me” (Ps 35:1) to hoist-on-their-own-petard lines like “fell them | by their own schemes” (Ps 5:10), “his harm returns | to his head / on his skull | his cruelty comes down” (Ps 7:16), and “they dug me a pit / they fell inside” (Ps 57:6); from mild imprecations like “may they blanch | and blush” (e.g., Ps 40:14=70:2, and more) to curses couched in metaphors like “make them | like the whirlwind” (Ps 83:13) to terrible, murderous fury: “send them | down to the pit of the grave” (Ps 55:23), “you wipe out / their offspring | from the human race” (Ps 20:9c-10b), “let there be no one for him | to extend care / no one to feel | for his orphans” (Ps 109:12) and “let their base | be pillaged / in their tents / leave no one left” (Ps 69:25).

The second part of Psalm 139 presented, then startled back from, one of the more extreme retaliatory formulations in the book: “Oh let God kill | a cheat / you bloodthirsty | get away from me” (139:19). By contrast with its neighbor and with much of the rest of the volume, Psalm 140 shows extraordinary control. Here there is neither bloodlust nor protests of innocence nor avoidance. Three selah markers (140: 3, 5, 8) neatly divide the psalm in four sections, four six-line stanzas with a four-line coda. The first three stanzas focus on machinations, on villains’ plots and preparations for villainy, which makes the entire psalm strikingly less about retribution than about readiness. The intervention the speaker describes— or wishes for— in the fourth stanza is preventive, not punitive.

Badness and cruelty, paired explicitly twice (1, 11) have led the speaker to call for protection: “Free me, Lord” (1a) is matched by “Guard me, Lord” (4a), and each is followed by “from anyone cruel | protect me” (1b, 4b), followed by “they who’ve plotted” (2a, 4c). The first stanza features mostly intentions, “bad things in the heart” (4c) and a waiting for snakelike speech. The second stanza shows plans that have taken their first steps, “a trap and ropes… a net… snares” (5). The third stanza calls the Lord’s name four times (out of seven total in the psalm) to stop things before they can start: “don’t give, Lord | the rogue his passions / don’t permit his ploys | or they’ll take off” (8).

All of this is to say that the fourth stanza of Psalm 140 is not a call for indiscriminate slaughter or eternal punishment in a fiery or watery hell. One could be forgiven for reducing the entire book of Psalms to a four-word synopsis— “They surround us. Help.” Personal lamenting of siege mirrors the national fear of persecution by others. And so “the head of | who surround me” (9a) is as surely some foreign general, the Assyrian Rab-Shakeh, some satrap, some Herod, as it is the pate of one individual’s individual foe. The political is personal. Every other line in this stanza, in verses 9-11, can be parsed as either jussive or declarative in the imperfect form: that is, “let the harm of his lips | surmount him” could be “the harm of his lips | surmounts him” or “the harm of his lips | will surmount him.” The difference has everything to do with how actively one imagines God intervenes, which is to say, how automatically do bad consequences follow from cruel behaviors? Still, regardless of the translation, the stanza shows “coals aflame” and “trenches” (or whatever sodden pit is intended) not as figures for an afterlife of everlasting torment, but as the anticipatory flicking-off of a bug that might bite.

This point matters because there are plenty of readers who mistake this psalm as evidence of a conception of hell, which it decidedly is not. It is, rather, a vision of an ideal society in this world in which the poor and weak, the just and the level of heart, have found an advocate and a home, protected from anyone and everyone who would do or even wish them harm.