What Are the Imprecatory Psalms?

Somebody did you wrong. Not a little wrong. The kind of wrong that sits on your chest at 2 a.m. And if you grew up in church, you probably learned to handle it the respectable way: smile, say “God’s got it,” and keep the real feelings somewhere nobody can see them.

Here’s what a lot of us were never told. The Bible has a whole set of prayers for that exact feeling. In them, people of faith tell God, out loud and in detail, what they want to happen to the people who hurt them. They’re called the imprecatory psalms, and they are some of the most honest words in Scripture.

What “imprecatory” means

An imprecation is a prayer or declaration that calls for judgment, calamity or a curse on someone. J. Carl Laney, writing in Bibliotheca Sacra, adds a detail that changes how you read these psalms: a true imprecation is addressed to God. It’s a request, not a spell. The psalm writer isn’t cursing someone into bad luck. They’re bringing the case to the Judge.

That matters, because it means these prayers are not about taking matters into your own hands. They are about putting the matter into God’s.

Which psalms are imprecatory?

There’s no official list, and that’s not a dodge. It depends on whether you count only the psalms where the curse is the main event, or every psalm with a curse in it somewhere.

• Laney names nine where imprecation is a leading feature: Psalms 7, 35, 58, 59, 69, 83, 109, 137 and 139.
• John N. Day counts wider. He finds 98 verses of imprecation spread across 32 psalms, and 14 psalms where it is the defining element: 7, 35, 52, 55, 58, 59, 69, 79, 83, 94, 109, 129, 137 and 140.

If you want a place to start, here are a few, with what is happening in each one.

Psalm 109, the one everybody asks about

Psalm 109 opens with a man being lied about:

O God, whom I praise, don’t stand silent and aloof while the wicked slander me and tell lies about me.

Psalm 109:1-2 (NLT)

Then comes the line that makes it ache:

I love them, but they try to destroy me with accusations even as I am praying for them!

Psalm 109:4 (NLT)

He loved them. He prayed for them. They came for him anyway.

What follows, in verses 6 to 19, is a long list of curses: a short life, a lost position, a ruined family. Here’s something most people miss. Translations don’t agree on who is speaking. The New Living Translation, the one quoted on this site, begins verse 6 with “They say,” so in the NLT those curses are the accusers’ words about David. Other translations read the same verses as David’s own prayer. Laney looks hard at that “quotation” reading and rejects it. He calls it very strained even for Psalm 109, since nothing in the text signals a change of speaker, and it can’t work in the other imprecatory psalms at all.

Either way, the New Testament picks up verse 8. In Acts 1:20, Peter applies “Let someone else take his position” to Judas, the friend who betrayed Jesus. That’s why you’ll hear people ask whether Psalm 109 is about Judas. The honest answer is both: it’s David’s prayer about his own accusers, and the early church saw Judas’s betrayal in it.

And notice how it ends:

Help me, O Lord my God! Save me because of your unfailing love. Let them see that this is your doing, that you yourself have done it, Lord.

Psalm 109:26-27 (NLT)

Let them see that this is your doing. The whole psalm is a wounded man handing his case to God.

A word of care. You’ll find people online praying Psalm 109 at an ex or a coworker like it’s a hex with a Bible verse on it. That is not what this is. Prayer is not a spell, and God is not a weapon you get to aim. The psalm is a hurt person telling God the truth and asking God to judge rightly. And a God who judges rightly judges all of us, including me.

Psalm 137 and the verse that stops you cold

Psalm 137 comes out of exile. Babylon’s army destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in the 580s BC and carried many of its people away to Babylon. The psalm opens by the water:

Beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem.

Psalm 137:1 (NLT)

Their captors wanted entertainment. They wanted the exiles to sing the songs of home. And the psalm asks:

But how can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a pagan land?

Psalm 137:4 (NLT)

Then it ends here:

O Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you have done to us. Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!

Psalm 137:8-9 (NLT)

There is no softening that, and we shouldn’t try. This is what grief and rage sound like from people who had seen what a siege does to a city and its children (read Lamentations 2 if you can stand it). Scripture records the cry honestly. Recording it is not the same as endorsing it, and praying it is not the same as doing it. They said it to God. They did not pick up a rock.

If you come from a people who were carried away from home, Psalm 137 may not need much explaining. Enslaved Africans in America made their own songs of exile, longing and endurance. The Library of Congress counts the African American spiritual among the largest and most significant forms of American folksong. W. E. B. Du Bois called them the Sorrow Songs, and he heard in them “a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” That same faith runs under Psalm 137: what was done to us does not get the last word.

Isn’t this the opposite of “love your enemies”?

Fair question. Jesus said it plainly:

But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!

Matthew 5:44 (NLT)

And from the cross he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34, NLT)

But the New Testament doesn’t erase the cry for justice. In Revelation, the martyrs in heaven are still asking God “how long before you judge the people who belong to this world and avenge our blood for what they have done to us?” (Revelation 6:10, NLT) And Paul ties it together:

Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, “I will take revenge; I will pay them back,” says the Lord.

Romans 12:19 (NLT)

That is the move the imprecatory psalms make. They don’t take revenge. They hand it over. Paul says leave it to God, and the psalm writers leave it to God out loud. Asking God for justice and choosing to forgive are not opposites. For a lot of us, the first has to be said honestly before the second can be real.

What psychology says about praying your anger

I want to be careful here, because pop psychology loves to overpromise. Here’s what the research does and doesn’t show.

• Naming a feeling may take some of the charge out of it. In a UCLA brain-imaging study, choosing a word for the emotion on an upsetting face was linked to less activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional reactions, than simply looking at it (Lieberman et al., 2007). That’s a lab task with pictures, not real-life betrayal, but it points in the same direction as lament. Lament names things.
• Stuffing it has costs. People who habitually hid their emotions tended to report more negative emotion, less positive emotion and lower well-being, while people who tended to rethink a situation showed the opposite pattern (Gross & John, 2003). Those are patterns, not proof that holding it in causes harm.
• Replaying it can make it worse. In an experiment, angry people who hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who angered them ended up angrier than people who were distracted or did nothing, and they were more aggressive in a follow-up lab task. Doing nothing at all beat venting (Bushman, 2002). So “just let it out” is not the whole answer either.
• You are not the only believer who has been angry at God. Across a series of studies, people commonly reported anger toward God after painful events, and positive feelings toward God were still more common overall (Exline et al., 2011).

Put those together and you get something close to what the imprecatory psalms model: say it honestly, say it to God, and don’t camp there rehearsing it. Dominick Hankle, writing about these psalms in Christian counseling, makes a related point. They give voice to painful emotion, but taken at face value they can leave a person stuck in justified anger, so they need sound theology and movement toward resolution (Hankle, 2010).

And one more honest note: understanding all this won’t fix the feeling by itself. Insight is a start, not the finish line.

How to pray an imprecatory psalm (a gentle practice)

1. Pick one psalm. Psalm 35, 55 or 94 is a gentler place to start than 109 or 137. Read it slowly, out loud if you can.
2. Name what happened. Be specific. “I’m angry that she lied about me in that meeting” lands differently than “I’m upset.”
3. Say what you want, even the part you’re embarrassed by. God already knows. Being honest with God is not unbelief.
4. Hand it over. Pray Romans 12:19 back to God: you won’t take revenge, and you’re leaving it with the One who judges rightly.
5. Let God search you too. The same psalm that asks God to deal with the wicked ends like this: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.” (Psalm 139:23-24, NLT)
6. Take your next faithful step. That might be a boundary, a hard conversation, a report, a wise friend, your pastor or a licensed counselor. Lament is not a substitute for safety. If someone is hurting you, getting safe comes first.

I’ve confessed on Substack that I’m a complainer, and I’ve been making the case that complaining needs a rebrand. Start with Complaining Needs a Rebrand, then read Complaining Still Needs a Rebrand. And if you want the verses themselves, grouped by what you’re feeling, read Bible Verses About Anger.

Questions people ask

What does imprecatory mean?

An imprecation is a prayer that calls for judgment or a curse on someone. In the Psalms, imprecations are addressed to God: the writer asks God to bring justice instead of taking revenge personally.

How many imprecatory psalms are there?

It depends on how you count. J. Carl Laney names nine psalms where imprecation is a leading feature: 7, 35, 58, 59, 69, 83, 109, 137 and 139. John N. Day counts 98 imprecatory verses across 32 psalms and names 14 psalms where imprecation is the defining element.

Is it okay for Christians to pray the imprecatory psalms?

Many Christians do, as a way to bring anger and the desire for justice to God instead of acting on it. Romans 12:19 says never to take revenge and to leave it to God. Praying these psalms honestly and then releasing the outcome fits that. Using them as a curse to aim at someone does not.

Is Psalm 109 about Judas?

Psalm 109 is a prayer of David about his own accusers. In Acts 1:20, Peter applies verse 8, “Let someone else take his position,” to Judas, so Christians have also read the psalm as pointing to Judas and his betrayal.

What does Psalm 137:9 mean?

It is the cry of exiles after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, voicing grief and rage at what was done to them. Scripture records that cry honestly. It is spoken to God, not an instruction to act, and the New Testament teaches leaving vengeance to God (Romans 12:19).

Is it a sin to be angry at God?

Anger at God is common, and the Psalms bring it straight to God in prayer. Ephesians 4:26 warns against letting anger control you, not against feeling it. What matters is where you take it and what you do next.

Sources

1. Laney, J. C. (1981). A fresh look at the imprecatory psalms. Bibliotheca Sacra, 138, 35-45. biblicalelearning.org
2. Day, J. N. (2002). The imprecatory psalms and Christian ethics. Bibliotheca Sacra, 159, 166-186. galaxie.com
3. Hankle, D. D. (2010). The therapeutic implications of the imprecatory psalms in the Christian counseling setting. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 38(4), 275-280. doi.org
4. Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
5. Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
6. Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724-731. journals.sagepub.com
7. Exline, J. J., et al. (2011). Anger toward God: Social-cognitive predictors, prevalence, and links with adjustment to bereavement and cancer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(1), 129-148. pure.psu.edu
8. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). Of the sorrow songs. In The Souls of Black Folk. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
9. Library of Congress. Spirituals. Songs of America. loc.gov
10. New World Encyclopedia. Babylonian Exile. newworldencyclopedia.org

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.