Psalm 58: No One Mourns The Wicked
Imagine telling your Creator that some of their creations were created wrong
At the beginning of the musical Wicked, Glinda questions “Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” The psalmist in 58:4 unequivocally states, “The wicked are ‘strange’ from birth.”
The psalmist considers himself wiser than an omniscient God, that such a god needs his advice on how to judge and how to be just.
Imagine telling your Creator that some of their creations were created wrong. Imagine callously praying to God, flippantly using a simile of a miscarriage, without giving any thought to the associated pain to those who have experienced them (58:9). Imagine thinking that the truly righteous celebrates the deaths of masses who didn’t know any better, to the point where he bathes his feet in their blood (58:11). And imagine thinking that anyone else is going to look at you and say, as you are bloody from the carnage surrounding you, “wow, this is the reward for the righteous.” (58:12).
The psalmist describes these wicked people like a serpent who purposely deafens itself, so as not to listen to the snake charmers or magicians (58:5-6), a rather unique way of describing someone. “They just don’t listen to anyone.”
The word in 58:4 “zoru” is from the verb for foreigner, outsider, alien. Seemingly, just like the Greek root xenos, like xenophobia. But the Septuagint doesn’t translate the phrase with xenos, rather with allos, the other. We see the two words contrasted in Psalms 69:8, “I am the ‘other’ (allos) to my brothers and a ‘foreigner’ (xenos) to my family.”
In Ruth, when she bows down to Boaz in Ruth 2:10, and calls herself a foreigner, it’s translated as xenos. In Job 31:29-32, he writes how he never rejoiced over the destruction of his enemy, nor did he ever sin by cursing him. On the contrary, he describes the bloodlust of his family as insatiable, just like we read in Ps. 58:11. And then he says that he never let a foreigner (xenos) spend the night outside, rather he opened his doors to all guests.
In Leviticus 10:1, Aaron’s sons worshiped a different way by taking a “strange fire” (allos), and were killed for it.
That is the distinction between the other and the outsider. The other is a member of the family. They are known from birth. They are expected to fall in line, and listen to the snake oil salesmen, and it is frustrating when they don’t. They should belong, but they don’t. They aren’t foreign, they “choose to be” different.
And that infuriates the psalmist more than anything. Enough to wish they were never born. Enough to pray for horrible violence to befall them. Enough to imagine that outsiders will celebrate him for his righteousness in his rejection of them.
Enough to inform God that they are wicked, not the other way around.