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Imprecatory Psalms

13 Comments

Fundamentalists love the Psalms — especially the ones that involve praying down destruction, despair, and dental catastrophes upon their enemies. Having ones posterity cut off is also a sure crowd-pleaser.

It’s well enough to contemplate the psalms about the Good Shepherd or the beauty of a creation that proclaims the glory of a powerful God — if you’re a namby pamby, happy clappy, flowers and sunshine type, that is. But if you really want to get your righteous blood pumping there’s nothing that can compare to the joy of praying for liberals, Democrats, and compromisers to have their children left fatherless and their wife made a widow. And it’s all Biblical! Sorta.

Everyone would do well to step lightly around the fundamentalist who is armed with imprecatory parallelisms — especially if they value their jaw teeth and would like to avoid being smitten on the hip and thigh.

“We’ll be praying for you”…who knew it was such a threat?

13 thoughts on “Imprecatory Psalms”

  1. This kind of … how to put it nicely? … stuff makes me want to pray imprecatory prayers against the nut jobs that are praying imprecatory prayers…

  2. Haha. Made me think of a song by Jarron. I think it’s called “I’ll pray for you.” Look up the lyrics. They’re great!

  3. Correct spelling of his name is Jaron. Here are a few of the lyrics.

    I pray your brakes go out runnin’ down a hill
    I pray a flower pot falls from a window sill
    And knocks you in the head like I’d like to
    I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
    I pray you’re flyin’ high when your engine stalls
    I pray all your dreams never come true
    Just know wherever you are, honey, I pray for you

  4. “Having ones posterity cut off is also a sure crowd-pleaser.”

    I was reading pretty quickly and thought you’d written “posterior” instead of “posterity.” Then again, maybe my first reading was just as accurate. 🙂

  5. I got the “I’m praying for you” comment a lot when I came out. I knew what they were really praying. It was rather refreshing to have a former colleague tell me, “I’m praying for you. I’m not praying at you like most people probably are: I’m really praying for you.” It was a nicer sentiment that I’m used to getting from fundies.

  6. Fundies sing psalms? You mean like- from a Psalter? That’s new to me. We only sing the Psalms( just using our Bible to a made up tune) and I don’t think we ever sang any imprecatory
    Psalms. The only one I can think of of the top of my head is Psalm 19:7-11. We only sing a handfull( maybe about ten) and we do not sing them that often I think hymnody dominates Fundamentalist church music much more than Psalmnody does.

  7. Ha! I think about that line, Thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly, every time I go to the dentist. Hadn’t thought about it in years.

  8. I absolutely DESPISE when people will in the name of “being Christian” pray or claim that Psalm 109:8 for the President. They did it for Clinton as well. Someone out there may have done it for Bush, which is just as hideously bad, but I’ve never seen anyone do that for W, just for Obama & Clinton, including Fundy preachers I know. So inappropriate, & just wrong. GREAT last night “Who knew it was such a threat”.

  10. Do fundamentalist sing Psalms a lot? That’s probably a good thing, considering their otherwise profound insight on handling Scripture. Have you noticed their different tunes to II Timothy 2:15, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God”? Many of them have not caught on to the fact that this is not a cause-and-effect verse (aka. “Study [the Bible] IN ORDER to shew thyself approved unto God”) but a command as a whole (“Study [exert yourself/strive] to show [bring to visible reality] yourself approved to God.” Now, that would destroy their awards-based Bible and Sunday School clubs, so I won’t speak too loud.

    Let me not get started with their favorite “Line upon Line, Precept upon Precept”.. which is really a Hebrew way to say “Blah blah blah”.. uh-oh..

  11. @Lou Melànd: in my experience they do not, unless you count the occasional verse ripped out of context and thrown into a song.

  12. We never specifically sang the Psalms in my IFB church growing up, although there were occassional exceptions like Ps. 19:7-12. It was this very thing that encouraged my husband to add praise & worship songs to our church’s tradition of only hymns. The Bible tells us to sing the psalms, and many of these songs use verses straight from the Psalms although one might not recognize it if one only reads KJV. I started putting a little musical note in my Bible next to the Psalms which we had sung to remind myself of them all!

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