Psalms of Cursing
Feb 15, 2010 Print This Post
This weekend at Riv, I talked about Psalms of Cursing (or “Imprecatory Psalms”). One of the things I didn’t have time to get into was why I think Psalms of Cursing help prove the Bible is God’s Word.
I’m not going to get into this too much, because you really have to be a history geek like me to care. But here’s the basic gist: it’s well known that “history is written by the winners.” Because of this, most cultures down through history have written their history books and literature in such a way that it casts them in a good light. Their enemies are seen as terrible and brutal. They, on the other hand, are seen as gracious (or some other positive trait) even when they are winning at a brutal war.
Historians will tell you that no one is ever as good as they look on paper.
The odd thing about the Bible (as evidenced in the Psalms of Cursing), is that it paints God as vengeful and the Israelites as almost bloodthirsty. This is uncommon (if not completely missing) in other ancient writings. Why does the Bible go there? Because it’s not trying to gloss anything over. It’s painting things the way they were.
Last week, I was reading French Philosopher Rene Girard (that’s another whole post) and here is an interesting observation he made about ancient writings:
In mythology, the collective violence is always represented from the standpoint of the victimizers and therefore the victims themselves are never heard. We never hear them bemoaning their sad fate and cursing their persecutors as they do in the psalms. Everything is recounted from the standpoint of the persecutors.
No wonder the Greek myths, the Greek epics and the Greek tragedies are all serene, harmonious, and undisturbed. In pagan cultures, the persecutors are in charge. We never hear the victims. We only hear the persecutors who always have the last word, and who are unaware of their own arbitrary violence.
It’s interesting to note that the pendulum has definitely swung the other way in our culture. We are now hyper in tune with the voices of victims. We need to understand that is our cultural bias and it is a relatively new one. You know where you can see this well? Christopher Columbus. When I was a kid, he was revered as a hero who discovered a new world. Now (my kids tell me), he is reviled as an arbiter of genocide. So which is it? Probably a bit of both. Both sides of that story probably carry some validity.
We have to understand that we have a huge reaction to the Psalms of Cursing because we are often looking at the victim. Most people down through history have seen the other side because most people in the world have been the victims, calling out for justice.
Suffice it to say that the Psalms sheer honesty is, for me, a proof that the Bible is true. If it was myth or legend, the story would be different.
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