Devotional Short Note to Psalm 58: This Psalm of David has the same header as Psalm 57. In Psalm 56 David was saying: just you unrighteous wait until (az) the Bookkeeper or Accountant of heaven open the books in court and my Advocate God stands up for me (56:9-10). In Psalm 58 David begins asking God: “Will You speak righteous unto them (elm), the steadfast/faithful (haumenam)?” (58:2a). Christ our Righteousness in Heaven speaks righteous “on behalf of the saints” (see the role of the Son of Man in Daniel 7:22 “judgment was passed in favor of the saints of the Most High”) an ongoing process since 1844 right now. “Will You judge the sons of men from uprightness?” (58:2b). Christ cannot be better as He was the most perfect of all. Spotless and qualified to be our Representative in the heavenly court. As we speak. But notice that David is maybe addressing Satan or Lucifer here. He does not speak righteous [doing] to the faithful but wrongdoing. He will not judge with fairness humanity since he cries out conspiracy ever since his Rebellion in Heaven. David used a special form of the verb in verses 2 and 3 (3x) which is the addition of a nun-paragogicum or –n at the end of the verb. The role of this extra addition is to function a role in contrastivity (Hoftijzer) defined as “exceptions to normal practice, contradictions, deviations from normal expectation …” David used it with the words: will You speak? (righteous)Will You do? (evil) Will You weigh? (violence).

In stark contrast to Christ the Victor is Satan the Looser “thus [aph] in heart you will work/do/commit evil things” (58:3). Satan “will weigh out in the earth the violence of your hands” (58:3b). It is not God or anyone from His side. One of the last signs of the times at the End-Time is predicted by the prophet Habakkuk that in Lebanon or Syria of Old [did Lebanon stretch to Aleppo in Isaiah’s days?] there will be according to Habakkuk 2:17 “violence” and secondly that it relates to the blood of man and violence of the land, city and inhabitants. See Habakkuk 2:3 where Habakkuk also talks, like Daniel, of an “appointed time” and in Daniel appointed times are 1798 as the end of 1260 years, 1844 as the end of 2300 years. The power after this time of 1798 says Habakkuk (2:5) will be characterized as: “betrayal, not restful, gathered unto himself nations and collected them from many nations, just as the poem of Emma at the Statue of Liberty is boasting. This power of Habakkuk gets into trouble later as the verse proceeds and as Levi-Strauss’s philosophy of the gospel of democracy abroad and over the globe increased, the phenomenon of the anger of nations increased. The violence in Lebanon is ironically a backlash against objectives of this power by other nations to proof that polarity must be substituted for multi-polarity with the cost of thousands of innocent lives in Aleppo and elsewhere in ancient Lebanon or current Syria. Violence is the R&D of Satan and he uses earthlings as proxies to carry out his wishes. In Habakkuk 2:12-13 it reads that when the Lord of Hosts come fire will consume these peoples to nothingness and it means that those who labor for violence shall be exchanged for nothingness from the Lord.

David says that “wicked ones are estranged from the womb” (58:4a). In this verse David used a figurative speech in Poetry that we call hyperboly. It is phrases with non-literal meanings (Gerhard Hasel in Symposium 1974: 176). He is correct because David is not designing a Theology of Human Nature here for systematic theology. He is not saying that Peccatum Originale of Augustine’s later years or “Original Sin” is the doctrine embedded in this verse. The biblical position is that Original Sin or people born with sin is a myth. David is saying “the speakers of lies goes astray from birth” (58:4b). Is this not Original Sin? No. Babies do not speak and neither is their speaking so sensible that it is interpreted as “lies”. Ask any mother. What David means is that the mother is wicked while the baby is still unborn and when the baby is born the mother and father and the babies relatives around him/her is liars.

The wicked is like a snake [back to Eden’s favorite instrument for Satan’s deception and lies] and they have venom (58:5). They follow their own way and does not listen to the voice (58:6a).

From 58:7-10 David is citing apparently from common Ancient Near Eastern idioms or colloquial expressions. He used a Hebrew particle related to Akkadian, “like” (kemo) five times in this section. It means that he is figurative in his meanings and we should be non-literal in our interpretations. He used a Phoenician negative particle in a very beautiful idiom in 58:10.

The wicked are like lions so David wants God to break their teeth (58:7). God should let them melt as water runs away [he used the hithpael form here to indicate a back and forth action very inconsistent but repetitive] (58:8a). When the wicked aims their military equipment, David wished that they should be immediately as one who is repeatedly cut/rubbed (malal in hithpael form again) (58:8b).

David wants them to be a snail that melts in the passing (58:9a). As a young boy he has seen it often and when I was a young boy on a big farm in South Africa, I also used salt on snails to see them melting away. David wants the wicked to be like a woman not [bal which is the Phoenician for ‘not’] seen in the sun (58:9b).

Then David used a beautiful idiom. He said “Before your pots will understand a thorn, like life, like faces [Late Egyptian word ḥrw(n) for faces] He will burn us” [not them because –nu in Imma-nu-el means ‘us’ and that is what it meant in the Amarna cuneiform glosses and also here] (58:10). Life is degenerative and so is our faces. God gave the punishment for Adam’s sin as death and deterioration towards to skeleton status. There apparently was an idiom like this one saying that before a woman can cook and the pot is almost not used or scratched by thorns, the pot is burnt or the person dies.

The last two verses is stongly connected to the Eschaton. At the Second Coming David can see the righteous rejoice (using the future form of the verb) and God is the one Who has the right to revenge (58:11a). In 58:12a He brings His reward [fruit = peri] to the righteous.

Coming back to David’s question in verse 2 whether there is a judge with uprightness his answer is clear: “truly/verily there is a God that judges in the earth” (58:12b).