Psalms 10King James Version
Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? A cry about the wicked who say in their heart, God hath forgotten. But God has not. Thou hast seen it: for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand.
The companion to Psalm 9, and the darkest of the two. Here the celebratory framework collapses: God stands far off, the wicked prosper and boast they will not be called to account, the poor are crushed with no deliverer visible. The psalm does not resolve into easy praise. It moves through lament and accusation toward petition and finally to a hard-won trust that God will act.
The arrogant man's deepest delusion is that God does not see and will not act; the prayer is that God will rise and break that delusion in history.
verse: "Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?" The opening question is the prayer; it refuses to soften the apparent absence.
No superscription in the Hebrew. The LXX combines Psalms 9 and 10 as one. Together they form an alphabetic acrostic, structuring the full range of experience from praise (Ps 9) to lament (Ps 10). The vivid portrait of the wicked man (vv3-11) has a nearly contemporary journalistic feel that makes it land across every century.
The wicked as a vivid character: boastful, greedy, trapping the poor, declaring God has forgotten. God addressed but seemingly absent. The poor and oppressed as victims. David as intercessor.
Psalm 10 is one of the Psalter's sharpest articulations of theodicy, the problem of God's apparent absence while injustice proceeds. The wicked man's self-talk in vv6-11 is rendered almost novelistically. Jesus's cry of dereliction on the cross echoes Psalm 22 but the consciousness of abandonment here is the same category of cry.
For when God seems to be doing nothing while real harm continues and the people causing it seem untouched and unbothered. This psalm names exactly that and does not flinch.
1Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?
2The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.
3For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.
4The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.
5His ways are always grievous; thy judgments are far above out of his sight: as for all his enemies, he puffeth at them.
6He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: for I shall never be in adversity.
7His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his tongue is mischief and vanity.
8He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages: in the secret places doth he murder the innocent: his eyes are privily set against the poor.
9He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net.
10He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones.
11He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it.
12Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble.
13Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it.
14Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless.
15Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: seek out his wickedness till thou find none.
16The LORD is King for ever and ever: the heathen are perished out of his land.
17LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear:
18To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress.