Psalm 10 (1928 BCP)

Psalm 10 (1928 BCP) is a prayer against the apparently secure power of the wicked and for God's justice for the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed. In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, it is appointed with Psalms 9 and 11 at Morning Prayer on the second day of the month. The psalm does not deny the reality of violence or conceal the felt absence of God; it takes both into prayer and ends by confessing the Lord as king and judge.

Text of the Psalm

The 1928 Psalter gives the Latin opening Ut quid, Domine? The text below has been compared word for word with the Society of Archbishop Justus transcription of the 1928 Psalter, including the Prayer Book's verse division and asterisks.

WHY standest thou so far off, O LORD, * and hidest thy face in the needful time of trouble?
2 The ungodly, for his own lust, doth persecute the poor: * let them be taken in the crafty wiliness that they have imagined.
3 For the ungodly hath made boast of his own heart's desire, * and speaketh good of the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.
4 The ungodly is so proud, that he careth not for God, * neither is God in all his thoughts.
5 His ways are alway grievous; * thy judgments are far above out of his sight, and therefore defieth he all his enemies.
6 For he hath said in his heart, Tush, I shall never be cast down, * there shall no harm happen unto me.
7 His mouth is full of cursing, deceit, and fraud; * under his tongue is ungodliness and vanity.

8 He sitteth lurking in the thievish corners of the streets, * and privily in his lurking dens doth he murder the innocent; his eyes are set against the poor.
9 For he lieth waiting secretly; even as a lion lurketh he in his den, * that he may ravish the poor.
10 He doth ravish the poor, * when he getteth him into his net.
11 He falleth down, and humbleth himself, * that the congregation of the poor may fall into the hands of his captains.
12 He hath said in his heart, Tush, God hath forgotten; * he hideth away his face, and he will never see it.
13 Arise, O LORD God, and lift up thine hand; * forget not the poor.
14 Wherefore should the wicked blaspheme God, * while he doth say in his heart, Tush, thou God carest not for it?

15 Surely thou hast seen it; * for thou beholdest ungodliness and wrong, that thou mayest take the matter into thy hand.
16 The poor committeth himself unto thee; * for thou art the helper of the friendless.
17 Break thou the power of the ungodly and malicious; * search out his ungodliness, until thou find none.
18 The LORD is King for ever and ever, * and the heathen are perished out of the land.
19 LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the poor; * thou preparest their heart, and thine ear hearkeneth thereto;
20 To help the fatherless and poor unto their right, * that the man of the earth be no more exalted against them.

Lament, pride, and the poor

The first question—“Why standest thou so far off?”—is not a detached speculation. It is uttered while the poor are persecuted, deceived, and caught in a net. The psalm makes a moral diagnosis of evil: it boasts, blesses covetousness, thinks it cannot be moved, and assumes that God neither sees nor requires an account. Its answer is not permission for private vengeance. The petitioner asks God to arise, to see, and to judge for those who cannot secure justice for themselves.

Jesus' blessing gives a New Testament horizon for the psalm's repeated concern for the poor. It names a kingdom promised to those who know their need before God, rather than a worldly program that simply transfers power from one party to another.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

The psalm's “poor” include people exposed to concrete wrong, while the beatitudes also direct every worshipper away from self-sufficiency. Together they prevent a reader from making the Psalm's enemies into a convenient name for personal opponents. The prayer is for righteousness, mercy, and God's judgment, not for the speaker's own ascendancy.

A Christian reading of delayed judgment

Augustine treats the opening cry as a question about delay in tribulation. His reading does not make suffering unreal; rather, it says that the longing created by trouble can turn the heart toward the life that God gives.

“Why, O Lord,” says he, “have You withdrawn afar off?” Then he who thus inquired, as if all on a sudden he understood, or as if he asked, though he knew, that he might teach, adds, “You despise in due seasons, in tribulations:” that is, You despise seasonably, and causest tribulations to inflame men's minds with longing for Your coming. For that fountain of life is sweeter to them that have much thirst.

That is an interpretive judgment from a particular patristic tradition, not a denial that the psalm speaks first as Israel's prayer. It can nevertheless illuminate why the Prayer Book retains such an unguarded question in public worship: faith may name the experience of God's distance without ceasing to address God.

Augustine also warns against reading present prosperity as proof that evil has escaped judgment:

Let no one congratulate the man that prospers in his way, to whose sins no avenger is near, and an approver is by. This is the greater anger of the Lord. For the sinner has angered the Lord, that he should suffer these things, that is, should not suffer the scourging of correction.

This reading sharpens the contrast in verses 5–6. The wicked person's apparent safety is not the final truth about the world; the Psalm refuses to confuse impunity with innocence.

Christ, the Church, and patient hope

John Mason Neale's nineteenth-century Anglican commentary reads the opening verse in relation to Christ's passion and to the Church's experience of trial. His approach is a traditional Christian or typological reading, and should be distinguished from a claim that Psalm 10 has no historical voice of its own.

But in the fullest and most bitter sense, our dear LORD might take the whole question on His own lips, as indeed He did in His paraphrase on the Cross, Why standest Thou so far off, O Lord? “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

Neale's connection is strongest where it preserves the psalm's protest rather than turns it into easy consolation. Christians pray it as those who confess that Christ entered the extremity of suffering, while still asking God to remember those who are poor, fatherless, and wronged.

The last verses move from accusation to trust: “the poor committeth himself unto thee.” Paul gives the corresponding Christian grammar of hope. Hope is neither denial nor possession; it waits for what it does not yet see.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

Prayer in the Daily Office

The Prayer Book appoints Psalms 9, 10, and 11 for the second morning. Their sequence matters: thanksgiving for God's righteous judgment in Psalm 9 is followed by Psalm 10's unflinching account of oppression and then Psalm 11's confession of trust. Psalm 10 is therefore not an isolated text for private anger, but part of a corporate discipline of praise, lament, and confidence in God's kingship. After psalmody, the Daily Office adds the ancient doxology:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

The doxology does not silence the psalm's plea for justice. It places that plea within worship of the Triune God, teaching the Church to speak honestly about evil and to leave final judgment to the Lord who hears the desire of the poor.

See Also

• Book of Common Prayer (1928)
• The Psalter (1928 BCP)
• Daily Office (1928 BCP)
• Psalm 9 (1928 BCP)
• Psalm 11 (1928 BCP)

External Links

• The 1928 Psalter, Psalms 1–50, Society of Archbishop Justus
• Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 10
• Neale and Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1