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Catholic Commentary
Prayer for the Confusion of the Enemy in the City
9Confuse them, Lord, and confound their language,10Day and night they prowl around on its walls.11Destructive forces are within her.
Psalms 55:9–11 describes a psalmist's prayer for God to confuse his enemies and his lament that destructive forces have infiltrated the city's institutions from within. The passage compares this chaos to the Tower of Babel episode, suggesting that coordinated wickedness triggers divine judgment, and emphasizes that true danger comes not from external siege but from internal corruption and moral decay.
The Psalmist reveals evil's true tactic: it doesn't besiege the city from outside—it prowls the walls night and day, taking up residence in the institutions you trust.
Catholic tradition brings a rich layered hermeneutic to these verses, reading them on literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical planes—the four senses described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC §115–119).
Literally, these are the words of a king or righteous person betrayed by close associates within Jerusalem, invoking God against conspirators. Tradition associates the psalm with David's flight from Absalom (2 Samuel 15–17), making the treachery as intimate as it is political.
Allegorically, Augustine's City of God provides the master key: the two cities—one built on love of God, the other on love of self—coexist in history. The "destructive forces within" (v. 11) are the signature of the earthly city. The Babel allusion in verse 9 is theologically precise: the pride that scattered nations at Babel is the same pride enthroned in every corrupt civic order.
Morally, the Fathers (especially Cassian and later St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 77) read the "prowling" of verse 10 as an image of the capital vices that never cease their circuits around the soul. The Christian's interior city—the soul ordered toward God—is always subject to this ceaseless encirclement.
Anagogically, the prayer anticipates the final eschatological separation when God will definitively scatter the wicked and purify the City of God. Revelation 17–18's "Babylon the Great" echoes precisely this language of a great city whose walls house violence and whose streets run with iniquity. The Psalmist's prayer is, ultimately, a prayer for the coming of the Kingdom.
Contemporary Catholics live within institutions—parishes, families, nations—that may harbor destructive forces within their own walls. The pastoral insight of Psalm 55:9–11 is startling in its modernity: evil rarely announces itself from outside; it colonizes the structures we trust. When a Catholic prays these verses in the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church invites an honest examination: Where is the 'āwen—the iniquity—operating not out there, but within the communities I depend upon? And what is my response?
The Psalmist's response is prayer—specifically, prayer that God would confuse and disrupt the organizing power of wickedness. This is not passive resignation but active spiritual warfare (cf. Ephesians 6:12). For the Catholic today, this might mean praying for the disruption of corrupt networks within civic or ecclesial life, naming the "prowling" anxiety or cynicism that circles one's own soul without rest, and trusting, with Augustine, that no human city is final. The prayer is a declaration of ultimate allegiance: my city is not built with these walls.
Commentary
Verse 9 — "Confuse them, Lord, and confound their language"
The Hebrew verb balla' (בַּלַּע), rendered "confuse" or "swallow up," carries a sense of violent engulfing—God is asked not merely to puzzle enemies but to overwhelm and devour their plans wholesale. The additional plea to "confound their language" (palleg lešonām) is one of the most striking allusions in the Psalter: it deliberately echoes the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:7–9), where God scattered the proud by dividing their speech. David—or the speaker who voices this psalm—invokes a precedent in salvation history. He is saying: you have done this before, Lord, to those who organized themselves against heaven; do it again to those who have organized themselves against your servant and your city. The imprecation here is not a petty curse but a theologically grounded appeal to divine justice. The Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, understood such imprecatory verses not as expressions of personal hatred, but as prophetic declarations against the City of Man and its rebellion against God. The "they" are the wicked within the city—traitors, conspirators—whose agreement in evil is itself what makes them dangerous.
Verse 10 — "Day and night they prowl around on its walls"
The imagery shifts from speech to movement. The enemies are not sleeping soldiers but active, ceaseless predators who "go around" (yesōbĕbûhā, they encircle) the walls—ironically occupying the position of watchmen whose duty it was to protect the city (cf. Isaiah 62:6). These false guardians are on the walls not to defend but to dominate. The phrase "day and night" (יוֹמָם וָלַיְלָה) underscores that wickedness operates without rest; it has colonized even the city's structures of defense and governance. St. John Chrysostom, in his homiletical tradition, treats this verse as a warning that evil is not merely found in obviously dark corners but entrenched in the institutions—the walls, the towers—that a community depends upon. For the typological reader, Jerusalem here becomes the human soul or the Church, and the prowling enemies are the vices that never take a holiday: pride, envy, and malice that circle the inner citadel continuously.
Verse 11 — "Destructive forces are within her"
The Hebrew 'āwen (אָוֶן), translated "destructive forces" or "iniquity," is a word loaded with connotations of trouble, wickedness, and falsehood concentrated into a moral chaos. Critically, these forces are ()—they are not an external siege army but internal corruption. This inwardness of the evil is the psalm's sharpest point. The city is not merely threatened; it has already been infiltrated. For Augustine, the City of Man is precisely this: the earthly city where (self-love) has displaced (love of God), generating destructive forces not from outside but from the disordered will within. The verse thus moves from imprecation (v. 9) to surveillance (v. 10) to diagnosis (v. 11): the enemy is not at the gate—the enemy has taken up residence.