A note on Psalm 11:5

Sometimes a word just jumps out at you.

I recently had that experience reading Psalm 11:5, which in the ESV says:

The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.

For some reason, the idea that God hates the wicked really stuck out to me here. I suppose I had not really thought very carefully about whether God actually hates anyone. God hates sin, sure. But people? It really made me think.

So I opened my Hebrew Bible. And, sure enough, that is what it says. The Qal perfect verb translated here as "hates" has the straightforward sense of "to hate" (BDB, s.v. שָׂנֵא).

But I was still curious. So, I also decided to read this verse in the Septuagint.*

I found that in the Old Greek of Psalm 11:5, it reads like this instead:

The LORD carefully examines the righteous and the ungodly, but the one who loves wickedness hates his own soul.

Now, that comes across a bit differently, does it not? In the Greek of Psalm 11:5, the one doing the hating is not God but rather the person who loves wickedness. He hates his own (ἑαυτοῦ) soul.

It looks like the ESV used the Hebrew for this verse.

The Greek version of Psalm 11:5 is really interesting to me, though. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis's view of divine punishment in The Problem of Pain, where, basically, God punishes people by allowing them to have their own way (see John 3:19):

though Our Lord often speaks of Hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the judgement consists in the very fact that men prefer darkness to light (p. 124)

This is what we might call the "natural consequences" view of punishment. You can also see this idea at play in Romans 1:18-32, where Paul repeatedly says concerning the wicked that God "gave them up" to their impurity, with the result that they received "in themselves the due penalty for their error" (Rom 1:27).

So, in the Hebrew version, we have God despising the wicked because they love injustice. And in the Greek version, it is in fact those who love wickedness who despise themselves. Which is it?

Either. Both. Whichever you please. For, as Lewis notes, "the two conceptions, in the long run, mean the same thing" (p. 124).

Rather than choosing between the Hebrew and the Greek versions of this verse, what if instead we placed them side by side? Then, they could suggest together a fuller and deeper meaning than either has alone.

I think that this deeper meaning, to again quote Lewis, could be the invitation to consider that in Psalm 11:5, the wicked person's perdition is "not ... a sentence imposed on him but ... the mere fact of being what he is" (p. 124).

Sometimes, in other words, wickedness is its own punishment.

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*You may recall that the Septuagint is the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament that the New Testament authors – who do not seem to have known much Hebrew – used as their Bible. If you have doubts about which Bible the apostles used, just look at Paul's argument in Galatians 3:16. His point there depends on a nuance in the Greek of Genesis.