Should we rejoice when our enemies suffer?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This tension is internal to the Hebrew Bible — Psalms against Proverbs — and surfaces an ethical fracture the canon never fully sutures. Psalm 58 belongs to the imprecatory psalms, a cluster that also includes Psalms 35, 69, 109, and 137. These texts pray for, anticipate, or celebrate violent retribution against enemies. Psalm 58:10-11 (Hebrew 58:11-12) caps a poem against corrupt judges with a startling image: the righteous one yismach ki-chazah naqam, "rejoices because he has seen vengeance," and pe'amaw yirchatz b'dam ha-rasha', "bathes his feet in the blood of the wicked." The verb samach (to rejoice, be glad) is precisely the verb Proverbs 24:17 negates: al-tismach, "do not rejoice when your enemy falls," with the parallel al-yagel libbecha, "let not your heart be glad," when he stumbles. The two texts use overlapping vocabulary to issue opposite imperatives about the same emotional response to an enemy's downfall.

The strongest defense of the imprecatory tradition is Erich Zenger's, which reads these psalms as protest theology spoken from positions of powerlessness — cries that hand vengeance over to God rather than enacting it — not as ethical blueprints. Bonhoeffer, Wenham, and Daniel Estes develop a related harmonization: the imprecatory psalmist petitions God to act and reads 58:10 as eschatological vindication of justice rather than vindictive personal pleasure. Proverbs 24:17-18, by contrast, is wisdom paraenesis, and its motive clause is telling: "lest the LORD see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him" — the gloater risks redirecting Yahweh's wrath onto himself. This forward-looks to Matthew 5:43-48 and to Romans 12:17-21, where Paul quotes Proverbs 25:21-22 ("heap coals of fire") and Deuteronomy 32:35 ("vengeance is mine") to ground the renunciation of personal retaliation. The genre distinction is real and does ease the surface clash: a prohibition against personal gloating and a prayer ceding judgment to God need not be flatly equivalent claims.

Yet the harmonization strains at the specific verse cited. Psalm 58:10 is not petition; it is anticipated participation. The righteous one's feet are in the blood. Hossfeld and Zenger's Hermeneia commentary concedes the imagery is difficult and notes the psalm assumes a worldview in which divine justice is visibly executed and shared in by the righteous community — a vantage Proverbs 24 explicitly forbids the individual to relish. Reading 58:10 as purely eschatological also imports a developed afterlife-vindication scheme the psalm does not supply; the joy is at concrete, witnessed slaughter (ki-chazah, "because he has seen"). Text-critically the verse is stable across the Masoretic tradition and the Septuagint (which renders the bathing image with niptō/plynō, washing in blood), so the difficulty cannot be dissolved as scribal corruption.

The critical verdict, articulated by Walter Brueggemann and David Firth, is that the imprecatory psalms preserve an ethic the rest of the canon — most sharply the New Testament — actively rejects. Michael Fox's Anchor Yale commentary on Proverbs underscores that 24:17 reflects the sapiential conviction that schadenfreude is itself a moral failure, independent of the enemy's guilt. What stands in tension is therefore not a single proposition stated two ways but two distinct ethical traditions lodged in one Scripture: a cultic-imprecatory voice that celebrates witnessed retribution and a wisdom voice that prohibits the very gladness the psalmist enacts. The genre move harmonizes them as different speech acts, but only by granting that they prescribe opposite affective responses.

Where the critical reading lands: real and theologically significant; partially harmonizable by genre, but the harmonization works only by softening Psalm 58:10 past its plain, participatory sense.