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Messianic Prophecies

Psalms 31:13

This passage comes from the wider catalog — a broader, more lightly curated list than the core set. Both readings are shown as peers; GEBible takes no side.

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Psalms 31:13

For I have heard the slander of many, terror on every side, while they conspire together against me, they plot to take away my life.

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You have not shut me up into the hand of the enemy. You have set my feet in a large place.

Have mercy on me, Yahweh, for I am in distress. My eye, my soul, and my body waste away with grief.

For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my iniquity. My bones are wasted away.

Because of all my adversaries I have become utterly contemptible to my neighbors, a horror to my acquaintances. Those who saw me on the street fled from me.

I am forgotten from their hearts like a dead man. I am like broken pottery.

For I have heard the slander of many, terror on every side, while they conspire together against me, they plot to take away my life.

But I trust in you, Yahweh. I said, “You are my God.”

My times are in your hand. Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, and from those who persecute me.

Make your face to shine on your servant. Save me in your loving kindness.

Let me not be disappointed, Yahweh, for I have called on you. Let the wicked be disappointed. Let them be silent in Sheol.

Let the lying lips be mute, which speak against the righteous insolently, with pride and contempt.

The counter-reading

How this passage is read within its own context.

The critical reading holds that Psalm 31:13 is a conventional element of the individual-lament genre, in which conspiring enemies are a stock feature. It observes that near-identical plotting language recurs across the Psalter (for example Psalms 35, 38, 56, 64, 71, and 109), describing a recurring social experience rather than a specific future event. On this view the correspondence to the Sanhedrin arises from mapping a generic motif onto a particular episode, so the specificity lies in the Gospel narrative rather than in the psalm. Critics add that if enemy-plotting language alone qualified as prophecy, much of the lament corpus would also count.

The fulfillment reading

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

The messianic-fulfillment reading holds that Psalm 31:13's picture of enemies conspiring together to take the speaker's life anticipates the coordinated decision of the Jerusalem authorities to put Jesus to death (Matthew 27:1; John 11:53). On this reading Psalm 31 belongs to a cluster of righteous-sufferer psalms whose portrait of a persecuted innocent converges on the Passion. Proponents note that the Sanhedrin's formal deliberation supplies a historically concrete instance of the plotting the psalm describes. They further argue that the cumulative weight of several such psalms, read together, forms a composite prophetic portrait that no single verse establishes on its own.

How the New Testament uses this passage

Each entry names how the New Testament author draws on the passage — a direct quotation, an allusion, an echo, or a typological reading. An echo or an allusion is not the same as a prediction; the label says which is which.

  • Mt. 27:1 Echo

    Matthew 27:1 and John 11:53 narrate the conspiracy but do not quote or cite Psalm 31:13; at most the shared plotting language is an unmarked thematic echo of lament tradition.

  • John 11:53 Echo

    Matthew 27:1 and John 11:53 narrate the conspiracy but do not quote or cite Psalm 31:13; at most the shared plotting language is an unmarked thematic echo of lament tradition.