1. DO YOU indeed in silence speak righteousness, O you mighty ones? [Or is the righteousness, rightness, and justice you should speak quite dumb?] Do you judge fairly and uprightly, O you sons of men?
2. No, in your heart you devise wickedness; you deal out in the land the violence of your hands.
3. The ungodly are perverse and estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.
4. Their poison is like the venom of a serpent; they are like the deaf adder or asp that stops its ear,
5. Which listens not to the voice of charmers or of the enchanter never casting spells so cunningly.
6. Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths; break out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord.
7. Let them melt away as water which runs on apace; when he aims his arrows, let them be as if they were headless or split apart.
8. Let them be as a snail dissolving slime as it passes on or as a festering sore which wastes away, like [the child to which] a woman gives untimely birth that has not seen the sun.
9. Before your pots can feel the thorns [that are placed under them for fuel], He will take them away as with a whirlwind, the green and the burning ones alike.
10. The [unyieldingly] righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.
11. Men will say, Surely there is a reward for the [uncompromisingly] righteous; surely there is a God Who judges on the earth.