Should the righteous rejoice when the wicked are punished, or not rejoice when an enemy falls?

The two passages speak of different kinds of joy over different things. Proverbs 24:17 forbids gloating over a personal enemy’s misfortune: being glad when someone you dislike stumbles. The warning that follows shows the reason. God sees such glee and is displeased by it, and he may turn his anger from the enemy to the one who gloats (24:18). The Old Testament says the same elsewhere. Job counted it a sin to have “rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me” (Job 31:29), and the law told Israel to bring back an enemy’s straying ox and to help his donkey when it lay under its load (Exodus 23:4-5).

Psalm 58 is about something else: the public triumph of God’s justice over unjust rulers. It opens by challenging those who should judge uprightly but “weigh the violence of your hands in the earth” (58:2). The joy it foresees is joy that wrong has been put right and that the oppressed are vindicated, and the psalm says what people will conclude: “verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth” (58:11). Washing the feet in blood is a battlefield picture of complete victory, as in Psalm 68:23, not a call to take pleasure in cruelty. Proverbs itself allows this kind of joy: “when the wicked perish, there is shouting” (Proverbs 11:10). Matthew Henry puts it that the righteous rejoice because their faith in God’s justice is confirmed. So the Bible forbids personal spite but welcomes the victory of justice. God himself has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11), yet he executes judgement, and his people may be glad that he does.