Ps.30.14 (trust and terror all around)

“For I have heard / the whispering / of the multitudes – terror all around – in the scheming / together against me, - they have determined / to take / my life.”  Isolation has now fallen upon the psalmist. From his own bodily disintegration he has also become ostracized from even his neighbors and acquaintances. At the end of the process, he has been pushed ‘beyond the pale’ and become invisible, nothing but useless (and irredeemable) shattered vessel. This verse stands at the conclusion of the lament and will serve as a foil to the following verse reflecting the psalmist’s trust in Yhwh. Here it seems as if we take a step back, into the realm of social hostility. The difference being that his ‘friends and acquaintances’ were moving into the state of avoidance; here, the ‘multitude’ is moving, aggressively, against him. Here, perhaps, is his ‘shattering’. The ‘multitude’ has always carried ominous overtones throughout the psalms: from psalm 2 where the multitude of kings rose up against Yhwh and his anointed (son), to psalm 3 where David was in fear of a faceless horde descending upon him. What is common to all of them is that this ‘multitude’ is difficult to pin-point. Here, they ‘whisper’. Terror is ‘all around’. They encompass precisely in the inability to locate their ‘face’. From the midst of this ‘whispering’ and consuming ‘terror’ the psalmist can discern their overall scheme (everything here is disturbingly malevolent): they want his life. Before, the psalmist was pushed out of social communion—here, he stands as the focus but as the object of destruction. This is no mere ‘passing from memory like who is dead’. These men want to kill him. As wicked men they may not be able to agree on much, but on the psalmist’s death they are united. The progression, then, has been one as follows: bodily alienation—social alienation (friends and acquaintances)—threat of death. Once he has, like a hunted animal, been removed from the traditional realms of protection (friends and acquaintances: we can see here Peter’s denial) he can be much more easily caught in “their net” without repercussion. This serves to highlight a theme we have been exploring here: the enactment of the first commandment leads, in tragic fulfillment, to this individual, abandoned by all forms of protection, left to rely on nothing but his trust in Yhwh. Again, the first commandment has spread this man as thin as humanly possible. It has demanded he look only to Yhwh for protection and, at the same time, refused him the ability to seek comfort in death (he cannot clothe himself in silence). The covenantal bond is here at its maximum distance, like some band set to snap. It is, conversely, like Abraham, enabling the spread of covenantal blessing.