“For without cause / they hid their net / for me – a pit they dug / to entrap me.” I do no think it is an overstatement to say this verse is the hinge to understanding the wicked in the psalm, and this for several reasons. “Without cause”: in our previous reflection we looked, with some detail, at the curses that were called down by David on his enemies. They were of ‘being blown like chaff’ and having their paths become ‘darkness and slippery slopes’. We noted how both images are of an utter inability to control one’s self: either by ‘being blown’ (being a total ‘object’) or by fearful immobility. In their own ways they point to confusion, a dreadful overcoming of man’s abilities and power. They, in a real sense, mock the human form. Here we find why this particular judgment is called for—just as their punishment disintegrates their form, so too did their attempt to capture David originate in a similar place: “without cause”. This sense of total confusion, of an evil that has no source but seems to emerge only in a fragmentary but destructive manner, pervades David’s sense of his enemies’ actions (as we will continue to see). It is as if these men conjured up a force they themselves, by definition, would not be able to control—it emerges “without cause”. It is, in this way, a mock creation (just as creation itself came ‘without cause’), except here its first ‘creation’ is darkness and not light—its purpose is destruction and darkness and, as David explicitly says, the “robbing of life”. Creation’s movement is of light and life. And, just as with most other judgment/curses we have looked at, it is thrown back on the perpetrators head in perfect justice. “Let ruin / come upon him / unawares – and let the net / that he hid / enmesh him – he shall indeed / fall into ruin.” Notice how formally this curse mimics the enemy’s injustice. 1) “Let ruin com upon him unawares”àfor without cause they hid their net… 2) “and let the net that he hid enmesh him”à “they hid their net for me”… 3) “he shall indeed fall into ruin”à “a pit they dug to entrap me”. These lines model the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ justice at the heart of many judgments/curses and it shows how one must pay particular attention to the form of judgment employed to show precisely what wickedness it is addressing. Just as it is impossible to foresee what emerges “without cause” so too will this judgment overtake the enemy “unawares”. It would seem that this is theologically profound: that just as evil begins from a source of “without cause” so too will its judgment mimic it and come “unawares” (one thinks of when the ‘bridegroom returns’ in the middle of the night; and that Christ comes “like thief in the night” that “no one can predict”; nor can one avoid thinking of the terrible judgments of Revelation that seem to catch everyone by surprise). When one stands in and conjures up darkness, one will be overcome in like manner by darkness. What this shows is that this judgment is anything but ‘arbitrary’ although it is ‘unaware’—rather, it perfectly mirrors the evil brought forth and responds in like form, causing the darkness to consume itself. Man may feel like this judgment comes in an arbitrary fashion but it is only because he has not adequately appreciated the fact that he has called it down by bringing forth the chaos “without cause”. One cannot help but feel that hell may be a continuous sense of judgment-unaware precisely because man refuses to acknowledge he has created the judgment’s response. In the words of the psalm, it would be the perpetual feeling of being ‘chaff in the wind’ and ‘hounded by a (the) terrifying angel of Yhwh’. It is being “enmeshed” in a net that the individual had carefully stitched together.
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