“Wicked persons / drew their sword – and bent the bow – to
bring down / the weak / and the poor – to slaughter / honest wayfarers. – Their
sword / will enter / their own heart – and their bows / will be broken.” From
the heavenly laughter of Yhwh we now descend to earth. What takes place in
these verses is, arguably, the working out on the earthly level what occurred
in the heavenly realm. In other words, I think this section may be describing
the same thing as the previous section but from a different perspective. Here,
we find what we have called the ‘boomerang’ effect of evil: evil has a
destructive principle within it; it brings about its own downfall and those who
enact it end up bringing the destruction down on their own heads (for example:
they dig a pit for the righteous, but fall in it themselves; they aim arrows at
the righteous, but they only come back upon their own heads; they utter curses,
only to find themselves cursed). Yhwh does not, himself, need to do anything in
particular in these matters, except to do nothing and allow evil to
self-destruct. This is why we can see these verses as re-enacting the previous
section. There, Yhwh laughed because “he has seen that their time has come.”
Here, evil is seen to fulfilling its ‘boomerang’ effect—the wicked are, in
these verses, “coming to an end” but it is by way of evil’s own destructive
power. That is why in the previous section Yhwh was seen to be merely laughing;
he didn’t actually do anything other than be an observer. In effect, Yhwh was doing
what the teacher has been imploring of the student: waiting.
There is
an important development here: the teacher has not indicated prior to now that
the ‘boomerang’ effect of evil was one of the reasons why their ‘time was short’.
In fact, we were never sure exactly why the wicked’s possessions would not
endure. One of our ideas was that goods cannot endure unless they are given by
Yhwh. If they are obtained simply by ‘grasping’ for them, they can certainly be
held for a time; and, in fact, long enough to create envy and strife. However,
they cannot be held in perpetuity. Here, we find a deepening of that insight:
goods that are obtained by ‘grasping’ are, at root, unjust and therefore
wicked. Their ‘end’, then, is not simply due to some neutral principle of the ‘impermanence
of all things’ or ‘the vanity of all things’. I think that is true but it is
not complete: their end is also due to an underlying destructive power in them.
It is this ‘devouring worm’ that Yhwh perceives from heaven. And, because it is
seen from a heavenly perspective it is seen purely by Yhwh as an inescapable
conclusion. He sees the worm eating at the wicked and their goods. He knows it
cannot be warded off because the wicked are blind to it. Even up to the eve of
their downfall they are ‘drawing swords’ and ‘bending their arrows’. The
disconnect is complete and it is this disconnect that is so (disturbingly)
funny to Yhwh. One wonders whether the final line would have been read as
humorous: “Their sword will enter their own heart…”.
One final thought: this idea of Yhwh as able to
perceive the end of the wicked because he knows the inevitability of the worm’s
power. Is this something that, once it is fully internalized in the ‘student’,
becomes a source for apocalyptic literature? The idea is that once one is
convinced that wicked ‘grasping’ has an ‘end-point’, and once one is convinced
of the full ripening of the wicked fruit, wouldn’t one (as in this psalm) come
to see the earth from a heavenly perspective and see the works as being played
out in an apocalyptic manner? Wouldn’t it be the case that this could easily
lend itself to predicting when, precisely, the ‘end’ would come? And, wouldn’t
this lend itself to searching for signs much like a farmer reads the signs of
the sky? Couldn’t apocalyptic be seen as a form of “Yhwh’s laughter”?
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