Ps. 44.15-16 (the king and a brief interlude)

“My ignominy / is before me / all day long – and shame / has covered / my face – because of the voice / of the reproacher / and reviler, - because / of the enemy / and the avenger.” These two verses operate as a type of conclusion to verses 9-14. They are made in the specific voice of the king and not from Israel (or the congregation): “My ignominy is before me…shame has covered my face…´ This does bring us to a facet of the psalm we have not thus far emphasized: that the king is, himself, a central voice of the psalm. As we have seen time and again in other psalms, this is not the voice of any individual, but the one elected by God for a role within Israel (to be the ‘shepherd’ of His people). For that reason, although verses 9-14 clearly allude to the ‘shame’ that descended upon Israel, here the shame and ignominy is particularized and centralized in the person of the king. He is the one who would bear the weight of this defeat unlike any other Israelite, and this along two lines: internally, as to the Israelites themselves (his flock), and externally as to the nations. This is no minor distinction as we have brought out in other psalms: the king is a public person; his ‘being’ is to represent, in his individuality, the entirety of the nation. For that reason he lives within the public eye and, therefore, must adhere to the public ‘ethics’ that involves the ex-pression of authority and power. For the nation to suffer defeat, then, would tear into him in a way unlike any other, for it is in him that all of the public sham of defeat would, laser-like, descend. The common Israelite does not need to withstand this type of glaring of the nations, but, rather, can push the king forward to shield him (much like they would push Moses forward to converse with God).  “The people” do not live within the intensity of the king’s position.  It is within this litany of woes that we come to this individualized voice. From this point on, however, he will submerge himself again within the congregation. The following verses will all focus on “we” and “us”. In this brief interlude, however, we are given the glimpse of a single man, elected by God, and therefore a man feeling, in a way unlike anyone else, the intense sense of betrayal and abandonment by God (“…my God, my God, why have you forsaken me…”).