Ps. 49.5-6 (wealth remains; man does not)

“Why / should I be afraid / in evil days – when the iniquity / of my treacherous foes / surrounds me – they / who trust / in their wealth – and boast / of the magnitude / of the riches?” With this opening question is launched many of the themes of the psalm: fear, foes, trust, boasting and wealth. Within the confluence of these themes, something of the enigma posed in the opening verse will be ‘revealed’. The one central, missing ‘ingredient’ is death. Death will be that which unifies all of these various threads into a coherent quilt. Death will be seen, also, in its unifying power, as the ‘enigma’ itself. The source of the problem is not merely the fact that the psalmist has enemies. What we see here is that their ‘boasting’ and ‘trusting’ is a central concern and the quandary that needs some answer. The content of their boasting may seem familiar (wealth and riches) but in the context of the psalm, the wisdom teacher will expertly use precisely this in order to undercut the wicked. We therefore would do well to pause over it. First, what does it mean to ‘trust in wealth’ or ‘boast in the magnitude of riches’? Clearly these are parallel and should be understood together. We can tentatively say that to ‘trust and boast’ in something is to recognize that the object trusted in is a source of power and/or stability. Trust is a subjective appropriation of the stability of the object trusted. Hence, it seems as if these wicked men find in wealth something that protects them from an attack (of some sort). It is, within this context, that the question itself takes on added depth. The question presupposes that the wicked’s trust is misplaced by being asked in rhetorical fashion. Hence, by posing the question in this manner, the wisdom teacher is simultaneously robbing the wicked of their authority and, importantly, revealing that there is, potentially, a greater source of trust than that relied upon by the wicked. Interestingly, I’m not sure the psalmist ever really answers the second aspect. The psalm, at least at this point to me, seems to find wisdom by and through destroying the validity of the wicked’s approach to life. We must point out here at the outset though something that will flow throughout the psalm: the trust of the wicked in wealth is not misplaced because wealth is ‘transitory’ whereas God is not. It is, in a sense, precisely the opposite—the trust of the wicked in wealth is misplaced because man is transitory; wealth remains, man does not. Any undercutting of the wicked will come not from the direction of the impermanence of things, but the impermanence of man.