Ps. 52.7 (an object of mockery)

“Look at the man / who did not make God / his stronghold;
he trusted / in his great wealth;
he tried / to be strong / by being destructive.” 

It is thematically important that the psalmist at this point stops addressing the ‘hero’ directly in the second person (“you”) but now in the more abstract and distant third person (“look at the man…; he trusted…”). After the point of humiliation, the hero is no longer a person to be addressed but only someone spoken about—he is a pure object, a thing to be described. This is also related to another change: whereas the hero was previously directly addressed, now the psalmist turns to the ‘righteous’. The words in this verse are not addressed to hero any longer. Indeed, he will not speak anymore for the remainder of the psalm. Rather, a community of righteous ones stands and gazes at the humiliation of the hero. The fact that they are communally engaging in this spectacle adds to the judgment enacted on this hero/man. His judgment is now seen as ridicule. The command of the psalmist to the others is to “Look…”. The hero is, again, a spectacle, an object of mockery. This points to another important change in wording. The first verse referred to this person as a “hero”; now, after he has been not only ruined but utterly humiliated, he is only “the man”. One pictures here a man not only robbed of his wealth and prestige but of any communal respect. He is an outcast. These are words of mockery, much as the opening questions were words of intense sarcasm. The content of the mockery is in the fact that this ‘hero’ attempted to make himself great through wealth and destruction. To the psalmist, his humiliation was an inevitable outcome. The only source of perpetual greatness is in God’s “loyal-love” (vs. 1, 8). Those who trust in ‘wealth’ and the ‘power of destruction’ can, for a time, become heroic; they cannot, however, maintain their position and will be cast down. His glory can last only “for a little while”.