“My heart / races in my breast
the terrors of
death / have fallen / upon me
Fear and trembling / have invaded me
horror /
overwhelms me.”
The psalmist is living in a nightmare. And, as in a dream, the
boundaries between himself and the world around him are fluid. And it is this
coinciding of internal and external that is a source of great horror to him,
for fear seems to be both emanating from him and invading him, both housed
within and overwhelming him—it “falls on him”, “invades him”, and “overwhelms
him”. He has become the play-thing of fear, a pure object to its power. This
sense of an all-encompassing and active presence of dread has pushed him nearly
to a breaking point as he seems to have no means of escape. It is crucial to
grasp this sense of being crushed beneath the weight of fear in order to
understand what follows—from underneath this pressure two visions emerge, one,
a dream of escape, the other, a demand for judgment.
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