Ps. 55.9-11 (dreams and judgment)

Destroy them / O Lord!
confound / their speech
for I see / Violence and Strife / in the city.
Day and night / they make rounds / on its walls
Evil and Trouble / are within it
Destruction is there
Oppression and Deceit / never leave / its public square

From the dream the psalmist now descends into his current situation and, from that vantage, requests the only thing that will actually provide him the freedom he dreamed of: destruction and judgment. There are many things to note about this transition. First, the previous dream is very rare in the psalms. I recall one other psalm that used similar images (of flight from danger). Typically, when a psalmist seeks freedom from his oppressors he does what, in fact, we see here—he calls on God to judge them. Indeed, if one were to skip the dream portion (vs. 6-8), the psalm would flow very much like almost every other complaint. It would read: “…horror overwhelms me – Destroy them, O Lord!” Second, the ‘dream portion’ is exactly that: a dream. And, when juxtaposed with this call for destruction, the dream and the judgment are understood to be simply two ends of the same pole. In other words, (impossible) dreams are often forms of a subtle call for judgment and destruction. And, when the impossible aspect dissolves the only thing left is what nearly every psalmist calls for: judgment. Which leads to a second point: the righteous yearn for judgment (as deeply as they dream for freedom). Never would the righteous want to forestall God’s judgment (except in the interesting cases of Abraham and Moses…), because his judgment is a form of cleansing and rectifying the world. When escape becomes impossible, judgment is the only means of freedom. And escape is clearly not an option for the psalmist. Verses 4-5 emphasized that terror was ‘all around’ and inside him. He is living in a nightmare. Here, the containment of the city has become, in fact, a torture chamber. Both in terms of time (“day and night…Oppression and Deceit never leave…”) and geography (“on its walls…within it…Destruction is there…in public square”), the psalmist is entirely surrounded. In fact, the psalmist is so thoroughly enmeshed in evil that the city has become inhabited, not by people, but by their personified wickedness: Violence, Strife, Evil, Trouble, Destruction, Oppression and Deceit. The city is so corrupted, that their pure forms are seen to be its inhabitants.  In a type of mockery of the perfection of God’s ‘seven’, these seven entities not only haunt but control, run and guard the city. Indeed, the city seems bent on protecting its own form of chaos and destruction (Violence and Strife patrol its walls…), like some evil womb protecting the seed inside. And it is directly from the heart of this city that the psalmist the cries for judgment and destruction—as pure as the evil has become is as total as the destruction called for. A final note is the reference to Babel: “confound their speech”. It is a shocking denunciation of the city, especially if in fact this is Jerusalem (which it may or may not be). Thematically, it ties together with the opening where the psalmist is distraught “from the voice of my enemy…from the threat of the wicked.” (vs. 2-3).  Furthermore, the ‘confounding’ specifically relates, in the story of Babel, to the fact that the city is united in its (wicked) resolve. The fact that the psalmist places this ‘curse’ on the city and then goes on to describe the myriad ways in which the city operates toward a common goal (all of the evil vices working in a urban concert…) reveals that he has found their unity to be as profoundly corrupt and in need of disintegration as Babel.