Ps. 56.5-6 (slander and rot within)

All day long / they twist my words
all their schemes / are aimed at me / for evil.
They plot / they lurk about;
they watch / my heels
as they wait / hoping to take / my life. 

The psalmist, from his peak of confidence, now descends once more into the realm of the wicked. This is a type of recapitulation, a repetition from a different angle, of the opening verses. There, the enemies were ‘hounding’ the psalmist and ‘pressing their attack’. The emphasis in these lines is different however. There, it was open fighting. The battle was public, in some sense.  Here, the sense of dread emerges from the preparatory sense of the wicked, their ‘priming’ and waiting for the psalmist’s most vulnerable moment. They ‘take aim’, but they have not yet fully attacked. They ‘plot’ but have not yet initiated their plans. They ‘lurk’ about and ‘watch my heels’ from a position of unseen danger. And, whereas the psalmist’s hope is clearly in God’s help, theirs is in attacking the psalmist at the most opportune time. Death is their goal. The gist of all of this seems more sinister and, importantly, more anxiety inducing. The psalmist is aware of an attack, he is aware that their goal is all-pervasive and consuming (“all day long they twist my word”), but he is not aware of when the attack will come. Further, the ‘twisting of his words’ now comes into focus in a different way that in the opening. What we see here is that their continuous plotting against him involves this slander. They are, in other words, spreading poison throughout a community that is aimed at destroying the psalmist’s reputation and weight (‘glory’) within that community. The psalmist senses this spreading flow of slander, as it weaves itself throughout others, but he cannot tell the extent of it as it lies underneath the surface, ready to break free when his attackers feel is the most opportune time. This is the most dangerous form of attack as the psalmist cannot aim his defense at anyone in particular. It may be that what we see here is the voice of a king as those in opposition to him are subtly working out their attempt at overthrowing him by robbing him of his authority within the kingdom; they will cause him to rot-within before they make their final attack at which time the king will be severely weakened by their slander and ready to fall as there will be no one to come to his aid.