Ps. 59.3-4 (a hidden anxiety)

For see how / they lie in wait / for me!
Mean people / plot against me,
but / for no offense of mine / and no sin of mine / O Yhwh.
There is / no waywardness / on my part
but / they run / and prepare to attack. 

The psalm opened with a plea for deliverance. The king now petitions God to “see”, something he returns to in the following verse. We have argued before that for God to ‘see’ is not merely for him to become aware of a given situation. It is no mere passive observation. Rather, to appeal to God to “see” is to ask for him to act. We have described this in other contexts as the hiatus between seeing and acting—in God, these two should be united but often are not, and it is the goal of the petition to unite these two poles into the present in an act of judgment. This view is very close to the following verse where the king says, “Rouse yourself to meet me and see!” In this phrase we find both aspects brought together: the ‘meeting’ and the ‘seeing’ are here understood as a unified act of judgment, an act that would, by its nature, condemn the oppressors and deliver the righteous (the king). What the king is asking God to see is instructive: he wants God to see their wickedness and, importantly, their hiding (“…see how they lie in wait for me…”). In essence the king is asking God to ‘see how they hide’. For him, God ‘seeing wickedness’ would move him into action as quickly and profoundly as his ‘seeing righteousness’. There is the sense that for God to look upon wickedness is to, in a sense, already condemn it. In reality, these two poles are combined for the king wants God to “see” both their plotting and his innocence (“…no offense of mine…no sin of mine…no waywardness on my part…”). There is also, as will become more clear later, a deep anxiety at the heart of the petition. Unlike a request for deliverance prior to engaging in battle, where the enemy is manifest, this request originates from the sense that what is most dangerous—what is ‘rising against me’ (vs. 1)—is taking place in secret and in hiding. The images of a ‘hunt’, with the king as a prey, will be seen throughout the psalm (the ‘howling dogs’). What the king wants is for God to pierce this darkness that he himself can sense but cannot fully perceive—hence, why he asks God to ‘see it’. It is the king’s inability to fully comprehend the danger that is at the root of this petition, which is why the one thing he can say, with certainty, is that he is not guilty.