Ps. 64.2-5 (from fear to horror)

Hide me / from a wicked mob
from a klavern / of evildoers
who whet their tongues / like swords
who string their bows / for arrows/ of poison words
to shoot from hiding / at the blameless
who shoot / without warning / and fear not
who encourage themselves / in an evil matter. 

Here we come to identify, on some level, who these agents of chaos are. What we will find, though, is that the manner in which they are described (almost more than the images used) will key us into the psalmist’s real fear (indeed, horror) at these men. The first thing to note is that, over-against the single psalmist, they are a mob and a klavern. The enemy exists in its corporate multiplicity. The danger emerges from their congregating, their planning and conspiring together. We might say that their sum is greater than their parts. (Or, in more apocalyptic imagery: their unholy alliance creates a single, overwhelming beast (or statute)). It is in their “encouraging themselves in an evil matter” that they grow in power and unanimity. And it is in this sense of overpowering ferocity and cunning that the psalmist begins to experience something more than fear and bordering on horror. But there is another ingredient that needs to be brought out—throughout the description of the wicked, and the entire psalm, they never touch the psalmist. Their existence is that of threat, of the certainty of a malevolent attack that has not yet been executed. This is the essence of horror. Once the attack comes, fear dissolves, but until that point the victim exists within a heightened state of anxiety, and the fear feeds itself (it is at the point where fear begins to, in this sense, ‘procreate’ that one is truly in the realm of horror). This is also why the psalmist’s request is for ‘hiding’, more than ‘empowering’. The true victim of horror exists within a deep uncertainty. If the hunter is powerful, the victim is never sure whether he is, in fact, in hiding or whether the hunter is simply biding his time (perhaps reveling in the psychological pain being inflicted on the prey), certain of where the hunted is. The truly terrifying moment is when the person realizes that their hiding place is, in reality, a prison and they have no hope of escape. Within this space of uncertainty, the victim’s perception of the hunter borders on the demonic. Their fear infuses them (the attackers) with the powers of darkness and chaos itself as the victim’s life is about to be violently and suddenly snuffed out. It in this context that we can, I think, adequately sense the horror that is seeping out the psalmist and why he creates this dark litany of the wicked. These men have become to him an all-consuming, and ever-present, threat: “who whet their tongues…who string their bows…to shoot from hiding…who shoot without warning…who encourage themselves…”. Apart from the description of these men, the fact that the psalmist employs this manner of repeated description (this ‘dark litany’), points to what we have been describing as the place of horror. In other words, the psalmist feels doomed.