Ps. 69.1-2 (without foothold)

Save me / O God
The water / is already / up to my neck
I am sinking / in a deep swamp
and there is / no foothold.
I have reached / the watery depths,
and a flood / engulfs me. 

The immediacy with which these lines hit the reader is jarring. The very short introductory petition for ‘saving’ is dwarfed by the psalmist’s description of his drowning (1 line to 5). The choice of the psalmist to couch his dilemma in the context of drowning is instructive on several levels. First, we note how the opening line places the activity in God: “Save me, O God”. For the psalmist, by contrast, his plight is one of overwhelming passivity; he is like a man drowning, a pure object of the water. “I am sinking…I have reached…flood engulfs me.” This final line completes the drama: God saves—the psalmist drowns—the water engulfs. Just as God is active in his saving, so too is the water now in its ‘engulfing’. This will come out more clearly later when his danger is compared to a ‘water-beast’ (a Leviathan perhaps): “Let not the flood of waters engulf me; let not the depths swallow me; let not the pit close its mouth over me.” (There, the image moves from a force of blind chaos to an image of active destruction.) In these opening lines, however, the formal structure mirrors the dilemma: there are two opposing forces, with the psalmist in the middle.  Further, the image of drowning points to the medium of water and its all-encompassing dread. The psalmist’s danger is not isolated; he is not asking for deliverance from a particular person. As he will say later, his enemies are “more numerous than the hairs on my head” (vs. 4). He is surround and compressed. To highlight this sense, the psalmist paints the very vivid image of “lacking a foothold”. He is not only surrounded and compressed: he is suspended in the chaos of his enemies. He is, literally, flailing for support and can find none. No one is coming to his aid and he is about to drop below the line of the living. As profoundly as he is surrounded by his enemy is he alone and without a companion. The only thing he has left is his voice (only his ‘head’ is above water). And, for that reason, he still has the medium of petition available to him (to counter the medium of the water-chaos). God must, as he did in creation, speak to the water and divide it/conquer it so that the psalmist can, again, stand on dry ground. (All of these threads will be woven together as, a quick glance at the ending will indicate: the psalm begins in water but ends in the “building” (an image for creation and the Zion-Temple) of the Promised Land.