Ps. 69.27-28 (the blotting out)

As for you-- / they hound / whomever you strike
and talk about / the pain / of those you wound
Add guilt / to their guilt
and do not let them / come into your righteousness
may they be / blotted out / of the scroll of the living
and not be recorded / with the righteous. 

These verses represent the conclusion of the litany of the wicked, the calling down of curses. Likewise, in these lines there is the final reversal. The psalmist portrays the ‘suffering servant’ in these lines who has been ‘stricken’ by God as experiencing a compounding of his misfortune through the wicked’s banter. These lines, it seems, clearly portray the state of the psalmist in the position of the ‘idiot’ that has been at the heart of the psalm. We have seen how the psalmist has been ‘engulfed’ with shame, a shame that should have fallen on God but instead revealed him to be an ‘idiot’—a man full of zeal but utterly devoid of any authority to back his passion. In the void created by this ‘idiocy’ now falls the ‘slander’ of the wicked. The look at him, bereft of God’s vindicating power (his “being stricken by God”), and, instead of offering compassion and comfort (vs. 20), the speak “about the pain” (not about the psalmist). These are the ‘drunkard’s songs’, the words spoken by the ‘men in the gate’ (vs. 12). They are they terrible public denunciations that offer the psalmist ‘vinegar’ instead of drink and poison in his food (vs. 21). This is the proverbial “insult to injury”. And it is from this ‘compounding’ that God’s ‘compounding’ of their guilt is called for: “add guilt to their guilt”, just as they added ‘insult to my injury’. Let their injustice now turn around and fall upon their own heads. The ultimate effect of this ‘compounding’ is exclusion—the banishment from God’s righteousness, that power that undergirds every form of vitality and power. In other words, to be banished from God’s righteousness is equivalent to being “blotted out of the scroll of the living”. It is to be cast out into death. On the hand the image evokes active exclusion; on the other, it envisions a removal, a “blotting out”. All of these images seem to suggest something like a divine ledger. On the debit side of the wicked, “guilt is added to guilt”. The effect of which is their removal from a scroll that otherwise (had not the ‘guilt been added’) they may have persisted on. This scroll is one on which the ‘righteous’ are ‘recorded’, much like a reckoning. The ‘righteous’ are here the people-ed version of God’s righteousness that the wicked are now banished/excluded from. The righteous are ‘written’ whereas the wicked are ‘blotted out’. This deepens the previous reflection of how God, in his judgment/wrath, “unites what is divided and divides what is united”. Here, the wicked are ‘blotted out (divided) while the righteous remain (unified)’—the final act of removal of the wicked is what brings unity to the righteous; it is not focused merely on the wicked’s removal; as we will see it is the precondition to the perpetual establishment of the righteous (the unifying).