Ps. 69.4 (a proposal: king as speaker)

Those who hate me / are more numerous / than the hairs of my head
my mendacious foes / who would destroy me / are so many
that I am / forced to restore / what I did not steal. 

In these verses I want to propose who I believe the speaker of the psalm could be. There are indications scattered throughout that the psalmist is beset by vast horde of enemies; his foe is not individual. Further, he refers to himself as “a servant” which can be designation for the king. Likewise, verses 5-6, and the following, seem to contemplate that the psalmist functions in the role of a mediator; his sins could cause God to become deaf to the cries of his people. It is, probably, this sense of his ability to be a more-than-an-indvidual that seems to me to be a persuasive argument that we are listening in on the voice of an appointed mediator (here, the king). Lastly, the concern for the Temple, the ‘zeal’ for God’s house, while certainly something that every Israelite could experience would be a particularly potent type of zeal within the king. All of that said, the psalm does not necessitate such a reading but I find it to be fruitful, particularly as it applies to this verse and the resolution of the problem posed in this verse at the conclusion of the psalm. The dilemma posed is thus: due to the overwhelming presence of his enemies, the king is not in a position of strength such that when his enemies make demands of him he cannot refuse them. If they make incursions into the land, he has to let them take what is not theirs. In the final line he says he must “restore” “what I did not steal”. I think what we see here is that land the king had conquered is here being ‘restored’ to his enemies, even though the king did not ‘steal’ this land, but rightfully conquered it. The ‘exchange’ involves pieces of the holy land. Clearly, land is not mentioned in these lines; however, the psalm concludes, after a long series of reversals, with the God saving Zion, building the towns of Judah and allowing his servants to “possess it” and to leave it to their descendants. It is the only time in the psalm when possessions are spoken of except for in these opening lines. Every other act of wickedness performed by the wicked return on them—if an act of ‘restoration’ is to occur, then it must be in this restoration of the land. This anxiety over the loss of the land would be one the king would feel in an entirely unique fashion because he is the Adam-like ‘guardian’ of the land. Just as Adam (the ‘son of God’ as ‘made in his image’) was given the command to ‘guard’ the Garden, so does the king participate within this Adam-commission in his adoption as the ‘son of God’ (Ps. 2; reign of David). The ‘weight of the land’ is placed on his shoulders and any loss of the land on his part would be a failure of his commission. This is important, particularly as it relates to the following verses and the king’s ‘folly’: the failure of a commission is type of ‘folly and sin’, although it is not what we would call, ‘personal’. The king is a political person; he is his flock and his role as ‘guardian’ is a political-communal investment. His ‘being’ is more than his person. He is a mediator and, as a mediator, his failings are a failing of his mediatorial being—just as he mediates God’s justice and protection, so too will he mediate God’s disfavor (we will see this in the upcoming verses). Hence, his military and political failings are just as (indeed, more perhaps) profound as any type of ‘personal’ sin or ‘folly’ and would weigh down on him in a very troubling fashion.