Ps. 73.2-3 (the fall)

But for me / my feet / had almost stumbled
my step had / nearly slipped
because I envied / the arrogant
and coveted / the prosperity / of the wicked. 

Immediately, the note of disunity is introduced once the proverb has ended. It is as if the proverb were the one commandment in the garden, and now the psalmist, Adam-like, has disobeyed. He signals this by the word “But” and then proceeds to describe his near fall. The images are, initially, of walking, but soon turn to what we saw as the central arena of God’s goodness: the heart. He “envied” and “coveted”. This ‘heart-direction’ is what nearly caused his feet to stumble. This was the beginning of impurity and, as such, was the beginning of the twilight of God’s goodness (to Israel…). What flowed into his heart, by way of ‘envy’ and ‘coveting’, were the impure arrogant and the wicked. There are two things to note about this ‘prosperity’: first, we need to directly mention the fact that, as a Levitical priest, the psalmist’s ‘portion’ is (only) God himself. As a priest, he would be removed from the realm of possessions and placed within the realm of the Temple precincts. For him, therefore, to covet possessions is doubly problematic. Most importantly, it calls into question the fact that his ‘possession’ is God. The second thing to note: we have indicated in several other psalms the fact that goods, in and of themselves, partake of the vanity of the world. The wicked can obtain them very easily. They cannot, however, maintain them in perpetuity and they, therefore, become the source of violence and oppression. (In this way it is a mockery of the perpetual, enduring goods of God.) Only God can give something in safety and perpetuity. Only God can make goods good. When the psalmist then speaks of ‘prosperity’ it is important to note that he qualifies this with “the prosperity of the wicked”. This is not prosperity, per se. It is prosperity that partakes of the vicious vanity of the world. These two aspects, the priestly and the vain, combine to begin leading the psalmist away from God’s goodness. Which leads to a concluding thought: as a priest, the psalmist would have been intimately aware of the need for sacrifices to be ‘pure and without fault’ (like what his heart should be). Further, impure animals are those animals that seem to exhibit a form of ‘category mistake’ (a bird that has wings that can’t fly; a shellfish that walks as if it were on land; etc…). The sacrifices that were impure would have then exhibited a lack of integrity and, in so doing, would be unfit to present to God. This system would have clearly been something that exemplified not only a cultic but a moral reality as well. The heart cannot exhibit the same ‘category confusion’. And the priest would have been doing this two-fold. First, as a priest, he would have been doing so by way of desiring anything other than God as his ‘portion’. Second, he would have been doing so by the fact that he wants what the wicked have, which is vain. In light of the opening proverb this is problematic, in the extreme. If the heart of the world (Israel) becomes impure, whence God’s goodness?