Friday, December 13, 2013

Ps. 89.41 (the crucified house)

All who pass by / have plundered him
he has become / the scorn of his neighbors. 

These lines signal the utter defenselessness of the king. From the height of pure control and mastery, through Yhwh, he has now been cast down to the realm of being made into a pure object. The immediately preceding verse signaled this as Yhwh ‘broke down all his walls’ and ‘reduced his fortifications to ruins’. What we saw there was Yhwh making the king completely and utterly vulnerable. All of his walls have been broken down.  He has no power to defend himself and, as such, the forces of chaos that he was empowered to control are now almost invited in to destroy him. These lines, however, push that vulnerability to its complete boundary. Now, it is not an army that has control over him but even those who are merely “passing by”. In other words, the king cannot even defend himself against these ‘casual wanderers’. He is completely powerless. They do not bother ‘attacking him’—they are not even interested in him—but they plunder him. When the authority dissolves, the looters pour in. 

This ‘internal’ looting is manifested externally in the ‘scorn of neighbors’. The king’s public face (his reputation) is completely disgraced. He has been robbed of all of his authorial glory and in his fall he has sunk to the level of a byword, an almost ‘curse’ to those around him. This is the ‘state’ of the abandoned ‘son of Yhwh’, the state of the king without his father and without glory. He is the complete(d) victim. This is the lament that rises in the aftermath of the crucified Davidic house.

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