Ps. 94.8 (idiots among the people)

Understand this / you idiots / among the people!
you fools, / when will you get smart? 

One thing to note in this psalm so far is its very aggressive tone. When the psalmist describes the work of the wicked, it is full of violent description: they “spew arrogance”, they “crush, oppress, kill and murder”. And, when they speak about Yhwh, they taunt. This aggressive language is not only in its description but in its compactness—it is very concentrated, which lends to it a feeling of urgency and, more directly, anger. This tone continues without interruption into these verses but now the wicked are subjected to it. The ‘fury’ of the psalmist now falls upon them. The same aggression that described the wicked and their actions toward their victims and to Yhwh is now turned upon them in a flurry of very sarcastic and condescending questions. These questions are meant to humiliate. We need to feel the force of this reversal. It is total and it is without apology. 

This psalmist initiates this reversal in very artful way. The immediately preceding line ended with “Jacob’s god wont understand.” Here, the first word is “Understand this you idiots..”. The wicked’s accusation is being literally (and literarily) turned against them. What they envisioned as a lack of understanding is now falling upon in an overwhelmingly forceful manner. They are the ones who lack understanding; they are the idiots. There is something deeply deeply ignorant and problematic about these wicked people. Their fault, moreover, is one of ‘understanding’, of perception, and of being, in effect, stupid. In other words, the psalm portrays these wicked’s fault as something that is not subtle but glaringly obvious. 

This reality is important to note in regard to one of their claims about Yhwh not being able to see or understand their wickedness. The wicked believe that their exploitation of the vulnerable is artful, subtle, and full of such intrigue that Yhwh would not be able to unravel it or be able to, in the end, judge it; for them, their wickedness is deeper and more profound in its machinations than Yhwh. What we see here, however, is that it is precisely the opposite. Their wickedness does not take place in some inaccessibly dark place. They are not performing in some invisible sphere away from divine oversight. Rather, they are like actors on a stage and the one whom they thought they were hidden from (Yhwh) is the audience that clearly discerns their wickedness.