Ps. 101.3 (the "I" of the king)

I have behaved / with integrity of mind
at my court. 

The opening line is, in some fashion, a mirror to verse 2. There, David celebrates Yhwh’s “path of integrity”, asks when Yhwh will come to him, and now declares that he has “behaved with integrity of mind.” As we have argued, David is laying the ‘foundation of his case’ as to why Yhwh should come to his aid. And he does so by matching his integrity and Yhwh’s. He does not merely praise Yhwh’s integrity, he enacts it as Yhwh’s sovereign agent. What is key to see in this is that this type of argument is a ‘covenant argument’. David appeals to Yhwh as a covenant partner appeals to another covenant partner. In other words, he is saying, “I’ve held up my end of the bargain, now you hold up yours.” Putting it in these stark terms sounds ‘contractual’, rather than ‘covenantal’. In their context, however, of that of Yhwh-and-his-king-son, and within David’s clear love and admiration for Yhwh (vs. 1-2), this covenant is more like kinship than contractual. This is a son speaking to his father (Ps. 2). David is modelling in his court what Yhwh performs in his heavenly court (“…thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”). 

Along these lines we should note the repetitive “I”. Every single line of the psalm describes what “I” (David) have done. It is, almost startlingly, ‘self’ centered. In this we should hear something important—what the king does (or refuses to do) is absolutely crucial. The king, as we have seen, holds in his person, all of his people. And, he likewise is the one through whom Yhwh establishes his kingdom on earth. The overwhelming focus on the “I” of the king then is the result of the king inhabiting these two realms between Yhwh and his people. The king is not an ‘individual’; his “I” is not simply personal. Rather, he is, somewhat like the Temple (and somewhat like a priest), the person in whom the people and Yhwh meet. And, therefore, like the Temple, he must be kept clean; he must not be ‘profaned’. The king’s being is, in other words, utterly appropriated by the people and by Yhwh. He does not have a ‘portion to himself’.  For this reason, his entire “I” must be examined in a way unlike any other person. His office—his covenant status—places him in a hierarchical role (like a priest, like the Temple) that consumes him (the higher up the hierarchy the more one’s ‘person’ is expropriated and consumed, whether as a  ‘prophet, priest or king’.) This absolute focus on the “I” is therefore not a type of hubris and dangerous self-centeredness. It is the focus appropriate to the office. (As we will see later, this type of focus on the king’s innocence is similar to the focus on the need for no impurity to enter the Temple.)