Ps. 101.4-5 (wisdom, high and low)

A perverse mind
has been / far from me. 
I have not been / involved in the wrong.
Whoever secretly slandered / his associate 
him I have silenced
if any have arrogant eyes / and big ideas
him I have not tolerated. 

In many psalms the psalmist complains about the evil perpetrated “in secret”. It seems to either refer to a type of duplicity—that what is ‘open’ and what is ‘secret’ are not the same—or to a hidden attack—they ‘lie in wait’. In both of these situations, what is ‘hidden’ is an act of communal destruction. They are not ‘hiding themselves’ but the evil they intend to do to another. It is always directed at someone (generally, the psalmist). In these psalms, it is precisely the hidden nature that causes the psalmist to cry out to Yhwh because, as to Yhwh, nothing is hidden. In other words, Yhwh is the only one who can protect the psalmist against that which, by nature, is hidden from him but designed to destroy him; there is a deep anxiety over this in those psalms. What the psalmist want is for Yhwh to ‘bring out in the open’, by way of judgment, the hidden plans of the wicked. The psalmist wants Yhwh work a reversal, whereby what is hidden is revealed and, often, openly turned upon the heads of the perpetrators. So, while they intended to attack others (communal), the end up only hurting themselves (individual), and while they planned in secret, they will be exposed publicly. We might say, in the context of this psalm, that this is Yhwh’s “path of integrity”, the path whereby he brings justice to the world, and light to the darkness. 

What is important to see, of course, is that in our psalm, it is the king who silences these “secret slanders”. He is the one who protects those whom are spoken about. He is the one brings justice. He is the one who protects the social cohesion of those around him. He ferrets out the ‘secret slander’ and puts a stop to it because, as we indicated in the previous reflection, evil is dynamic, dangerous and, in a sense, contagious. As such, the king must ‘nip it in the bud’ before it blossoms in the court. This reveals how ‘socially wise’ the king is; how attuned he is to the dangers of social entropy. And how he, as the ‘wise king’, must protect his realm from it. Again, this is precisely what Adam and Eve failed to do in the garden, when they allowed the serpent’s ‘secret slander’ to persist and grow. Ironically, this happened before, during and after they “ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (a ‘tree of wisdom’). 

When we look at the second form of ‘evil’ that the king thwarts he notice an important relationship between it and the previous one. Here, the evil is ‘big ideas’ and ‘arrogant eyes’. This operates openly and ‘loud’. Which stands in contrast to the single, ‘hidden slander’, which worked slowly and silently. What we see, then, is that the king governs the realm inside and out, and top-to-bottom. He is able to discern every level of danger to the social cohesion of his people and to thwart it, enacting wisdom throughout.