Ps. 101.6 (the eye and the clothing of wisdom)

I have had my eyes / on faithful countrymen
for them / to live with me.
The person / who walks / a path of integrity
has been / my minister. 

We have already pointed out how the psalmist-king is enacting wisdom through his ‘shunning of evil’. Unlike Adam (and Eve), he does not permit deception within the realm he has been given to protect. Wisdom, however, is two-fold. It also necessitates an adhering to, a ‘following after’, the good. Psalm 1 is a good example (the ‘gateway to the psalms’): there, the wise man avoids the wicked but meditates on Yhwh’s torah. Here, the ‘wise king’s adhering to the good’ is enacted through the people he chooses to surround himself with and to advise him. Just as he ‘pushed away’ the evil, so now does he ‘bring close’ the good. This whole wisdom dynamic is captured by the king’s “eyes”. In the previous verse the king did not tolerate those with ‘arrogant eyes’. Here, his “eyes are on faithful countrymen”. For the king, what his ‘eyes’ focus on is clearly more than mere observation. It manifests his entire person. For him, what his eye avoids is what he “hates” and what he resolutely acts against. What his eye is “on” is something he comes to ‘surround himself with’. In other words, the ‘eye’ is intimately associated with the dynamic power of evil and good. Just as evil and good are not merely ‘things’ but ‘spheres of power’, so too is the eye what either avoids or brings the person into those spheres. To ‘perceive’ is to ‘enter’; to ‘shun’ is to ‘walk away’. The eye is as active for the person as good and evil (the ‘fruit’ was “…pleasing to the eye…”). 

We also need to highlight how the king’s approach to the ‘good’ mimics his approach to evil. We saw in his avoidance of evil that he often used ‘spatial’ terms: no evil purpose is ‘before his eyes; devious actions do not ‘cling’ to him; and a perverse mind is ‘far’ from him. Here, the reverse is true—he ‘surrounds’ himself with good people, they ‘live with him’ and they ‘minister’ to him. As opposed to the immediate and unequivocal shunning of evil, the king ‘abides’ with the good; it is constant to him. Wisdom enacted is, accordingly, both repulsive (it repulses the wicked) and attractive (it attracts to itself the good). It is something, moreover, that is received in communion with other good people. It is not individualistic. It is not received merely through the mind, but through the body as well (the ‘entire person’, so to speak).

I think there is another reversal as well. We saw how the king was able to perceive the ‘snares of evil’ in both its secret, hiding places (‘secret slander’) and in its more open forms (‘boasting’). Here, the king surrounds himself with both the low (my countrymen) and the high (ministers). He ‘clothes himself’, so to speak, in wisdom.