It shouldn’t happen to Me!

The Psalmist kvetches about the things he does when someone else for once is doing it back to him. He suffers because the natural order has been disrupted; woe, woe, woe, he is receiving it rather than handing it out! In the Psalms there is no sense of karma, of ‘what goes around comes around’. What we do unto others is right, and what they do unto us is wrong, end of story. What the Psalmist wants is not help in improving his own conduct, but a divine guarantee that in future, he will always be the one handing it out, and always be patted on the head by God for it. The spirit of the Psalms is one of narcissistic self-righteousness.

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