It is to be noted that the psalm says no more about the sins of unjust authorities, but passes on to describe the "wicked" generally. The transition may suggest that under unjust rulers all wrongdoers find impunity, and so multiply and worsen; or it may simply be that these former are now merged in the class to which they belong. The type of "wickedness" gibbeted is the familiar one of malicious calumniators and persecutors. From birth onwards they have continuously been doers of evil. The psalmist is not laying down theological propositions about heredity, but describing the inveterate habit of sin which has become a second nature, and makes amendment hopeless. The reference to "lies" naturally suggests the image of the serpent's poison. An envenomed tongue is worse than any snake's bite. And the mention of the serpent stimulates the poet's imagination to yet another figure, which puts most graphically that disregard of warnings, entreaties, and every voice, human or Divine, that marks long-practised, customary sinfulness. There can be no more striking symbol of determined disregard to the calls of patient Love and the threats of outraged Justice than that of the snake lying coiled, with its head in the centre of its motionless folds, as if its ears were stopped by its own bulk, while the enchanter plays his softest notes and speaks his strongest spells in vain. There are such men, thinks this psalmist. There are none whom the mightiest spell, that of God's love in Christ, could not conquer and free from their poison; but there are such as will close their ears to its plaintive sweetness. This is the condemnation that light is come and men love darkness, and had rather lie coiled in their holes than have their fangs extracted.
The general drift of the second part (vv. 6-9) is to call down Divine retribution on these obstinate, irreclaimable evil-doers. Figure is heaped on figure in a fashion suggestive of intense emotion. The transiency of insolent evil, the completeness of its destruction, are the thoughts common to them all. There are difficulties in translation, and, in ver. 9, probable textual corruption; but these should not hide the tremendous power of gloomy imagination, which can lay hold of vulgar and in part loathsome things, and, by sheer force of its own solemn insight, can free them from all low or grotesque associations, and turn them into awful symbols. The intense desire for the sweeping away of evil-doers has met us in many previous psalms, and it is needless to repeat former observations on it. But it is nowhere expressed with such a wealth of metaphor as here. The first of these, that of crushing the jaws and breaking the teeth of a beast of prey, occurs also in Psalm iii. 7. It is less terrible than the subsequent imprecations, since it only contemplates the wickeds' deprivation of power to do harm. In ver. 7 _a_ their destruction is sought, while, in the second clause of the same verse, the defeat of their attempts is desired. Ver. 8 then expands the former wish, and ver. 9 the latter. This plain symmetrical arrangement makes the proposals to resort to transposition unnecessary. Mountain torrents quickly run themselves dry; and the more furious their rush, the swifter their exhaustion. They leave a chaos of whitened stones, that lie bleaching in the fierce sun when the wild spate is past. So stormy and so short will be the career of evil-doers. So could a good man of old wish it to be; and so may we be sure of and desire the cessation of oppression and man's inhumanity to man. Ver. 7 _b_ is obscure. All these figures are struck out with such parsimony of words that they are difficult. They remind one of some of the stern, unfinished work of Michael Angelo, where a blow or two of his chisel, or a dash or two of his brush, has indicated rather than expressed his purpose, and left a riddle, fascinating in its incompleteness, for smaller men to spell out. In ver. 7 _b_ it may be asked, Who is the archer? If God, then the whole is a presentation as if of an occurrence taking place before our eyes. God shoots His arrow, and at once it lodges in the heart of the enemies, and they are as though cut off. But it is better to take the wicked as the subject of both verbs, the change from singular to plural being by no means unusual in successive clauses with the same subject. If so, this clause recurs to the thought of ver. 6, and prays for the neutralising of the wicked man's attempts. He fits his arrows, aims, and draws the bow. May they fall harmless, as if barbless! An emendation has been proposed by which the clause is made parallel with Psalm xxxvii. 2, "As grass let them be quickly cut off," thus securing a complete parallel with _a_, and avoiding the difficulty in the word rendered by us "pointless." But the existing text gives a vigorous metaphor, the peculiarity of which makes it preferable to the feebler image of withering grass.