Psalm 10

This psalm is about a local predator, not a foreign army. The ancient village economy ran on debt: a bad harvest meant borrowing seed grain, and a second bad harvest meant pledging your field, then your children, then yourself as a bondservant. A creditor with patience and no conscience could absorb his neighbors' land legally, one loan at a time.

The hunting language in verses 8–10 is exact. Lions in that region did not chase; they crouched in cover near a watering track and waited. Human hunters used nets — a weighted mesh dropped or drawn over game driven toward it. The oppressor here "lieth in wait secretly, as a lion in his den," then "catcheth the poor: he draweth him into his net."

"He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages" points at the unwalled settlements. Small farming hamlets had no gate, no wall, no garrison — Israel's law repeatedly singles out the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger because they were exactly the people with no clan strong enough to answer for them.

The predator's creed is quoted twice: "God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it." This is not philosophical atheism. It is the working assumption of a man who has noticed that nothing has happened to him yet.