Psalm 35

The opening asks God to arm himself: "take hold of shield and buckler." These were two different pieces of equipment. The buckler was a small round shield strapped to the arm for close work; the larger shield was a full-body screen, sometimes carried by a separate bearer, that a soldier crouched behind. "Stop the way against them that persecute me" describes a man planting himself across a pass.

The court scene is just as concrete. "False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not" is the exact danger Israel's law tried to contain by requiring two or three witnesses and by ruling that a proven false witness suffered the penalty he had tried to impose. Perjury at the gate was the cheapest weapon available.

Verses 13–14 describe how the singer had behaved when these same men were ill: he wore sackcloth, humbled his soul with fasting, and went about heavy as one mourning for his mother. That was the accepted way to intercede for a sick neighbor, and it was a public commitment — the whole village saw you do it.

"Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the Lord chase them" brings back the threshing floor of Psalm 1, and "let their way be dark and slippery" pictures the rock paths of the hill country after rain, where a man running in the dark went down hard.