Men carved their paths through the Judean wilderness knowing violence waited in the narrow defiles. Deep wadis dropped hundreds of feet and offered perfect choke points for highwaymen to trap travelers. The authors of the Psalter recorded these terrors using the vocabulary of a hunter tracking game. They wrote of men who sharpened their tongues like swords and hid viper poison in their mouths. Survival meant watching every shadow along the escarpment for a hidden net or a camouflaged pit.
This hunting vocabulary matches imperial records from the surrounding empires. Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh show kings using braided nets and dropping heavy grates on lions in enclosed spaces. By the time scribes compiled this fifth division of the Psalms after 538 b.c., Jewish exiles returning from Babylon understood this militarized trapping intimately. The Persian garrisons policing the 35 miles of road between Jericho and Jerusalem employed these same ambushes to control the trade routes. The psalm describes an environment where human beings hunted other human beings for political and financial control.
These physical traps required precise engineering to function correctly on the uneven terrain. Hunters wove cords from animal sinew and flax to create snares capable of holding a thrashing body. They anchored these loops to the dirt and covered them with foliage to make them vanish from sight. When a foot caught the snare the sudden tension snapped the victim upside down. This mechanism of sudden reversal informed the ancient mind when evaluating human treachery and divine retaliation.
The hidden cord strangles the man who tied the knot.
The knot tightens regardless of who steps into the trap. The authors of the psalm appealed to their Deity to throw burning coals upon their enemies and cast them into deep pits. They wanted him to employ the exact methods of the highwaymen against the highwaymen. The text leaves the violent men teetering on the edge of their own carefully dug craters.