Psalm 54: 1 – 7
Squealers
To the Chief Musician. With stringed instruments. A Contemplation of David when the Ziphites went and said to Saul, “Is David not hiding with us?”
1 Save me, O God, by Your name, and vindicate me by Your strength. 2 Hear my prayer, O God; Give ear to the words of my mouth. 3 For strangers have risen up against me, and oppressors have sought after my life; They have not set God before them. Selah 4 Behold, God is my helper; The Lord is with those who uphold my life. 5 He will repay my enemies for their evil. Cut them off in Your truth. 6 I will freely sacrifice to You; I will praise Your name, O LORD, for it is good. 7 For He has delivered me out of all trouble; And my eye has seen its desire upon my enemies.
Have you ever experienced someone become a tattletale or a squealer against you? If you have then welcome to the team. If you have not had someone do this to you then you probably are not even familiar with the terms. These words refer to a close family member or friend who betrays you and turns to be an informer. Why would someone be so low to do this to you. The principal reasons are fear or reward.
I am thankful to my High School English teachers who challenged me and stretched my knowledge by having me read some excellent novels. Not the junk you find today (when is the last time you learned of a new real hit novel?) but some real classics.
British novelist George Orwell (1903-1950) wrote an amazing allegory in 1946 called ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell satirized the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent decades of totalitarian Soviet oppression. The story takes place on a fictional farm where the maltreated animals’ rebel and overthrow their human overlords. They establish a seemingly utopian society where they work for and are governed by themselves; however, it doesn’t take long for the farm to deteriorate into a totalitarian state with a ruler who can only be described as a tyrant. The most pivotal factor responsible for this outcome is propaganda. Using propaganda in the book, Orwell argues that a government’s power to control its people’s knowledge and views is that government’s capacity to manipulate and oppress.
The first way that Orwell demonstrates the insidious power of propaganda is through the carefully crafted language used by the farm’s pigs, who incrementally assume all power and control over the other animals. For example, in chapter three, a pig called ‘Squealer’, who is essentially the mouthpiece of the despotic Napoleon, declares that “the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ ”. This slogan is one salient example of oversimplification as well as “us vs. them” rhetoric—both propaganda ploys that Squealer uses to extract support from the animals. Another example of Squealer’s deliberate language is found in chapter nine, when the pig consistently refers to the animals’ shrinking shares of food “as a ‘readjustment’ of rations, never as a ‘reduction’ ”. In this passage Squealer utilizes a form of propaganda know as euphemism, where a word that clearly represents something negative is replaced by a word with a more neutral or even positive connotation. Squealer does this to prevent the animals from realizing the true severity of the food crisis, which might have led to some discontent among the animals about how things were going on the farm. One last instance of propaganda in Squealer’s language is his oft-reiterated appeal, “ ‘Surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones back?’ ”. Squealer makes this query over and over throughout the book: first to defend the pigs’ hoarding of the milk and apples in chapter three, later to support his claim in chapter five that Snowball was a traitor, and towards the end to justify the pigs’ practice of sleeping in the humans’ beds. In all these scenes, the question is a thinly veiled attempt to instill fear in the animals to make them comply with the pigs’ schemes. In conclusion, Squealer’s intentional language—his slogans, his euphemisms, and his appeals to fear—supports Orwell’s argument that propaganda gives those in authority the power to manipulate their people.
The last and most concrete manner in which the pigs use propaganda to further their own agenda is the changing of the Seven Commandments. Originally composed in chapter two, some of the more specific Commandments read: “No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal”. However, the animals soon notice things amiss. In chapter six, the news leaks out that the pigs (who have moved into Jones’ vacated farmhouse) are sleeping in the beds. The smarter animals feel faintly concerned about this and consult the Seven Commandments, but they find that commandment number four states, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets” (67). Later, the animals learn that the pigs have obtained wine and held a raucous party after which Napoleon nearly dies of a hangover. Again, the smarter individuals seem to remember that the Seven Commandments forbade alcohol, but when they look at the wall of the barn on which the Commandments are painted, they find only, “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess” . It all comes to a head when, in chapter seven, Napoleon and his dog enforcers perform a massive crackdown in which scores of animals are executed for various alleged crimes against the state. The bloody massacre downright appalls the farm, and this time practically all the animals have the distinct feeling that the event violates their memories of the earliest guidelines laid down for Animal Farm. As a body they gather below the Seven Commandments on the wall, but they discover that the commandment in question proclaims, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause”. In all three of these scenes, it is blatantly obvious that the commandments have been altered from their original forms. How this occurs is revealed at the end of chapter eight, when in the middle of the night Squealer is caught outside the barn with a ladder and bucket of white paint, rewriting the Commandments. This is possibly the most insidious incidence of propaganda in the book, but it is indisputably successful in accomplishing its goals; namely, to absolve the pigs of all responsibility for their questionable behavior, and thus to uphold the idealistic view of the farm and its rulers as infallible and exemplary in all things.
Orwell utilizes Squealer’s carefully calculated language, the pigs’ practice of progressively mutating history (or the animals’ perceptions of the past), and Squealer’s repeated modification of the Seven Commandments to make his case that when a government has dominion and sway over people’s knowledge and perspectives through propaganda, that government has essentially free rein, and can manipulate, mislead, and oppress its people, all with relative impunity. This argument reflects Orwell’s apparent fascination with the rise and fall of Soviet Russia as well as the ideology behind communism, both of which heavily influenced Animal Farm. In the context of the arguments explained in this essay, the most important takeaway from the book is this: that the people of any state must be constantly on guard so that their government can never assume dominion over information and thought, and that they must never willingly surrender control of public opinion to their leaders. If they do so, they run the risk of falling victim to the kind of utter tyranny exercised by the pigs in Animal Farm—and, for that matter, by every other dictatorial class in history.
In today’s Psalm David has been on the run from king Saul. He had moved about from area to area from Saul’s pursuit. He then comes to an area where the people were called ‘Ziphites’. We will find out the reasons why these people squealed on David and his followers.
To the Chief Musician. With stringed instruments. A Contemplation of David when the Ziphites went and said to Saul, “Is David not hiding with us?”
Dedicated to the Choirmaster or Chief Musician, and to be played on stringed instruments, this is another Maschil of David. It is said in the heading to have been written when the Ziphites, in the Judean wilderness, betrayed David to Saul (1 Samuel 26.1). That was a particularly difficult time for David, for having built up a private army a few hundred strong, he had previously been in danger of being handed over to Saul by the men of Keilah, whom he had delivered from the Philistines (1 Samuel 23.1-13). Having therefore escaped to the wilderness of Judea he was once more betrayed to Saul by the Ziphites, who may well have been very concerned at having such a large armed contingent in their territory.
The Psalm divides into two sections separated by the usual word Selah, indicating a pregnant pause in the singing, when the singers and listeners could pause to consider what had been said. The two sections are as follows:
• David prays to be delivered from the hands of Saul (54.1-3).
• David expresses his confidence in God’s protection and deliverance and assures him that he will not be short on gratitude (54.4-6).
1 Save me, O God, by Your name, and vindicate me by Your strength. 2 Hear my prayer, O God; Give ear to the words of my mouth.
David calls on God to deliver him ‘by His Name’, in other words by the character and attributes that that Name reveals. It would be in His Name that David was anointed by Samuel to be Saul’s replacement (1 Samuel 16.12-13), which David no doubt saw as giving him the right to God’s protection. It was to Samuel that David first fled when he recognized that he was no longer safe from Saul’s jealousy (1 Samuel 19.18). He was also relying on what that Name revealed of loyalty to those who observed His covenant (which Saul had failed to do).
He calls on God as ‘the Strong One’ to consider his case and act accordingly ‘Judge me in Your might’, demonstrating a verdict in favor of David by acting in might on his behalf. Confident that he is in the right, David calls on God to hear his prayer, and listen to what he has to say.
3 For strangers have risen up against me, and oppressors have sought after my life; They have not set God before them. Selah
He points out to God that strangers and violent men have revolted against him and are seeking his life, because they have not given consideration to God’s purposes. They are not looking to God for guidance (something that David constantly did). ‘Strangers’ regularly signifies ‘foreigners’ of whom there may well have been a good number in Saul’s standing army. Having come to dwell in Israel they would be content to be on full time duty because they possessed no land which had to be cultivated. One such was Doeg the Edomite who might well have been in David’s mind. (David’s mighty men also included non-Israelites). Or ‘strangers may refer to the Ziphite wilderness dwellers, who lived lives separately from ‘civilized society’.
4 Behold, God is my helper; The Lord is with those who uphold my life. 5 He will repay my enemies for their evil. Cut them off in Your truth.
Having prayed to God he is confident of God’s help and protection. He sees God as his helper. For had God not anointed him to replace Saul? How then could He not help him to escape from Saul? And he sees Him as the Sovereign Lord Who Is the Upholder of his life, as One Who Is on his side. He is thus confident that God will respond to the evil of his enemies by Himself acting against them, requiting them for what they are doing. And that, having by anointing David demonstrated His favorable attitude towards him, He will be true to His promise so given.
6 I will freely sacrifice to You; I will praise Your name, O LORD, for it is good. 7 For He has delivered me out of all trouble; And my eye has seen its desire upon my enemies.
David then promises that he himself will respond in gratitude. He will sacrifice a freewill offering to God and will give thanks to Him under His covenant Name of YHWH, a Name which he declares to be ‘good’ (totally reliable, dependable and trustworthy).
The goodness of YHWH’s Name is especially brought out by the fact that He has delivered David from ‘all trouble’, something demonstrated by the fact that David’s eye has seen what was necessary for his deliverance on his enemies. David did not desire their discomfiture as such, in the sense of wanting them to suffer and gloating over them. He sought it because it was the only way in which he could be delivered.
