The Design of the Psalter

A Macrostructural Analysis

Peter C. W. Ho

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532654428
  9781532654435
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532654442
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Good poetry is like a good painting: the more you linger over it, the more it reveals. It is a deep well that never runs dry. And that is why the Psalter, like a good painting, keeps giving. In the last four decades, Psalms scholarship has found remarkable fruitfulness in reading the Psalter as a book--that is, in reading the Psalms as a unified composition with a metanarrative across its 150 poems. Pivotal questions associated with this approach really boil down to two questions--how and why? How are individual psalms sequenced, if at all, and what is the design logic behind that macrostructure? This volume seeks to answer those questions. In essence, the Psalter unfurls the story of the Davidic covenant. While interest in the editing of the Psalter remains high in recent Psalms scholarship, this interest has not led to clear consensus. The specific and timely contribution of this volume is twofold. First, it consolidates the results of studies on groups of psalms. Second, it integrates poetic and thematic approaches that are typically separated in Psalms scholarship. Readers will find results of this study surprising and their implications sobering.

1

Introduction

The question about the Psalter as a book is . . . rather a question whether each psalm, with its inherent and specific language, may have yet another dimension of meaning by its given position in the book of Psalms. It is whether the book as a whole has a program, which cannot be precisely detected with a mere glance at the individual texts.1

—Erich Zenger

Poetry is a series of discrete units upon the field and at the same time, it is also the total. There are factors operating in every poetic text that lend varying degrees of connectedness to the discrete units of the work. The predominant formal feature of the poem is its articulation of these distinct units into a series of organized parts that are both distinct from and related to each other that together form a unified whole.2

—Daniel Grossberg

“Blessed,” as the first word in the Psalter, provides a significant clue to the message of the Psalms when the entire book is read with an overarching logic.3 An overarching compositional design, or logic, of the Masoretic (mt) Psalter, if any, is in the sequence of its one hundred and fifty psalms. Formal, tacit and, thematic literary devices incorporated within the text either conjoin or delimit a unit of adjacent psalms, according it distinctive structural form and theme. However, the inquiry into the design (or logic) of the Psalter lies in whether these successive units of psalms come together under the broader text horizon to unveil a coherent macrostructure and metanarrative at the level of the book. The aim of this book is to understand the logic and design of the mt Psalter and whether any overarching architectural schema can be assigned to it.

If Psalms scholarship over the last hundred and twenty years were to be defined by its dominant approach, we would find ourselves at an interesting overlap between two major revolutions.4 The Formgeschichte (or Gattungforschung) defines the first revolution and remains methodologically entrenched even among the most recent major commentaries on the Psalms.5 At the same time, the second revolution, the canonical approach (or understanding the Psalter as a complete text), set ablaze by B. S. Childs, G. H. Wilson, and E. Zenger in the 1980s, is still growing strong even after about four decades. Despite a clear shift in mainstream Psalms research toward the latter, this approach has not achieved the same kind of influence Formgeschichte has had. There seems to be a growing impatience to reap what was promisingly sown forty years ago, and this is for several reasons. Perhaps the first and clearest reason is a lack of consensus in finding a coherent structure and dominant message in the entire Psalter based on the organization of the Psalms. Is the motif of the temple in the Psalter primarily theological or historical?6 Does the book of Psalms have an overarching shape defined by Torah (didactic) or kingship (eschatological)?7 Can various motifs be unified under some overarching theme?

Second, methodological choices adopted by scholars have affected the search for the Psalter’s structure and logic. For instance, following David Howard’s method of exhaustive lexical analysis of a structural unit of psalms in The Structure of Psalms 93–100, a host of similar studies have been undertaken and almost every psalm unit in the Psalter has been analyzed. While the positive impact of these studies is a clearer appreciation of how certain psalm units are connected through recurring lexemes or motifs, the downside is that these studies offer an equal number of competing conclusions on different parts of the Psalter, making an overall coherent analysis difficult.

Third, macrostructural analyses of the entire Psalter as a coherent unit are also rare, and the few available are primarily based on more subjective thematic arguments loosely supported by formal and structural evidence.8 The function of formal poetical devices (e.g., superscriptions) and higher level poetic structural analyses (beyond a single psalm) are usually not central to the overall argument of these treatments. Thematic and poetical analyses of the Psalms remain disconnected, partly because poetical structural studies are, in general, limited to the level of a single psalm,9 while thematic analyses traverse across individual psalms easily. Although there are works that argue for a coherent organization of entire biblical books based on poetical techniques,10 such arguments for the Psalter are scant.11

Fourth, the search for the coherence of the Psalter is also complicated by the intertextual link between the Psalms and other books in the OT (even without considering diachronic issues of dependency), which affects how...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Macrostructure
• Chapter 3: Concentric and Linear Reading
• Chapter 4: The Five Davidic Collections
• Chapter 5: Numerical Devices, Alphabetic Acrostics or Compositions, and Superscriptions
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography