The Structure Of Psalms 93-100 (old Testament, Hebrew Bible, Psalter, Rhetorical Criticism).

Abstract

The Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible has been subjected to a variety of approaches over the years. In this century, the dominant approach has been a form-critical one, focusing on the genres of individual psalms and corresponding Sitze im Leben. The approach has been taxonomic, and psalms of each genre have been studied together. The assumption has been that genre groupings are the most meaningful and that the present canonical order and arrangement are, for the most part, random, or irrelevant to modern research. In recent years, however, studies have appeared which have focused upon present canonical groupings rather than ones based on form-critical genres. The assumption is that the present order and arrangement are not merely random, but that the techniques of the editors of the Psalter can be discovered, and that these present a view of the Psalter unobtainable from isolated study of individual psalms or the various genres. This thesis builds upon these recent studies, in describing the internal structure of a specific corpus within the Psalter: Psalms 93-100. The literature on Psalms study is reviewed in Chapter One and the focus here stated. Chapter Two considers the question of the Masoretic text tradition and the use of such tools as rhetorical criticism and syllable counting. Chapter Three presents an in-depth analysis of each individual psalm, in isolation. Chapter Four analyzes each psalm in relationship to each other psalm in the group. All significant links--lexical, thematic, and structural--are noted. Chapter Five distills the results of the analysis. Significant links are seen between consecutive psalms in every case, and those between non-adjacent psalms are noted as well. The entire section emerges as a logically coherent group. The group is also seen in its larger context, that of Book IV. The special themes emergent in this group center around YHWH's Kingship. Themes binding the group to the rest of the Psalter center around the Mosaic and Davidic covenants and sapiential concerns for the ways of the righteous and the wicked.