Psalm-structures: A study of psalms with refrains.

Abstract

This dissertation identifies and describes the basic "building blocks" of a biblical psalm. It focuses primarily on the larger units that constitute a psalm, namely strophes and stanzas. A weakness of previous research into stanzaic structures (such as that of Kraft and van der Lugt) is the failure to base conclusions on a set of psalms with stanzaic structures that are immediately evident. Therefore, the author selected eleven psalms with clearly demarcated stanzas due to the presence of refrains. Seven of these are analyzed thoroughly (Psalms 42-43, 46, 49, 56, 57, 59) and the other four more briefly (Psalms 39, 67, 80, 99). On the basis of this set the author concludes that the psalmists in a given psalm work with stanzas of equal size or with a combination of half-stanzas and full-stanzas. This symmetry of length is located on the stanza level rather than the strophe level. In addition to the refrains, the devices that most frequently serve to unify and demarcate a stanza are: repetition, word pairs, inclusion, the dominance of the imperative/jussive or the "indicative" verbal mood, and an initial colon with an imperative/jussive or a vocative. The author argues for and illustrates the importance of "reading" a psalm in accordance with its stanzaic structure. He demonstrates how integrating structure and content is necessary for a proper underst and ing of a psalm. This corpus of psalms exhibits a simple hierarchy of "building blocks" that usually are shaped as follows: a colon of two to four stresses; a verse of two to three cola; a strophe of two to four verses; a stanza of two to four strophes; and a poem of two to four stanzas. By counting syllables and stresses, the author describes the size of these "building blocks." He concludes that, although no psalm has a consistent and predictable stress pattern and therefore no "meter" in any traditional sense, the cola of a psalm do exhibit an overall regularity and a dominant stress pattern/syllable length, albeit with internal variations from the norm.