Psalms – The Divine Journey

Mark S. Smith maps four decades of Psalms research, foregrounding cultural contexts, pilgrimage motifs, and embodied emotion. He explores genre-bending poetics and argues for the Psalter as a carefully composed whole, shaped by its Levitical compilers and structured like an opera in five movements.

Research on the Psalms has shifted dramatically over the past forty years. In charting these changes, Mark S. Smith highlights the changing landscape of interpretation. Part One contains studies of specific psalms in light of these developments. Part Two addresses a relatively new topic in biblical studies, namely the human body and emotions expressed in and through the body; this includes the Hebrew word commonly translated “soul” (as in “bless the Lord, O my soul!”). Part Three probes specific cultural backgrounds to the Psalms: their Canaanite religious and literary heritage; their Temple setting; and their expression of social identity as a people. Most notably, pilgrimage and its constellation of practices inform many psalms (such as Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd”). Pilgrimage also plays a role in the larger shaping of the Psalter. No less important are the Psalms’ literary properties, particularly their “genre-bending” and their brilliant imagery, metaphor and sound-play as well as their use of prose particles. Finally, Part Four addresses the Psalter as a whole. This part of the book pays considerable attention to theories about the Psalter, with a focus on its Levitical compilers and their vision of the Psalter as a textual whole, laid out like an opera in five movements.

Introduction

Part I. Studies of Specific Psalms
1. Psalm 1: Sonant Particles and Parallelism, with Speculation on the Poem's Scribal Production
2. Psalm 8:2b-3: New Proposals for Old Problems
3. Setting and Rhetoric in Psalm 23
4. Psalms 42-43: Dual Self, Dual Genre
5. God and Zion: Form and Meaning in Psalm 48
6. The Invocation of Dead Ancestors in Ps 49:12c
7. The Structure of Psalm LXXXVII
8. Primary and Secondary Religion in Psalms 91 and 139: A Response to Dr. Andreas Wagner
9. How To Write a Poem: The Case of Psalm 151A in 11QPsa 28:3-12

Part II. Psalms and the Body
10. 'Seeing God' in the Psalms: The Background to the Beatific Vision in the Hebrew Bible
11. The Heart and Innards in Israelite Emotional Expressions: Notes from Anthropology and Psychobiology
12. Some Biblical Soul Talk in the Psalms: The Reflexive Self (nepeš)

Part III. Psalter Backgrounds
13. Canaanite Backgrounds to the Psalms
14. Like Deities, Like Temples (Like People)
15. 'People' between Liturgical Experience and Political Imagination: Preliminary Observations on *'ām in the Psalms

Part IV. The Psalter: In the End
16. The Theology of the Redaction of the Psalter: Some Observations
17. The Levitical Compilation of the Psalter
18. Taking Inspiration: Authorship, Revelation, and the Book of Psalms
19. The Psalms as a Book for Pilgrims

• By (author) Mark S. Smith