A POETIC ANALYSIS OF THE HEBREW TEXT OF PSALM 118:1-18 (original) (raw)
Related papers
A contextual and intertextual reading of Psalm 118
Old Testament essays, 2003
It is a sine qua non of biblical scholarship that texts should never be interpreted in isolation. Curiously enough ever since the rise of critical biblical scholarship this key aspect of the exegetical process has been largely ignored in the exegesis of the Book of Psalms. Nowhere is this shortcoming better illustrated than in the arbitrary allocation of a social and historical background to virtually any psalm. In this paper the shortcomings of this atomistic approach is illustrated by referring to a specific psalm, namely Psalm 118. A short overview of various interpretational perspectives on Psalm 118 in commentaries and other studies is given. It is argued that a contextual and intertextual reading of Psalm 118 will act as a counterbalance to arbitrary decisions on the interpretation of the psalm. It is the interplay between intra- and intertextual data that guides the exegete towards reconstructing an extratextual context for the poem.
once penned, "Poetics is to literature as linguistics is to language. Poetics describes the basic components of literature and the rules governing their use." 1 Bruce Waltke comments on her description, "If linguistics is the science of language-a study of the meaning of words and the rules that govern their interrelationship-then poetics is the science of literature -a study of how basic components of writing interrelate to create meaning. 2 An understanding of what a text means is then bound up with how it means, and our task as readers and interpreters is to observe how an author uses the available features within his language to effect meaning within his text. Accordingly, our purpose in the following analysis is to list various poetic features within Psalm 121, as well as to discuss their possible functions for bringing understanding of the psalmist's meaning of the text.
Gert T M Prinsloo A contextual and intertextual reading of Psalm 118
It is a sine qua non of biblical scholarship that texts should never be interpreted in isolation. Curiously enough ever since the rise of critical biblical scholarship this key aspect of the exegetical process has been largely ignored in the exegesis of the Book of Psalms. Nowhere is this shortcoming better illustrated than in the arbitrary allocation of a social and historical background to virtually any psalm. In this paper the shortcomings of this atomistic approach is illustrated by referring to a specific psalm, namely Psalm 118. A short overview of various interpretational perspectives on Psalm 118 in commentaries and other studies is given. It is argued that a contextual and intertextual reading of Psalm 118 will act as a counterbalance to arbitrary decisions on the interpretation of the psalm. It is the interplay between intra-and intertextual data that guides the exegete towards reconstructing an extratextual context for the poem.