Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Badly-composed psalms

Having looked at "historical psalms", I'll submit a few impressions.

We started with the Chronicler. I'll carry this to Psalm 135: it is bad and its psalmist should feel bad. Psalm 135:1-14 / Psalm 136 are about the same thing but Psalm 135 as we have it appends some nonsense about idols vv. 15f. And it includes a lot of encapsulating schmutz about the Levi/Aaron priesthood. Those constructions of stone and precious-metal are bad but this glorious Temple is different because IT IS, OKAY?!.

This leads me to wonder about Psalm 78. It is a product of redaction; some say, Hananiah, in the last days of Jerusalem. Having given it some thought I have to wonder if Psalm 78 was, itself, the Psalm 135 of its day. We have Psalms 105 and 106 (and maybe 136); these read like someone took some effort to compose them. Psalm 78 reads like several songs-of-praise and songs-of-repentance got spliced together.

The question I'd reopen, for Oded Tammuz, is: did Psalm 78 redact an already-redacted psalm, or did it compile its material from two psalms (now-lost?) already? Which option would Ockham prefer?

No comments:

Post a Comment