Saturday, February 15, 2025

Taproot

The Church tends to juxtapose its readings and psalms by shared theme; these are a mine for correlations. This Sunday's OT reading is from Jeremiah 17:6-8 and the psalm is the first. They share the similitude of the plant by a body of water. But more: the follower of the Lord is a tree rooted near a stream, and both texts compare him with something else.

Jeremiah 17 just has this as a follower of the Lord, alone; and the comparand is the bush in the desert. The psalm introduces the "Torah" and behaves like a wisdom-text. Classically the psalm is understood as the introduction to the Psalter as a whole; even Muslims have taken the time to translate it to introduce psalms of their own. It is general consensus that the psalm depends on Jeremiah to which it adds (Temple?) tropes.

Phil Botha posited about the same in 2005. He figured that Psalm 1's "Torah" was the general Divine wisdom vouchsafed to prophets, starting with Moses (in Deuteronomy) then Joshua, and most-lately Ezekiel and Jeremiah.

I think we are looking at a redactional layer of the Psalter, which went on to append or interpose sophiac matter to, for one, Psalm 19. This was done by the school of Baruch scribe of Jeremiah.

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