PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

The shouts of war were heard in front of me. [The Lord] will hear me because I
am filled with righteousness!
Thus there appears in the lyrics of Jewish worship 12 the boastful human enemy,
juxtaposed with the righteous sufferer who appeals to the Lord for help. And, as hinted in
the citation above, these figures can usually expect some sort of reversal. The boastful
enemy, being merely human, eventually receives mortal condemnation, while the
righteous sufferer, being dependent on the Lord, receives or looks forward to vindication.
The Qumran community similarly utilise this sort of rhetoric in their own psalms,
thanking God for reversal that has already been achieved, and expecting God to act as the
great Reverser. The following psalm exhibits the sectarian self-understanding of the
Qumran community. They are the righteous few, opposed by evildoers in the last times.
They look to God as the one who brings down the evildoers and vindicates the righteous: 13
1QH a Column 2, Lines 20-30:
I thank you Lord, for you have placed my life among the living
And you have protected me from all the traps of the pit.
For the violent have sought my life,
While I have held onto your covenant.
But these people are a council of wickedness and an assembly of Belial.
They did not know that my standing comes from you,
And that, in your mercy, you saved my life –
12 Although note Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr’s estimation of the Psalms of Solomon: “Wir
haben keine Sammlung von Kultgesängen der Gemeinde, sondern ein Erbauungsbuch vor
uns”. Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese: Katechismusartige Weisungsreihen
in der frühjüdischen Literatur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987), 223.
13 Eileen Schuller discusses a similar thanksgiving psalm from Qumran in which it is
emphasised that God reveals mysteries to his poor people, and casts down the haughty.
Schuller notes the importance of this motif of reversal in liturgy: “The reversal motif of
casting down and raising up is well attested in hymns; see 2 Sam 2:6-8; Ps 145:14; Sir
10:14; 11:5-6; Luke 1:52; 1QM xiv 11,15 (=4Q491 8-10 i 8,12). Eileen Schuller, “A
Hymn from a Cave Four Hodayot Manuscript: 4Q427 7 i + ii,” JBL 112/4 (1993): 605-
628; 616.
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