Smith DTh Thesis (final).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

Chapter 5: Concatenation in Psalms 3-8Although there is a serious risk of imagining a relationship between these twopsalms that did not exist in the minds of the redactors, I can envisage twoplausible reasons for their juxtaposition.1) As suggested by Keil and Delitzsch (2002), it is possible thatreferences to “enemies” at the end of Psalm 6 and the beginning ofPsalm 7 served as a tail-head link in the minds of the compilers. Thisinterpretation is supported by my analysis of the shared terminology,which pointed to קשש and אָ‏ יַב as the strongest verbal links between thetwo psalms.2) A more fanciful possibility lies in the striking contrasts between the twopsalms; one could hardly imagine two more opposite individuallaments. The first is a prayer for mercy by a guilty man, the other aninnocent person’s plea for justice. Might these contrasts have led theeditors to bring them together as complementary psalms—one forministering to the afflicted, the other for ministering to the falselyaccused? This hypothesis is difficult to verify, but on the reasonableassumption that psalms were used for ministry purposes (e.g., Broyles1999), it is worth considering.If the editors used shared references to enemies as the basis of arrangement,this implies a surface-level linkage, whereas if they grouped them because of219