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

Chapter 6Composition of Psalms 3-8This chapter represents the heart of the study—the quest for evidence ofpurposeful editorial arrangement beyond the level of the concatenation ofadjacent psalms. In the previous chapter, we saw persuasive evidence thatthe editors used verbal-thematic links between psalms as their primary basisfor juxtaposing neighbouring hymns. Now we need to ask whether or not thereis evidence that their purposeful arrangement extended beyond a desire tolink each psalm in a chain to the one immediately before it. Did the editorshave an overall rationale and objective for the arrangement of the entire minicorpus,Psalms 3-8?I shall explore three kinds of evidence that may contribute to the editorialshaping of the corpus: (a) the headings, (b) words and (c) themes. The studyto date has shown that historical links were unlikely to have played a230