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

Chapter 6: Composition of Psalms 3-8Psalms 3-4, 6-7 and 7-8. If the editors had prioritised keeping the headingdefinedclusters together, these verbal links would have been lost.6.2.3 The organisation of Psalms 4-6If Psalms 4-6 represent a trio of psalms that originally belonged to the musicdirector’s collection, two important questions need to be asked with referenceto their arrangement. First, were they a trio that previously existed in this orderor did the final editors extract three psalms from the music director’s collectionand bring them together in the order we have them in the canonical Psalter?Second, what provided the rationale for their present arrangement in thePsalter?Since verbal links have proved to be the primary redactional criterion for thefinal arrangement of the psalms in the corpus, the logical place to begin thesearch for these answers is with an analysis of shared lexemes. Table 6.8presents an exhaustive list of all shared lexemes amongst Psalms 4-6. Forthe sake of completeness, the table includes cognate words.Table 6.8: Shared lexemes in Psalms 4-6Psalm 4 Psalm 5 Psalm 6אָ‏ הַ‏ ב אָ‏ הַ‏ באַ‏ יִןאַ‏ יִן256