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

Chapter 6: Composition of Psalms 3-8Now let us return to the questions posed at the start of this section. First, werePsalms 4-6 a trio that previously existed in this order or did the final editors ofBook I extract three scattered psalms from the music director’s collection andbring them together in the order we have them in the canonical Psalter? Thereis little evidence on which to base an answer to this question. If the editorsfound these three in the music director’s collection in this sequence, then theywere fortunate that Psalm 4 at their opening boundary fitted neatly with Psalm3 and that Psalm 6 at their closing boundary linked fairly well with Psalm 7,allowing the trio to be inserted “as is” between Psalms 3 and 7. The fact thatthe verbal-thematic links between Psalms 6 and 7 are the weakest in mycorpus favours the view that Psalms 4-6 were a pre-existing trio that wereimported “as is” from the music director’s collection. Nevertheless, there isinsufficient evidence at this stage to permit a firm conclusion. I tentativelypropose that they existed in this order in the music director’s collection.This leads naturally to an answer to the second question, namely, whatprovided the rationale for the present arrangement of Psalms 4-6 in thePsalter? The answer seems to be that each psalm was juxtaposed with theones immediately before and after it on the basis of certain shared words andthemes (see chapter 5). If I have judged correctly that Psalms 4-6 were anexisting trio from the music director’s collection, then the editors received atrio of psalms in which Psalms 4 and 5 were linked by key words as were261