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

Chapter 6: Composition of Psalms 3-8For practical reasons, due to the difficulty of text and table pages, I opted toplace Tables 6.11-17 at the end of chapter 6.(a) Enemies (see Table 6.11)Allusions to the wicked enemies of the psalmist are by far the most pervasivecommon characteristic of Psalm 3-8. 134 Each psalm contains multipleallusions to enemies. Table 6.11 lists the ways in which the psalmists’enemies are described in each psalm. For the sake of clarity, I have tried totranslate different Hebrew roots with different English terms so that the tablemay give an accurate indication of verbal links.Row 1 coheres around the Hebrew root ‏,קש which occurs in several differentforms. In Psalm 3, it appears as שָ‏ י ‏,קָ‏ “my adversaries”. Psalm 4 uses קַ‏ ש in thesense of “adversity” rather than “adversary”, which is why it appears in lightgrey in the table. Psalms 6-8 all use ש ‏,קושֵ‏ from the root ‏,קשש in the phrases “myfoes” (6:8, 7:7 and 8:3) and “my foe” (7:5). Psalm 5 is the odd one out in thisrow since it uses the homonym ש ‏,שושֵ‏ which is not related to the root ‏,קש but is134 Several specialised studies have focused on “enemies” in the Psalter, such as Anderson(1965), Prokurat (1973), Gerstenberger (1982-83), Cherian (1982), Gerstenberger (1982-83),Sheppard (1991), Botha (1992), Dhanaraj (1992) and Althan (1999).274