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

Chapter 7: Conclusionb) The research sought to discover what criteria, if any, the editors usedto arrange the psalms when compiling Psalms 3-8.c) The research endeavoured to discover whether the editors had acommunicative objective behind their arrangement and, if so, what thatobjective was.Each of these objectives was applied at two different levels, namely, at thelevel of adjacent psalms and at the level of the corpus as a whole.7.1.2 The methodology of the studyThe methodology consisted of three steps. The first step presented anexegesis of individual psalms, the second explored the concatenation ofadjacent psalms and the third investigated the compilation of the corpus as awhole. Each step built upon the preceding step.Exegesis. I began with an exegetical study of each psalm. The goal was notto present ground-breaking insights into the psalms, but to lay a foundation forcomparing psalms to determine possible criteria of arrangement. I reliedheavily on major commentaries to assist in my analysis of textual variants,historical setting, life setting, structure and themes. Using computerised Biblesoftware, I compiled detailed statistics of word frequencies in my corpus, thePsalter and the Masoretic Text.303