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

Chapter 7: Conclusionarrangement of a group of psalms needs to begin with an open mind as towhether historical, liturgical or lexical influences were dominant. Mymethodology does have a built-in bias towards lexical links because they arethe most concrete, objective, measurable similarities between psalms. If thestudy resulted in a difficult judgement as to whether, for example, lexical orliturgical factors served as the primary editorial criterion of arrangement, thenthis natural bias in the method would have seriously weakened the credibilityof the findings. However, since verbal-thematic links emerged withoverwhelming clarity as the primary factors, this natural bias does notseriously undermine the findings.I am aware of only one comparable study of the arrangement of a corpus ofpsalms, namely, Howard’s (1997) analysis of Psalms 93-100. He chose tofocus exclusively on literary similarities between psalms. Using hismethodology, my conclusions would probably have been identical, yet the factthat the present study also kept historical and liturgical factors in mind initiallyand eventually excluded them on the basis of the internal evidence in thepsalms adds credence to the conclusions.Corpus size. Perhaps the most serious objection lies in the fact that thechosen corpus is too small to permit convincing conclusions. Since the312