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

Chapter 7: ConclusionThe study corroborates the growing scholarly sentiment that the editors gavecareful consideration to the arrangement of psalms in the Psalter. Wilson(1985a; cf. DeClaissé-Walford 1997) was no doubt correct in stressing (a) theseams between the five books and (b) the strategic placement of royal psalmsand wisdom psalms as the most prominent areas of editorial shaping in thePsalter. My study shows that careful editorial work extended to the exactplacement of each psalm. The editors of the Psalter seem to have beensensitive to verbal and thematic links between psalms when positioning themin a collection. Although these conclusions can only be firmly drawn withreference to a small portion of the canonical Psalter (i.e., Psalms 3-8), they docorroborate the findings of similar studies that emphasise the importance ofverbal links between small groups of psalms, such as Davis’ (1996)observations regarding Psalms 107-118 and Howard’s (1997) conclusionswith respect to Psalms 93-100. Further studies of other corpi may well confirmthat verbal and thematic links were widely used by the final redactors as acriterion of arrangement.One can only speculate what the result might be of extending the methodemployed in this study to larger sections of the Psalter or even across theentire Psalter. I suspect the result might be similar to the findings of this study;that is, we would observe a general tendency to juxtapose adjacent psalms onthe basis of verbal links and to keep larger groups together because they316