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

Chapter 7: Conclusioncohere loosely around certain shared themes. In short, I would hypothesisethat we would continue to observe surface-level redaction based primarily onverbal and thematic similarities. It will be difficult to test this hypothesis onlarge groups of psalms because the application of the method becomesexponentially more difficult as the corpus grows. Further research on othersmall groups of psalms would help to confirm the theory that verbal-thematiclinking was a major criterion by which the editors of the canonical Psalterarranged the hymns.Finally, the hermeneutical value of the study lies in affirming the need forpsalm exegesis to include a step in which the interpreter considers thepsalm’s literary context within the canonical Psalter (see Mays 1993;Jeppesen 2003). It has become common practice for academic articles abouta single psalm to include an analysis of the psalm’s relationship tosurrounding psalms. 156 Many recent commentaries, such as those by Tate(1998), Wilcock (2001), Goldingay (2006) and Lane (2006), do include156 Amongst the journal articles I consulted that explicate a single psalm, the following areexamples of essays that included a meaningful discussion of the psalm’s relationship tosurrounding psalms: Barker (1995), Davis (2000), Tate (2001), Prinsloo (2003), Botha (2004;2005a-b), Styger and Human (2004), Aloisi (2005) and Helberg (2005).317