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

Chapter 2: History of Psalms Studiespsalms were written for use in cultic rituals. Nevertheless, “[a]ttempts to fixspecific liturgical settings for each type [of psalm] have not been veryconvincing” (Stek 2002:779).Form criticism still held centre stage in major reviews of psalms studies byRonald Clements (1976), John Hayes (1979) and Erhard Gerstenberger(1985), but by the mid 1980s two new but related approaches to the Psalmswere coming to the fore—redaction criticism and literary analysis.2.5 Redaction criticismDavid Howard succinctly summarises the dominant view of the structure andmessage of the Book of Psalms towards the end of the 1970s.[T]he Psalter was treated almost universally as a disjointedassortment of diverse compositions that happened to becollected loosely into what eventually became a canonical“book.” The primary connections among the psalms were tohave been liturgical, not literary or canonical. The original lifesetting (Sitz im Leben) of most psalms was judged to have beenthe rituals of worship and sacrifice at the temple. The psalmscame together in a haphazard way, and the setting of eachpsalm in the Book of Psalms (Sitz im Text) was not considered.24