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

Chapter 2: History of Psalms StudiesPsalms 1 and 2 for the reading of the final form and observing the strategicplacement of royal psalms.Under Childs’ influence, and to a lesser extent that of Brennan (1976; 1980), anew avenue of psalms study opened up. Form critics had sought tounderstand the Sitze im Leben of the psalms. In this quest, they analysedpsalms almost exclusively with reference to their historical context, payinglittle or no attention to possible textual relationships between psalms.Redaction critics began to study the Psalter as a literary work, seeking toidentify possible relationships between psalms and to discover the redactionalagenda behind the Psalter’s final form. They shifted the focus from the Sitz imLeben to the Sitz im Text of the psalms.The most outstanding and influential figure in the field of redaction criticalanalysis of the Psalter is Gerald Wilson, a student of Brevard Childs. Hisseminal work, The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (1985a), remains the mostcomprehensive and authoritative work on the final redaction of the Psalter.The greatest contribution of Wilson’s research was his convincingdemonstration that the Psalter is not an ad hoc collection of unrelated psalms,but that it bears evidence of purposeful editorial activity. He was not the first tohypothesise that the Psalter was purposefully organised, but he was the firstto devise a sound method of testing the hypothesis. He began by analysing26