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

Chapter 3: Methodology• Frequency. Assuming that redactors form editorial habits and thus tendto reuse the same compositional techniques, repeated occurrences ofthe same kind of similarity increases the probability of it beingintentional.These three criteria by no means guarantee objectivity, but they are sensiblestarting guides in the attempt to distinguish intentional links from coincidentalones.3.6 Analysis of the composition of the corpusAfter analysing links between adjacent psalms, attention turns to the broaderrelationships between Psalms 3-8. Three interrelated questions form theobject of inquiry. First, is there evidence that these psalms were deliberatelyarranged? If the answer to this is “yes”, then what criteria of arrangementwere employed (i.e., what factors provided the basis of arrangement)? Finally,what communicative objective, if any, motivated the arrangement?I presuppose that whatever factors provided the basis for the concatenation ofadjacent psalms probably also featured prominently in the editors’arrangement at the broader level. Since the analysis of links betweenadjacent psalms showed that historical and liturgical factors were less84