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

Chapter 3: Methodologyprominent than verbal thematic ones, my search for broader links majors onthe headings together with verbal and thematic links amongst the psalms. 21The headings. It seems self-evident that the psalm headings would featureprominently in the thinking of anybody trying to arrange a group of psalms.There is general consensus amongst psalms’ scholars that the headings werea key factor, though perhaps not the chief factor. My strategy is to look formarkers of continuity or discontinuity between headings, both within mycorpus and in relation to the Psalter as whole, which might point to editorialactivity.Verbal links. I conduct an exhaustive analysis of shared lexemes amongstPsalms 3-8, seeking to weigh the significance of shared terminology using thesame criteria as for adjacent psalms. Terms such as the article, prepositions,personal pronouns and common particles are ignored. All remaining shared21 The decision to focus on verbal and thematic links when analysing the broaderrelationships between Psalms 3-8 was not made until after the full analysis of relationshipsbetween adjacent psalms. If the analysis of relationships between adjacent psalms hadsuggested that other factors (such as historical occasion or liturgical usage) had played a rolein the editors’ arrangement of the corpus, the methodology employed in chapter 6 would havebeen very different.85