David: The Meaning of a Structural Parallel in Psalm 78 - Yeshiva ...

A Frisch I Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009) 190-198 197Do not be like your fathers and your brethren, who were faithless to the LordGod of their fathers, so that He made them a desolation, as you see. Do notnow be stiff-necked as your fathers were, but yield yourselves to the Lord, andcome to His sanctuary, which He has sanctified for ever, and serve the Lordyour God, that His fierceanger may turn away from you. (w. 7-8)Abijah refers to the perpetual reign of the dynasty; Hezekiah, to the perpetualsanctity of the Temple. Note too the verbal echo between Hezekiahs "do notbe like your fathers", and Psalm 78, "they should not be like their fathers, astubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast,whose spirit was not faithful to God" (Ps. lxxviii 8), as well as the wordsthat begin the next verse: "The Ephraimites" (v. 9).The echoes in the two verses from Chronicles, spoken by kings of Judah,do not make a significant contribution to the debate about when our Psalmwas composed (remember, too, the conditional nature of Solomons legacy in1 Chr. xxviii 7 and 9). 12 1 do not believe that they carry any decisive weightfor the thorny problem of the dating of Psalm 78, with the proposed solutionsranging over many centuries, from Davids reign to the post-exilic era. 13In any case, the explanation proposed here for the structural parallel—theview of the Davidic monarchy as a divine boon whose continuation does not12)See S. Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and its Place in Biblical Thought (seconded.; trans. A. Barber; Frankfurt am Main, 1997), p. 391.13)Here are some of the many opinions about the dating of the Psalm: the tenth century BCE,around die time of David (Α. E Campbell, "Psalm 78: A Contribution to the Theology ofTenth Century Israel", CBQ41 [1979], pp. 51-79); before the division of the kingdom (Eerdmans,The Hebrew Book of Psalms, p. 381); when Solomon built the Temple (Loewenstamm,The Evolution of the Exodus Tradition, pp. 75-76); between the division of the kingdom and thedestruction of Samaria (M. Dahood, Psalms II [AB 17; Garden City, 1968], p. 238); duringthe reign of Hezekiah (B. Weber, "Zur Datierung der Asaph-Psalmen 74 und 79", Biblica 81[2000], pp. 521-532); during the reign of Josiah (A. A. Anderson, The Book of the Psalms, II[NCB; London, 1972], p. 562; Zakovitch, "He Chose", pp. 181-182); after the destruction ofthe Temple, as a restoration psalm (A. Berlin, "Psalms and the Literature of Exile: Psalms 137,44, 69, and 78", in P. W. Flint and P. D. Miller [eds.], The Book of Psalms: Composition andReception [VTSup 99; Leiden and Boston, 2005] pp. 75-84); in the early days of die return toZion, as an anti-Samaritan polemic (Gunkel, Die Psalmen, p. 342); and, finally, latest of all,during the Ptolemaic age (L. Finkelstein, "Pre-Maccabean Documents in the Passover Haggadah[Part 2]", HTR 36 [1943], pp. 24-27) or during the time of John Hyrcanus (B. Duhm, DiePsalmen [KHC; Tübingen, 1899], p. 206). But widi all these attempts at precise dating, weshould always remember Loewenstamm s observation: "The precarious nature of the attempts atdating each psalm in the Psalter are among the best-known maladies of biblical scholarship"{The Evolution of the Exodus Tradition, p. 71).