(DOWNLOAD) "Indications of Jeremiah's Psalter." by Journal of Biblical Literature # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Indications of Jeremiah's Psalter.
- Author : Journal of Biblical Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2002
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 197 KB
Description
Efforts during the past century to date the Psalms have mostly been quixotic, the pendulum of scholarly opinion having swung widely. After abandoning traditional Davidic authorship, influential critics early in the twentieth century favored a postexilic date for most psalms:1 Robert H. Pfeiffer (1941) could state that Ps 2 was "apparently composed for the marriage of Alexander Janneus in 103 (the acrostic of Ps. 2:1-10 reads: lyny' w'stw 'For Janneus A[lexander] and his wife')," and Marco Treves (1965) made the same proposal. (2) But then the discovery and analysis of the Ugaritic texts led Mitchell Dahood and others to date most psalms to the preexilic period. (3) The very nature of the Psalms, however--namely, liturgical material appropriate in any age--and the possibilities of metaphor in poetic expression have left few clues for dating. Beyond the setting of Ps 137 in the Babylonian exile, scholars have found few secure data. Parallels between passages in Jeremiah and the Psalms have long been noted, especially between Jeremiah's so-called confessions and various laments of the individual in the Psalter. These might seem to offer clues to dating the psalms, but the obvious problem is to determine the direction of influence: it was long assumed that Jeremiah had used such psalms for his model, (4) but when critical opinion assigned most of the psalms to the postexilic period, it followed that it was the psalmists who drew on Jeremiah. Thus, in 1960 Pierre Bonnard proposed that thirty-three psalms were written under the stimulus of Jeremiah. (5) John Bright, however, in his review of that work, wondered whether the dependence did not in some cases run the other way. (6)