An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

Author:Walter Brueggemann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Bible Study, Old Testament, Christianity
ISBN: 9780664224127
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 2003-11-28T22:00:00+00:00

Such an approach is not very helpful because it is likely that only Psalm 137

can, with any reasonable certainty, be connected to a particular circumstance.

Attention should be given, with reference to issues of historical context, to the superscriptions that characteristically link psalms to historical events in the life of David (Childs 1971). (Psalm 51 is the best known of these, wherein it is linked to David’s crisis after the events relating him to Uriah and Bathsheba.) In general scholars judge that these superscriptions that situate the psalms in a particular way are not to be taken with historical seriousness, but rather constitute an interpretive guideline from a later community about how to understand

the particular psalms. In this connection, it is also useful to recognize that the formula “A Psalm of David” (as in Pss 3, 4, 5, etc.) is not a note on authorship, so that Davidic authorship of the Psalms is not held credible in critical study.

More likely, the formula should be translated “for David,” that is, “for the

king,” in a way that may suggest liturgical usage in the royal environs.

A second approach to the Psalter among Christians is an inclination to

read christologically, as though Jesus were either the speaker of the psalm, as The Book of Psalms

313

in Psalm 22, or the one who speaks as the righteous sufferer, or the subject

of the psalm, as in the royal psalms such as Psalm 2. Such an approach was

taken with great seriousness in the early centuries of the church and was

championed by Augustine; with the rise of critical study, however, it is clear that no direct link can be made to Jesus. That does not preclude a second

christological interpretive move once the Psalter has been taken seriously in

its own Old Testament context. This latter move is especially important in

the interpretive work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer 1970; see Miller

2000, 345–54).

If we recognize that neither a historical nor a messianic approach is sus-

tainable in psalm interpretation, we may focus upon the singular contribu-

tion of Hermann Gunkel, a scholar of the early twentieth century who has

decisively influenced all subsequent psalm study. Gunkel came to see that the

psalms recur in a fairly limited number of rhetorical patterns (genres) and

that the several genres reflect social settings so that genre and setting are characteristically twinned. As a consequence, the psalms tend not to be free and

innovative speech, but are highly stylized and predictable in form, presumably in traditional societies that counted on the regularity of rhetorical patterns to shape and sustain life in certain ways: “Accordingly, genre research in the Psalms is nonnegotiable, not something one can execute or ignore according

to preference. Rather, it is the foundational work without which there can be no certainty in the remainder. It is the firm ground from which everything else

must ascend” (Gunkel and Begrich 1998, 5).

The work of psalm study, then, is to pay attention to the most distinctive

rhetorical patterns that characteristically carry certain content appropriate to specific contexts. Such patterns may be voiced with great imaginative variation, but the variations typically adhere to a constant pattern.

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