Full Description
This collection of essays advances psalms studies through a concerted focus on the persuasive aim of psalmic poetry, and it offers unique perspectives on rhetorical devices within the psalms. These essays include discussions not only of structure, literary devices, and rhetorical strategies, but the authors also dialogue with classical rhetoric, modern psalms research, and current trends in rhetoric and cognitive science.
Part One discusses various theoretical issues. Several articles discuss lament within the psalms, including the function of appeals to pathos, lament's compensation for monotheistic piety, and the need for more attention to the laments' poetry and rhetoric to understand their meaning. Other essays address the psalmists' self-presentation, the ideological identity of the wicked within the psalms, faunal imagery with regard to tenor and vehicle, the topoi related to God in call to praise psalms, the function of gaps in prayers for help, and the rhetoric of kingship psalms as attempts to persuade readers of the legitimacy and efficacy of kingship.
Part Two consists of rhetorical analyses of several psalms or psalm pairs, each with distinctive emphases. These include a discussion of Psalm 8 from a bodily perspective, the nature and implication of nature language within Psalm 23, the structure of Psalm 102 within Book IV of the Psalter along with its theology and lament, the forensic case of Psalms 105 and 106 emphasizing the role of narrative in forensic rhetoric and comparing the results with classical rhetoric, and an analysis of the rhetorical aim of Psalm 147, subjected to developments within cognitive science.
Contents
1.
"The Altar of Certitude": Reflections on "Setting" and Rhetorical
Interpretation of the Psalms by Rolf Jacobson
2.
Persuading the One and Only God to Intervene by Dale Patrick and Ken Diable
3.
Psalm 88 and the Rhetoric of Lament by
David M. Howard, Jr.
4. Rapid Change
of Mood: Oracles of Salvation, Certainty of a Hearing, or Rhetorical Play? by
LeAnn Flesher
5. Growling
Dogs and Thirsty Deer: Uses of Animal Imagery in Psalmic Rhetoric by J. Kenneth
Kuntz
6.
Night to Night," "Deep to Deep": The Discourse of Creation in the Psalms by
William P. Brown
7.
Topoi of Praise in the Call to Praise
Psalms: Toward a Theology of the Book
of Psalms by Robert L. Foster
8.
"Yet thou hast made him little less than God": Reading Psalm 8 from a bodily perspective
by Johan H Coetzee
9.
Psalm 33 and the Creation Rhetoric of
A Torah Psalm by Diane Jacobson
10. Psalm 44: O
God, Why Do You Hide Your Face? by Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford
11. Psalm 102: Lament and Theology in an Exilic Setting by
W. H. Bellinger, Jr.
12. The Rhetoric
of Two Narrative Psalms 105 and 106 by Thomas H. Olbricht
13.
Why is Psalm 147 Still "Catchy"? by Hennie Viviers
