Biblical and Judaic Studies from the University of California, San Diego – serie

The first in a series of volumes coming out of programs at the Department of Biblical and Judaic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, this book contains a number of essays originally presented at the Fourth Conversation in Biblical Studies held at UCSD, as well as pieces by each of the editors. Future volumes in the series will include both monographs and, like this one, collected essays.

An exhaustive study of these kingship psalms, utilizing the entire lexicon of the 8 psalms studied. Howard’s study confirms that Hebrew poetry is regularized around a pattern of bicolons of roughly 8:8 syllables and 3:3 stresses. A major contribution to the rhetorical-critical method.

From the Preface: “The alphabetic acrostic is one of the most easily identifiable poetic forms in the Hebrew Bible. Examples can be found in prophetic discourse (Nahum), the lament over the destruction of Jerusalem (Lamentations), liturgical song (Psalms), and wisdom literature (Proverbs). Yet its very obviousness has tended to deflect deeper exploration of its structure and purpose. Since Mowinckel denigrated the acrostics in the Psalms as a “disintegration of style,’ too often scholars have simply noted and then ignored the form.“There is no a priori reason that alphabetic acrostics should be less creative, expressive, or complex than other psalms. Thus the essays collected here investigate the acrostic format as a legitimate option for Israelite poets rather than as the refuge of uninspired epigones....The fruit of over twenty years’ close reading of these psalms, the following essays reveal the poets’ consummate mastery of the demanding acrostic form and deserve incorporation in future discussions of biblical poetic art.