The connections of the Torah-Psalm 119 to the fifth Psalter of David (Ps 138–145)

Abstract

The following exposition goes back to my lecture, ‘The Ways of YHWH and the Ways of the supplicant in the fifth and last Psalter of David’, at the convention, ‘The Torah in the psalms and the prophecy’, held at Munich on 13–14 July 2007. The first part of the lecture, which dealt with the composition of the fifth Psalter of David, has appeared in an excursus (on the concept of the fifth Psalter of David) in the psalm commentary by Erich Zenger and me (Author). It was for this reason that the second part, which dealt with the Way-motif in Psalm 119 in the fifth Psalter of David, was extended to the current subject of the article.

Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The psalms and the Torah belong to two different parts of the Hebrew canon. This means that the intertextual relations between them rest on the interdisciplinary relationship between the two corpuses. The connections between Psalm 119 and David’s fifth Psalter relate with the autonomous theologies of the fifth Psalter of David (Ps 138–145) and the final Hallel (Ps 146–150). Psalm 119 had both groups of psalms in front of it, and it respected the graduated psalm endings or rather the final redactions in both instances. The implication for the redaction study of the psalms is that Psalm 119 was specifically placed in its present position within the Psalter in its totality.