Job 14 and Psalm 3

Words shared by Job 14:12-16 and Psalm 3:5-8

Robert Cole's work to show the relationships within the Psalter of Psalms 1 and 2 and 149 for instance is quite convincing to me based on the recurring words. I haven't read his book on the subject but I did read a preliminary article he published several years ago. (Cole, Robert. JSOT 98 (2002). 75-88 An Integrated Reading of Psalms 1 and 2.)

I really don't have the time or the cash or the space to collect any more books at my age, but I bet it is good. He was negatively reviewed and has negatively answered the review. In it he mentions the death and resurrection simile of sleep and awake. I have no difficulty with this reading.

Awake is used in the Psalter with the sense of that final awakening as well as the normal sleeping / awakening pattern in 3:6, 17:5 and 139:18. Sleep (3:6, 4:9, 13:4) has the sense of ordinary sleep and also of death, the Hamlet usage. Shakespeare was not using the image for the first time.

The capping of the image is as Cole rightly points out in Job 14:12. The table above shows how clearly this response of Job reflects the language of Psalm 3. There is some similarity in the music for the Psalm and that of Job 14 but it is not as if one needs the confirmation. Each verse is a tri-colon delimited by both ole-veyored and atnah.