The Psalm Frames again

Beloved, this is a very interesting exercise even with the 5 to 10 % questionable results in my pile of deframed psalms.  Look again at the image in yesterday's post which I have updated.

Now there are vertical red lines for every 10 psalms, and blue for the 50 boundary, and green for the book boundaries. I am intrigued that there are new words used as frames in almost every psalm. Does this speak to a deliberate sorting of the poems? If the poems were grouped by similar frames, then there would be chunks which hung together. If the poets used fewer frames, then at some point say around psalm 100, new frames would stop. I note though that one can count the vertical gaps - there are 33 psalms that do not introduce a new frame beginning at psalm 43 (which doesn't really count since it it a continuation of psalm 42). So every poem up to psalm 47 introduces at least one new pairing of words that may be a frame. Psalm 47 doesn't introduce a new frame. Psalm 131 has a frame (גמל) I missed but curiously it is not new - but anticipated in Psalm 116:7 and 12  - though it is not obvious.

Mind you - some of the repeated words also may not be significant from a structural point of view. Only a further detailed analysis - and this to be manual over the next two months - will show this. I have seen a number of books on these sorts of structure, e.g. Girard, Marc, Les psaumes redécouverts, and Magonet, A Rabbi reads the Psalms. Girard and Magonet concentrate on individual psalms. Are there others who might have taken this kind of approach to reading the whole psalter as a book? (I see that a search for "psalter as a book" gets a lot of relevant hits.)

I note also from this morning when I was reading Psalm 7, that several of the frame words in the first 6 psalms are used once in psalm 7, linking the 'picture' in this psalm with what has gone before. I can't yet see whether this is just the normal use of language or a significant statement (as for instance the citation in Psalm 149 that joins this Psalm to Psalm 2 - see Journal for the Study of the Old Testament - An Integrated Reading of Psalms 1 and 2 - by Robert Cole).

Another interim word on keywords and the stacking of frames

This image is beyond silly - it's a grid of all the data points representing words used as frames in the Psalter. Handling that large a grid is awkward. Hard to see. And may take some time to load. It is comprised of 370 images and one 10M htm file.

It shows the patterns of new words introduced as a recurrence and possible frame in each psalm right up to to Psalm 150 and of the reuse of frames used in earlier psalms.

The overall question is - what story do the keywords tell and is the order of the psalms deliberate - an act of redaction, this decided if it can be, purely on the basis of content? Apart from historical speculation, content is all the information I have. Of course we know that the Psalter is well represented at Qumran and that it was the favorite book of the New Testament authors - judging by the number of allusions there.

Are there a few superficial lessons in content?

What we have so far is this:

• Psalm 1 is about: happiness, wickedness, the way, sin, righteousness, and there is a conditional
  
• Psalm 2: Earth, the stand-alone first person pronoun, the nations, and king
• Psalm 3: many, arising, salvation, and people
• Psalm 4: many, hear, righteous, speak, call, trust, bed, offer
• Psalm 5: many, voice, you (both the stand alone pronoun and in the tone of address - even preposition + second person singular pronoun makes a significant sound at the end of the psalm.)
• Psalm 6: hear, life/soul, time, vexed (O excuses!)
• Psalm 7: righteousness, righteous, conditional, life/soul, evil, toil, salvation, work, persecution, trouble, turning, judgment

That's enough for now - it only gets more complex as the length of the psalms increase. Also I can see where things might be equal that are slightly different - due to the difficulty of automatically parsing the Hebrew. I expect you can see the pattern of frames reaching both forward and back.

Trinity and Binary

Language is strange. Do you think there is a difference between 'God is one' and 'there is one God'? Is there a difference between unity and uniqueness?

Larry Hurtado has a video on early devotion to Jesus here. It is quiet scholarship. But like some others he uses a really strange word - binitarian. What happened to God as Spirit? Trinity is of course an equally strange word.

I do agree with the video that the evidence is very early that the risen Jesus was identified with God and as such is considered 'divine' and was attributed glory unique to the trust that belongs to God only. But is this really an exercise in counting? Or is there a good way to express such mystery?

Data points in the framing of the psalms

A walk at Government House in the rose gardens, From Collages

There are 150 columns and 535 (587 after corrections) rows in my list of data points - repeated roots in the psalter possibly used as structural frames sorted by psalm. The grid required 147 - (no 150 after counting repeats in the same verse) sorts (I was not sure Oracle would allow so many sort fields) . That there was something to sort still shows that there is something new in almost every frame right to the last psalm in the psalter. The last frame to appear is pleasure רָצָה in Psalm 147. (no - cymbals in psalm150) I wonder if this result will stand scrutiny. The roses are lovely though.

Trinity and psychology

My comments don't seem to stay posted at Richard Beck's site - so I repeat one here. His note on Trinity and Psychology is fascinating - see shared link on the right.

It could be also that the theoretical formulation of Trinity is important for your questions. E.g. your note "That is, while we recognized the preexistence and divinity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit" has two red herrings in it. Pre-existence and divinity are both unmeasurable. More suitable frames - like "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" or "if you by the Spirit do put to death the deeds of the body, you will live" seem to me to be Trinitarian but they have to do with present behaviour in present time based on the past event of the work of the Son that the Father gave him to do.  When you also extend the question to the ambiguous nature of the service of the Son - i.e. Christ as servant to the circumcision and "I called my s(S)on out of Egypt" then your questions could also discover what aspects of 'Trinitarian' belief could impact even those who do not know how to make 3 into 1.

Repeated words in the Psalms - a selected list.

Bogged down in data is where I am. There is too much for this idea to bear short-term fruit.

Here's a list by Psalm - roughly speaking, of the repeated roots that might be structurally significant and the number of times they repeat - followed by the count of Psalms in which the same root may also be structurally significant. There are over 2300 records. The psalms are a complex knit. The list reduces to 1700 or so if I remove all two-character roots - but some of these are interesting so I didn't remove them all - only a select few. I removed the negatives but they too might prove of interest - as when your teacher says - no, no, no.

Disclaimer - long list - incomplete - may be wrong calculation of the root from the lexeme - - may be useful as a reference? Note also that Psalm 119 may contribute excessively to the count since it is for me in 5 chunks.

This post turned out to be too long to syndicate - so I have deleted most of the data

Psalm root	Occurs in n Verses in Psalm x	Occurs as possible frame in y Psalms	No Comments
1 רשׁע	4	18	..
דרך	2	10	..
חטא	2	8	..
אם	2	22	..
כן	2	11	..
צדיק	2	9	..
2 גוי	2	14	..
מלך	3	16	..
ארץ	3	44	..
את	2	25	..
אף	2	10	..
אני	2	20	..
3 רב	2	19	..
קום	2	9	..
שׁוע	2	13	..
עם	2	35	..
deleted from psalms 4-148
149 הלל	3	17	..
יה	2	19	..
חסד	3	28	..
עשׂה	3	35	..
כבד	2	10	..
150 הלל	6	17	..
יה	2	19	..

Apophatic love

Joel Hoffman has asked what verbs you would use to describe the action of love when translating 1 Corinthians 13:4. The first thing I notice in the first verb μακροθυμέω is the number of suggestions in the glosses that remind me of the description of Exodus 34:6. Is Paul reflecting on what he has known of Israel's God and applying it to the way that is Love?

What part of this gloss would one choose for μακροθυμέω?

1. to be of a long spirit, not to lose heart
2. to persevere patiently and bravely in enduring misfortunes and troubles
3. to be patient in bearing the offenses and injuries of others
4. to be mild and slow in avenging
5. to be longsuffering, slow to anger, slow to punish

Would one choose אָרֵךְ? - I suspect that is what is in Paul's mind.

What about the others in the list?