Psalm 119: Matrix, Form and Setting (review)

Hebrew Studies 34 (1993) 209 Reviews PSALM 119: MATRIX, FORM AND SETTING. By Will Soil. CBQ Monograph Series 23. Pp. vii + 192. Washington, DC: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1991. Paper. Will Soli begins his study of Psalm 119 with a quotation in which St. Augustine confesses that when he was writing his commentary on the psalms he "put off the 119th Psalm" not only because of its length, but because "the psalm does not even seem to need an expositor." Soli's study of Psalm 119 illustrates Augustine's further observation that, although so much of the psalm seems to be self-evident, yet there is a depth which is "fathomable by few." SolI's book grows out of a doctoral dissertation at Vanderbilt University completed in 1982, but it has been extensively reworked, and retains few traces of the dissertation "genre." The book is really a series of three quite independent studies of specific questions about Psalm 119: the "matrix" of Psalm 119, that is, its acrostic form and use of Torah words in each verse; the form of Psalm 119 as an individual lament; and its "setting," which SoIl sees not so much as a wisdom milieu but as the prayer of the exiled Davidic king. A final appendix gives the author's own translation (a "fairly literal one") with some brief annotations. In many ways, I found the first section of the book the most illuminating and the most convincing. In contrast to much of modem psalm criticism and literary sensibility which sees only the artificiality and constraints of the acrostic form, son seeks to approach the alphabetic acrostic sympathetically and on its own terms. Incorporating much of the material of an article he published earlier ("Babylonian and Biblical Acrostics," Biblica 68 [1988] pp. 305-323), Soli examines a broad series of acrostic texts from Babylonian Theodicy to Apostrophe to Zion (11QPsa Zion) and Psalm ISS (11QPsa 155, Syriac Psalm III). son downplays both the alleged mnemonic purpose of the acrostic and its supposed link to wisdom literature, and instead highlights its aesthetic functions. I was particularly struck by his reflections on how the acrostic form functions within the specific context of prayer (p. 27) to give a sense of "completeness" even though either the praises of God or the confession of sin could be mUltiplied indefinitely. SolI goes on to examine what is really the most distinctive structural feature of Psalm 119: the use of a "Torah word" in each line. In contrast to a long line of interpretators who see ten Torah words, SoIl makes a convincing argument that the poem is structured around eight words, arguing Hebrew Studies 34 (1993) 210 Reviews that words such as derek, :Jemuna and :Jorah, while significant, are less frequent and play a different role. Although other commentators have certainly noticed this feature of repeated Torah words, SolI works out how the structuring of the poem in this way affects what has traditionally been called "parallelism" and the relationship, or better, non-relationship, of this structuring device to that of the acrostic (for instance, no Torah word is ever used to establish the acrostic pattern). Although in some ways this is the most "dense" chapter of the book, it is certainly the one from which I learned the most about how Psalm 119 "works." In the second section, Soli sets out his thesis that the form of Psalm 119 is that of a prayer, specifically an "individual lament." Here he is reacting to Gunkel's classification of the psalm as a m;schgammg ("mixed genre") and Deissler's designation of it as an "anthology." On the one hand, SoIl is able to argue his case precisely because he so closely identifies the individual lament with "psalm of petition." That is, by emphasizing the petitions in the individual lament ("all individual laments have them, and their recurrence in a given psalm is usually sufficient grounds for the psalm's classification as a lament" [po 69]), Soli is able to highlight the sixty verses of Psalm 119 which also contain petitions. Other factors which are usually considered distinctive of the individual lament but which do not appear in Psalm...