A Collective Anointed? David and the People in Psalm 89

It has been suggested by Timo Veijola and several other exegetes that the anointed one dealt with in Ps 89 does not mean an individual Judean king or the Davidic dynasty but the whole people of Israel. Psalm 89 thus witnesses to a collectivization of the divine promises given to David. In the present article, I critique this thesis of collectivization. To be sure, David and the people are closely related to each other in the psalm but at the same time clearly distinguished from each other. In the whole Hebrew Bible, there is no unequivocal evidence for a collective meaning of the title [inline-graphic 01i] (“anointed”). The textual and reception history of Ps 89 suggests that the collectivization of the Davidic figure is a phenomenon of reception rather than conforming to the original meaning of the psalm.