Abstract
This is the book of Willgren’s 2016 University of Lund dissertation written under Fredrik Lindström. It reviews the history of the holistic and canonical approach to the Psalms that was launched by Brevard Childs and Gerard Wilson in the 1980s. It is in six sections, divided into seventeen chapters, and a conclusion.
In the first section, ‘Framing the task at hand’, after discussing Wilson’s work, Willgren defines the purpose of his search as to provide answers to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the Book of Psalms: what was the process of the diachronic growth of the Psalms; to what end are the Psalms juxtaposed. In the second chapter, he proposes that the Psalter has been designed as an anthology.
In the second section, Willgren turns his attention to anthologies in general, and particularly in the ancient east. The anthologizing of prayers and songs was common in Sumer, Greece (the Homeric hymns), and in post-biblical Israel (the Hodayot of the Dead Sea Scrolls). He suggests this happened for three reasons: ‘archival economy’, ‘scribal curriculum’, and ‘preservation’. He rightly notes that if the Psalms had been left as individual lyrics, they would have been lost. But he says little about a liturgical motive for the collection.
In the third section, Willgren examines the Psalm texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He dismisses the view of Sanders and Flint that the Book of Psalms was a two or three stage process continuing into the Christian period. He thinks instead that it was a more complex and ‘messy’ process (p. 132). The fourth section is the centre of the book. He concludes that neither the prefatory Psalms 1 and 2, nor the suprescriptions, nor the colophon, Ps 72:20, nor the book divisions (at Pss 41:14, 72:18–19, 89:53, 106:48), nor the ‘Final Hallel’ (Pss 146-150) provide convincing evidence for the purposive construction of the entire book. Nor, in the fifth section, does he find that the use of the Psalms elsewhere in the Bible or later literature provide any such evidence.
He concludes that individual psalms did become part of increasingly stable sequences until they cohered in a single collection. But he thinks this had little to do with literary purposes and was simply the result of multilinear gathering processes. Rather than seeing the Psalms as an oratorio or cantata, he prefers the analogy of a cookbook, where the parts are put together for convenience rather than out of literary design.
Willgren’s book is an impressive work of scholarship. He is agnostic on the purposeful construction of the Psalms, as the inverted commas in his title show. (My view is that the collection arose as the result of a single creative impulse in the early second temple period.) But if you want a detailed and comprehensive introduction to final form studies of the Psalms, then this is a well-informed book.