Israel’s Story in the Psalms

Abstract This chapter probes the ways the Israelite songwriters produced various compositions that invite the community to reimagine important events and to highlight the experience of a particular occasion or perhaps to counter a prevailing ideology or belief system. An important genre is the historical psalms, where a sequence of episodes in Israel’s national history are poetically represented. Nearly a dozen psalms might be classified as historical (or at least contain longer historical reflections or have the characteristics of the genre), and three examples are discussed in this chapter: Psalms 114, 105–106, and 78. Several kinds of interconnected elements are of interest: some of the poetic techniques that are used (such as parallelism of intensification, ellipsis, and intertextuality) in the historical psalms, the overall message of a given psalm when its entirety is considered, and ideas about why a particular historical psalm may have been composed and preserved and how it might have been used in ancient Israel’s social setting.