Friday 30 September 2011

Recent posts on Poetry of Christ

I continue my 10 posts per month at the disciplined and now scheduled blog here. I am up to psalm 85 and am beginning to imagine a new idea for the organization of the Psalter: who gets to the Holy Place.  What if the Psalter is a series of progressions concerning this question?  Thoughts?  As I work out how to write a short book on the psalms, I am thinking this might provide a theme worth following. It would encompass worship, all uses of קדשׁ, i.e. the holy hill, holiness itself, the sanctuary, the Holy One, the place of Zion, and the city, which gets its last mention in psalm 139.

Thinking out loud - what are the progressions:

  1. the first is from psalm 1-7, leading to psalm 8, celebrated by the attempted acrostic 9-10
  2. the second is to psalm 15, leading to psalm 16, progressing through to 19 and 24, celebrated by the acrostic 25
  3. the third ...
  4. the inner cells from 42 to 106 need further thought from me on this theme. Perhaps they are a failure of the progression of human government ...
  5. Psalm 107 has much to say of the general human condition and the city as haven.
  6. the next sequence is to psalm 110, celebrated by the acrostics 111, 112
  7. the next sequence is to psalm 118, and the adoration of the acrostic 119
  8. then there are the steps to the Holy in the Psalms of the Ascents 
  9. then do we have another progression to psalm 139?
  10. the ultimate progression towards praise continues. Does 144 have a special role that it should be followed by the acrostic 145? Or does the final acrostic stand as a celebration of the whole formational process of the Psalter.
As I do my next work through of Books 2 to 4, I will be looking for clues...


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