I am slotted to give a paper in San Diego on 17 November 2007. My focus is on a few verses towards the middle of Psalm 102. Full details for the session, including links to abstracts, are as follows.

S17-108

Book of Psalms

11/17/2007
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: Windsor BC - GH

William Bellinger, Baylor University, Presiding

Daniel R. Driver, University of St. Andrews
For a Generation to Come: The Addressee of Psalm 102 in Reception and Recent Research (30 min)

Robert E. Wallace, Shorter College
Back to the Beginning: Yahweh as King, Moses as Mediator and Psalms 104-106 (30 min)

Judith Gärtner, Universität Hamburg
The Tora in Psalm 106 and Psalm 136 (30 min)

Jinkyu Kim, Nyack College
Strategic Arrangement of Royal Psalms in the Last Two Books of the Psalter (30 min)

Charles Rix, Drew University
Note the Silence: Reading Psalm 137 Through Messiaen and Bak (30 min)


Since my proposal was supposed to have a paragraph break in it, and since what else is a blog for?, and since it'll be good to keep the thing out in front of me as November approaches, here's my proposal/abstract:

In recent years, some attention has been paid to Psalm 102 by scholars interested in the canon’s final form, though in very different ways. Odil Steck, for instance, has argued not just that the psalm be read as a whole (contra an older form-critical understanding), but that its singularity be explained with reference to a body of scripture largely extant at the time of its composition. For him, the psalm arises at a late redactional phase in the formation of the canon, testifying to the confluence of distinctive prophetic and sapiential streams of tradition. Somewhat differently, Brevard Childs has discussed Psalm 102 as an instance of the authority scripture increasingly accrued in textualized form: it was “recorded for a generation to come” (19a). Despite fairly substantial disagreements in a number of areas—including about the place of intentionality as such—Steck and Childs agree that the intended audience is in the remote future. On analogy with late prophecy, perhaps, the generation addressed is not near, but distant; in Steck’s word, the psalm voices “Fernerwartung.”

The burden of the present paper is to query the history of reception of Psalm 102, particularly verse 19, to see whether there is any “family resemblance” (Childs) with these more recent interpretations. Which generations have been found in the psalmist’s purview? The results may have an important bearing on Childs’s program, which has long sought to hold the history of interpretation together with modern research (most recently, cf. The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture). If preoccupation with an original cultic context is a modern oddity, what can be said for the theory of a radicalized eschatology?

Obviously, the whole thing is kinda supposed to relate to the last chapter of my dissertation.

Tags: Childs, Psalms, PhD