‘I am like a green olive tree’: The Wisdom context of Psalm 52

Philippus J Botha

doi:10.4102/hts.v69i1.1962

Abstract

The article revisits the thesis of Walter Beyerlin from 1980 that Psalm 52 is a paraenetic- didactic Wisdom poem from the late Persian period. Beyerlin reached his conclusion from a comparison of Psalm 52 with post-exilic Wisdom psalms such as Psalms 37, 49, and 73. The direct literary influence that Psalm 52 received from the book of Proverbs and the motifs it shares with Jeremiah 9 are investigated here, since the author contends that the Wisdom influence on the Psalm was even greater than Beyerlin had envisaged. The article comes to the conclusion that the author(s) of the Psalm attempted to compose a psalm by establishing a network of allusions to a corpus of authoritative texts, inter alia, the Wisdom psalms. The end product is a brilliant composition which interprets the teaching of Proverbs for the needs of a group of Jewish believers who probably lived at the end of the Persian period.

Highlights

This article is an attempt to determine the literary context, and from this, the probable theologicalhistorical context for the understanding of Psalm 52.1 A similar investigation has been undertaken by Walter Beyerlin more than 30 years ago (Beyerlin 1980)
Beyerlin came to the conclusion that Psalm 52 is a paraenetic-didactic Wisdom poem with the objective of leading the community in which it was composed out of its distress and crisis to a renewed hope of salvation and trust in Yahweh (Beyerlin 1980:92)
Authoritative and thorough exposition of Psalm 52, Hossfeld and Zenger (2007:64–65) play down the connections Beyerlin found between Psalm 52 and postexilic Wisdom psalms

Summary

Introduction

This article is an attempt to determine the literary context, and from this, the probable theologicalhistorical context for the understanding of Psalm 52.1 A similar investigation has been undertaken by Walter Beyerlin more than 30 years ago (Beyerlin 1980). The antagonist of Psalm 52 is described by implication as the opposite of a wise person, since he is arrogantly pursuing evil, whilst the teaching of Proverbs is vindicated when his punishment comes and the righteous people respond with greater reverence for God.

Results

Conclusion