LITERAIR-STILISTISCHE ANALYSE VAN PSALM 6

Abstract

SUMMARY The general aspects of Psalm 6 as an individual lament have so far been clarified by form-critical studies. Its individual character and poetry, however, were, to a great extent, disregarded in spite of the developments in the field of Hebrew stylistics. This article describes in an explorative way the style-phenomena found in Psalm 6 and evaluates their function in the given context. In part one the author sums up the well-known discussion about strophes because this leads to the important question of how to examine and to describe the structure of a text. Most scholars when speaking about strophes limit themselves to only one criterion, the metre, or the number of cola or the general content, however vague this may be. Syntax as a constituent element has consistently been disregarded. The structural analysis given here does not rely on criteria arrived at by deduction, but on the interrelation between the stylistic data (syntax, parallelism, rhyme, repetition). In this article the term ‘strophes...