10/11 pt ii

When time and place become sanctified settings : " All of life (becomes) permeated with worship" ( Westerhoff,15.)
Present collection of Psalms appears random. We seem to have artificial , formal divisions: Five books ,each ending with a doxology: 1-41;42-72;73-89;90-106;107-150. Perhaps this structure is meant to echo the 5 books of the Torah.

Smaller collections can still be distinguished:

3-41 davidic , individual ; 42-83 Elohistic Psalter; 84-90 appendix to EP( 42-89 seem to be taken from cantors' guilds as mentioned in Chronicles see ch 6[ Asaph 73-83, The Korah eight 42-49 ; David 51-71; individual laments on enemies theme 51-59.

Book 3( 73-89) - community psalms predominate and guild attributions. Majority are communal laments

Books 4 + 5 - enthronement psalms93,95-99; 100 as conclusion 103-107 as praise
Alleluia psalms111-118,135-136
Pilgrimmage psalms 120-134
Folk Song-137

Some of the psalmic superscriptions( which originate from the collectors and not the composers )are mysteries to us: miktam,16,56-60 was translated by Luther as a golden jewel; shiggaion as innocence in Ps 7.

We find unexplainable musical notations like lamnasseah and selah which may indicate a sung choral responseas in 136:1.

In Psalms and Proverbs we find all three types of poetic parallelism:
1) synonymous 103:1
2)synthetic 103:2
3) antithetic Prv 21:26

Ps 93 contains a particularly powerful example of repetition in vs3.

We will listen to the Hebrew text to see hear the rhythm in some of these songs.
Westerhoff notes that hebrew poetry patterns itself after natural speech and thus avoids artificial structure. He reminds us that the sentence not the word is the basic unit of speech and therefore rhyme is not an individual word pattern but instead a sentence meaning pattern. That is what parallelism is really all about.