The Flow of the Psalms: Discovering Their Structure and Theology

I was severely disappointed because of two things: 1) the table of contents, which has links to the chapters, is at the end of the file and it is not accessible from the "GoTo" menu on my Kindle. Doing it right would have made navigation much easier.More seriously, 2) The author has made some (apparently) incredible charts to describe the structure of the book of Psalms. The version of those charts that come with the Kindle version is nearly illegible on the computer screen, do not allow enlargement or orientation to the direction of text that fits the screen. And they are illegible on the Kindle screen -- made very small.This could be remedied, and should be because the charts are central to understanding the argument and conclusions of the book. But that's not how it comes.For this, I would have rated the book one star only. However, the book is awesome.

The study of the structure of the Psalms is a complex study and I anticipate that scholars will continue to make progress that aids in our understanding of how the Psalms were compiled.Robertson suggests as most do, that the five books of the Psalms are critical in understanding the structure of the book. Where he makes a new contribution however is in his summation of each book. He offers a single word for each book (my explanations follow).Book 1: Confrontation. God's people are confronted by and struggle with the enemies of the Messianic Kingdom.Book 2: Communication. There is new communication with the Nations about the rule of Elohim.Book 3: Devastation. The people of God are devastated by invading international enemies, yet Suffering comes before Glory.Book 4: Maturation. Exile leads to maturation for God's people.Book 5: Consummation. - Though in the now-not-yet God's people will be gathered into his kingdom under his rule.I learned a tremendous amount from reading this book straight through but I think once the reader understands the author's basic argument, which can be gleaned from reading the opening chapters and the Summary chapter (10), the book will function best as a reference work. Robertson's insights are often detailed and would be traced better in the context of individual chapter study.Robertson's treatment on several familiar themes was extremely helpful for me. I benefited most from his discussion on the use Elohim vs. YHW, Hallelujah, the phrase "trust in the Lord," and the relationship between Torah and Messianic psalms especially.I'm thankful for this book and quite glad that I read it. I expect it to be referenced for sometime to come. I would probably only recommend it to readers with theological training.4 of 5 Stars.

The study of the final form of the book of Psalms and the study of its overall structure and its significance have provided several studies recently. This is one those great attempts to answer to those questions as what is or are the overall theme/s embracing the whole collection. This is a book not just to be read but to be studied and to reflect upon its proposals. I have been devoting time to the study of the Psalms for the last five years. Another great proposal may be found in The King As Exemplar: The Function of Deuteronomy's Kingship Law in the Shaping of the Book of Psalms. It its a good idea reading/studying both and then compare their textual and theological foundation. The debate will and must continue as it will bring more and more scholarly production which, by the end, will benefit those studying the dense, precious and beautiful book of Psalms.

I'm still not quite sold on the argument that the final form of the Psalms has a discernible flow, but the excellent work that has gone into this volume will make it helpful nonetheless for any pastor or teacher that is covering the Psalms as a whole rather than merely preaching or teaching through a single Psalm as a one off sermon or lesson.

Excellent scholarship! This book is quite innovative and takes the structure of the Psalms as a whole most seriously. I found it a thoroughly fascinating read!

Fantastic insightful book!

This is an excellent book, showing how the Psalms are not just isolated poems, but are grouped intentionally.

Arrived as described

I have found the Psalms incredibly helpful since getting seriously ill last year. I find they are powerful instruments in the hand of God to speak to me and to everyone "who has an ear to hear" today. They cover the whole range of human experience, especially situations in which we find ourselves in deep distress, even despair. Yet many Christians bypass the OT and focus only on the NT. For example, we went to Israel a couple of years ago and had for many days a really friendly and helpful orthodox Jewish guide who looked after many evangelical tour parties and said this for him was the most striking surprise, that we Christians were in the main very poorly informed about the OT, which is after all the large majority of our bible. If we Christians dont understand our Jewish roots, shame on us: also this failure can lead to the dreadful sin of anti Semitism.This new book by Palmer Roberson looks at, as the name implies, "the flow" of the Psalms. While there is some sort of order in the Psalms to an uneducated eye - they are divided into five books for example - most people do not think beyond this to discern an overall "architecture". To use a modern example for most people, myself included before I came across this book, reading the Psalms is like having your "i- tunes" collection on shuffle. You enjoy each psalm but the exact order doesn't matter so much. Not so, argues Robertson. To continue with a musical analogy, his view is that the Psalms were arranged by the unknown editors as a sort of symphony, where themes weave their way throughout and the "music" builds towards a coherent conclusion.Robertson argues, convincingly to me anyway, that the first two psalms are the key "pillars or gates" to the whole "building". The first two psalms are concerned with the Torah (God's word/law) and the Messiah ("anointed one" - Gods promised future King) respectively. Periodically these pillars recur together so Psalm 19 and 119 are Torah psalms while Psalms 18 and 118 are Messianic. You can read my blog on Psalm 118 here. http://jsjmarshall.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/personal-reflections-on-psalm-118.htmlThese close links are deliberate because eventually the two themes of "word" and 'Messiah" will merge (Christians would refer here to John 1v 1 "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God". ). He then looks at book 1 (Psalms 1-41) as psalms of "confrontation", followed by the themes of "communication", "devastation", "maturation" and "consummation" for the remaining four books. On top of this - and if Roberston is right then a huge amount of thought went into the planning of the order - there a number of other themes have deliberately and additionally been woven into the layout. Without being exhaustive, these themes include kingship psalms, acrostic psalms, innocent sufferer psalms , "Yahweh is King" psalms, psalms of ascent to Jerusalem and "hallelujah" psalms. Other groupings of psalms are "poetic pyramids" whereby a group of 5 or 7 psalms are grouped with the "peak" being the one in the middle of the collection. For example the Hallelujah" group Psalms 111-117. Quite a lot to take in! You will have to read the book to get the full picture.What I also found helpful is that as well as the groupings above, Robertson also looks at themes across the psalms. For example, lets take a cheery example, death, which is a frequently recurring theme. Psalm 39 "man is a mere phantom as...he bustles about..in vain he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it". But thinking about his death - and the psalmist is repeatedly delivered from death eg Psalm 116 - points to redemption. "God will redeem my life from the grave, he will surely take me to himself " (Psalm 49) and " I am always with you...you guide me with your counsel and afterwards you will take me into glory." (Psalm 73).The only very minor caveat I would make is that in places the authors strongly Presbyterian background and thinking are obvious. Not that there is anything wrong with Presbyterians you understand! But the attempt to place everything within a covenantal framework may not convince all (e.g I wasn't fully convinced about the reference to the covenant with Noah). But this is minor stuffSo does all of this analysis of the structural order or flow of the book actually matter? Is this book, as some reviewers have argued, only of interest to theological experts? I think not, though perhaps if you have never read a book on the Psalms there are slightly less intense places to start. The reason I think it's helpful is that it increases the depth and richness of the message that God is trying to teach us through his psalms. By seeing the flow and the pattern of the way that the Psalms are arranged we are given new insight and revelation of into the message of Almighty God. Let me end with one example - the famous Psalm 118. I came to understand it much more fully after reading this book and thinking as Robertson suggests as to why it's just before psalm 119 and just after psalm 116. The book will enrich your bible study, your devotional life or your sermons. You don't have to agree with everything that Robertson proposes but the book will certainly make you think. Most of all it will help you appreciate the Psalms more and push you to read and meditate on them.

At the outset Robertson explains that his aim is to explore the psalms as a book. He argues that the idea that the Psalter has a plot is one which is well worth exploring. He even goes so far as to propose that an Ezra-like scribe might have arranged and edited the Psalter—giving it both literary and theological coherence. In this way, Robertson is making a conservative tweak to a well-known scholarly hypothesis that the Psalter was shaped over a prolonged period by multiple hands.Chapter 2 examines the basic structural elements that are evident in the Psalter. Robertson looks at the five books which comprise the Psalter, the grouping of psalms by title and the importance of both torah psalms and messianic psalms. There is much to commend here in the succinct clarity with which the reader is shown the evidence. What I found frustrating is that despite lots of footnotes Robertson’s indebtedness to others does not emerge with clarity. Readers familiar with the literature on the psalms will appreciate our, and Palmer’s, enormous indebtedness to the likes of Brevard Childs, Robert Cole, Nancy deClassié-Walford, David M. Howard, J. Clinton McCann, Patrick Miller, Gerald Wilson and others. They did nothing less than overturn the decades-long consensus which had done little to enable the Church to utilise the Psalter.In Chapter 3 Robertson argues that the Book of Psalms has a redemptive-historical framework. Robertson’s opening argument (p.23) that viewing the Psalter as Davidic is fruitful. This combined with the necessity of understanding the impact of the exile (p.24) makes enormous sense. This is not, however, followed through in the manner that this reader anticipated. Rather than any consideration at this point of the impact of post-Davidic developments, Robertson considers the various covenants that Yahweh made with Noah, Abraham, the Patriarchs, Moses and David. This marginalises the very clear failings and ultimate failure of the Davidic monarchy and does not, in my view, offer the richness of much recent scholarly literature. Robertson’s starting point, is of course a very natural point of departure for someone from the Reformed tradition. In this way Chapter 3 marks a shift from the self-evident nature of the Psalter, considered in Chapter 2, to a specific intentional hermeneutical approach.Chapter 4 is very short—being only three pages in length. Despite its brevity the chapter is critical to Robertson’s approach. In the lengthy footnotes he somewhat tangentially engages with both Gerald Wilson and Nancy deClassié-Walford. Despite what these footnotes indicate, his proposal to trace a story-line through the Psalter is only a variation on the approach of these and other scholars who adopt a canonical approach.Robertson proposes the following themes for the Psalter’s five books:Book I: Confrontation (with enemies)Book II: Communication (with the nations)Book III: Devastation (by foreign powers)Book IV: MaturationBook V: ConsummationChapter 5’s consideration of Book I of the Psalter under the heading Confrontation is largely convincing. Anyone familiar with the psalms in canonical order will agree that this one word goes a considerable way to capturing a core dynamic of the first 41 psalms. Again, in my view, Robertson does not fully acknowledge the large number of people who have grappled with Book I previously. This can be seen with his correct assertion about the foundational role of Psalms 1 and 2—after mentioning Jamie A. Grant’s excellent book on the shaping of the psalms he does not even mention the work of Cole,[i] Miller[ii] and others who worked so hard to challenge the unhelpful marginalisation of these two introductory psalms by Gunkel and Mowinckel. In this chapter the role of Psalm 19 and the acrostic psalms are helpfully explored. In fact the real novelty of Robertson’s work is the role he ascribes to acrostic psalms and what he terms quasi-acrostics (Psalms 33, 38 and 103, each with their 22 verses matching the 22 consonantal phonemes of the Hebrew alphabet). This aspect of his book has been published in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament.[iii]The idea that Book II is all about communication with the nations (Chapter 6) is less convincing. Clearly the nations play a central role, being essentially a character in the Psalter, but seeing Book II in this way seems to flatten a more complex role for the nations and is arguably a rose-tinted reading back into the Psalter from a post-Easter perspective.Reading Book III, in Chapter 7, with the theme of Devastation fits well with the contents of Book III and coheres with Wilson’s original 1985 proposal. Yet even here there is a danger that Robertson’s schema over-simplifies the picture by laying the devastation solely at the hands of foreign nations. I suggest that a reading of this short series of psalms, pss.73–89, lays the blame with Yahweh and the nation of Israel’s failings.Chapters 8 and 9 move on from the consequences of exile in Book III and examine Books IV and V respectively. Here Robertson helpfully unpacks both the literary structure and the theological narrative. Again I think that Robertson errs on the side of making his case to the extent of smoothing over the full complexity and richness of the content of these two books. His hypothesis of a single editor leads to an over confidence regarding the possibility of reliably recovering editorial intent—the evidence, i.e. the Psalter, reveals a much more complex challenge that resists a simplistic interpretative straight-jacket.In Chapter 10, Robertson ends up where he started. This is my major concern with his book. I am broadly persuaded that the canonical approach he has articulated, following a large school of scholars from the 1980s onwards, is a fruitful way to read the Psalter. What I am not convinced of is that a Reformed redemptive-historical framework does justice to the rich tapestry of the Psalter. The proposal of a single Ezra-like scribe editing the Psalter fails to convince. Such a proposal might seem more palatable to some, but I find the idea of a more complex process where Yahweh has worked through multiple editors over a longer timescale to produce Scripture an exciting prospect.Despite the reservations outlined above, I would heartily encourage preachers, small group leaders and church leaders to work through this book. Whether you agree entirely with Robertson or not the reader will have a firmer grasps of the remarkable Book of Psalms—which is so much more than a hotchpotch anthology of ancient songs. The Church today sorely needs the psalms and those who have spent time immersed in the Psalter.[i] Robert L. Cole, Psalms 1–2: Gateway to the Psalter, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press (2013) and Robert L. Cole, ‘Psalms 1 and 2: The Psalter’s Introduction’ in The Psalms: Language for All Seasons of the Soul, Andrew J. Schmutzer and David M. Howard (editors), Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2013.[ii] Patrick D, Miller, ‘The Beginning of the Psalter’, pp.83–92 in J. Clinton McCann (editor), Shape and Shaping of the Psalter, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993.[iii] ‘The Alphabetic Acrostic in Book I of the Psalms: An Overlooked Element of Psalter Structure’, 40 (2), 225–238, 2015.

Superb!

Robertson relates the structure of the Psalter masterfully and clearly. Throughout the book, he explains the Psalms in their original context, as they correlate to of Psalms, and in the broader meta-narrative of Scripture, including their Christological significance.

Really helped me understand the way the book of Psalms was edited