I’ve been looking at the joins between psalms in Book 4 of the Psalter these last few weeks: where they are and aren’t, when they are consistent and when they aren’t. But I was looking at Psalm 33 for a different reason and noticed a couple of things.
1/ Psalm 33 is what Peter C. Ho would probably call some sort of acrostic. Not having a go at him but he calls things acrostics which most people in a million years wouldn't consider acrostics. In Psalm 33's case, it's certainly not an acrostic, but it does have22 verses, and it
immediately precedes Ps34 which is an acrostic, so it sort of is even though it
isn’t.
2/ Psalm 33 is one of the few untitled
psalms in the first three books. Apart from Pss 1-2, this is the first since Ps
10 not to have a title. And that’s significant, because Ps 9-10 are often
joined together, especially in the versions. The next one without a title is
43, which, again, is often joined to 42 beforehand.
3/ As you finish Ps 32 and move on to
33 you notice that pretty much all the vocab of the final verse of the former
is present in the first verse of the latter. And with one exception, it’s in a
chiastic order. The prefix for Yhwh is the same in both, and while the forms
for רנן and ישר are different, we’ve got an ABCDCBAD
layout on our hands:
שִׂמְחוּ בַיהוָה
וְגִילוּ צַדִּיקִים
וְהַרְנִינוּ
כָּל־יִשְׁרֵי־לֵב׃
רַנְּנוּ
צַדִּיקִים
בַּיהוָה
לַיְשָׁרִים נָאוָה תְהִלָּה׃
All of this
together makes me wonder if this wasn’t some attempt to have us read 32 and 33
together. Although I have William Yarchin's amazing list of hundreds of manuscripts with variant segmentation, I am not aware of any manuscripts in which these two were read as one
psalm, but it’s certainly tempting to do so.
33:1 feels just
like a restatement of 32:11, perhaps a (poorly-done) exercise of rewriting in
one’s own words. If (and here I’m getting into scary German approaches here) Psalm
32 finished at v7, Ps33 would be a fitting response. That is, 32:8-10 seems a bit out of
place. Perhaps the compiler/editor thought 33 should be read rather as the
better response to the psalm, where the faithful (חסיד)
of 32:6 meet the faithfulness (חסד) of Yhwh in 33:22.
Where I’ve taken
this in the preceding paragraph is all pretty wild and speculative, but where I started, the close and
deliberate connection between Psalms 32 and 33 cannot be denied, by (1) the lack of
title and (2) the reuse, in a chiastic order, of the same lexemes in
neighbouring verses of the two.
