Bernard P. Robinson, «Form and Meaning in Psalm 131», Vol. 79 (1998) 180-197
Psalm 131 displays a subtle play on words. The psalmist has silenced and calmed down his soul/breast (he has put an end to its loud complaints). The two verbs used express or suggest the idea of assimilation (I have transformed it into something silent and something calm), which leads up to the material image which follows. In 2b gamul means a child that has been weaned or is happy (and has stopped crying loudly); instead of kaggamul one should read tiggmol, you have been nice to me. Although the psalm has an unusual form, it has the same structure as Psalm 130. It probably constitutes a literary unit. It may by royal psalm.
that has come down to us must suggest otherwise. It might have been better to write Loretz version of 2a; but that does not mean that that is what the Psalmist wrote. I think that the Psalm does use parallelism, but that 2a is an imperfect bicolon (or a colon with internal parallelism).
V. 2a. ytmmwdw is supposedly a polal form from Mmd I = be silent, quiet. So Jerome: silere feci. Peshitta does not seem to have anything corresponding to it. LXX and Vulgate have I have exalted, which presumably translates ytmmr (found in a few Hebrew manuscripts). This seems likely to be a misreading. de Boer thinks that this took place because wm) yl( was taken to mean (rightly, he supposes) against its mother21. The MT reading is doubtless correct: the Psalmist speaks of his passive self-abandonment to God.
Crow wonders whether the author has chosen the verb Mmd because of its similarity to hmd, "to resemble", a synonym in one of its senses of the verb hw#$. (Symmachus indeed renders it w(moi/wsa) Crow suggests that the Psalmist is punning, using two verbs to express calming or quietening which coincidentally suggest the idea of comparison, by way of introducing the simile of the weaned child22. This seems quite plausible. We may therefore perhaps translate: "I have made my #$pn like something calm, like something quiet."
y#$pn.
It is now widely accepted that #$pn (like the Ugaritic np [as in np mt, the maw/gorge of
Death]) sometimes means neck, throat, gullet, appetite or breathing/speaking apparatus
(the meaning of the root being to breathe). KB recognize a number of instances, including
several in the Psalter: 44,26; 63,6; 107,9,18; 119,25; 143,6. Dahood identifies still
other occurrences, including Pss 7,3; 27,12 and 41,3. No one, however, finds the idea in
Ps 131,2, yet this is surely one of the cases where the word #$pn carries some of the connotation of
"throat". The Psalmist, having previously been raucous, has now abated his
complaining. Thus, as with bl and Myn( there
is an element of synecdoche about the use of #$pn. I suggest further that something of the same sort is found in the preceding
Psalm: when he says that his #$pn has waited for Yhwh, that it