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.
he says, but the Job passage is form-critically similar to a divine oracle or to a Certainty of a Hearing section in a Psalm of Individual Lament or Confidence, such as our present Psalm is. I am not persuaded by the argument. A similarity between Job 42,2-6 (and other parts of that book) and the Psalms of Individual Lament is evident enough, but what does it prove? Surely not that any individual Psalm of Lament (or, for that matter, any Jeremianic Confession) comes from the same period as the Book of Job. If a direct influence needs to be posited in respect of Ps 131 and Job 42, the Psalm could surely have influenced the author of Job rather than the reverse. But why need such a connection be made? Talk of Gods tw)lpn is not confined to Wisdom texts: it is found in both prophetic48 and historical49 texts.
Was the Psalm written as it now stands, as a unity? It is hard to be certain, but the arguments urged against this supposition do not convince me. The main problem is that whereas verse 1 is addressed to Yhwh, verse 3 is addressed to Israel. Should we regard either the Tetragrammaton in v. 1 or the whole of v. 3 as redactional? Let us examine the arguments. I take the case of v.1 first. It is possible to argue that the ancient Rabbis found the word hwhy here problematic on the basis of the "Note-line" that follows it. This line is usually taken as the sign legarmeh, part of the accent mehuppak legarmeh, which has a disjunctive force. This, though, tends to show, at most, that the Rabbis took the divine name to constitute an anacrusis. Kennedy, however, believes that there is no distinction between paseq and legarmeh. He thinks, pace Wickes, that the "Note-line" antedates the accentual system. The Masoretes, "viewing Paseq as if it were really a mark occasionally inserted to separate words in a sentence, adopted their accentual arrangements in accordance with this erroneous idea, as they deemed best in every passage where it occurred"50. There are fifteen different reasons for the insertion of the paseq, and both the occurrences in Ps 131,1 are instances of the fifteenth, namely to question the originality of the word that precedes it 51. If Kennedy is right, the ancient copyists will have regarded hwhy and ytklh as incorrect readings. It is difficult,