Sunday, April 01, 2007

The psalter as a sandwich

The Psalter is a sandwich: The filling consists of psalms where the words related to Elohim predominate over the words related to the holy name. There are two pieces of bread - psalms 1-41 and psalms 87-150.

I read (Craigie, Word commentary) about the dominance of certain divine names in parts of the Psalter, so I formatted a query to the database and up popped the graph in the new table of contents. (The bars for Elohim include variations like El, Eli, and Elohay; the bars for the tetragrammeton include short forms like Yah.) I could do all sorts of measurements. Any suggestions?

The framework for translation is fully loaded but I have only published in the JPG form about 33 - so if you get a page not found when browsing, that's why. 33 rough translations starting about June last year - so maybe the project won't take 6 years as I originally thought.

BTW, I don't think that the different divine names are support for a 'documentary' hypothesis. It's just that pronouns etc are never used with the tetragrammeton - I am sure there are some good questions here...

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