Book of Psalms

Call For Papers: For 2023, the Book of Psalms unit will host several sessions. The first is a joint session with the "Meals in the OT/HB and Its World" unit. This open session welcomes paper proposals on the topic of "Agrarian and Food-Focused Readings of the Psalms." The session will consider agriculture/food within both the context and the content of the Psalter. Given that many of the psalms possibly arose from or were used during feasts and fasts in ancient Israel, how might food-based contexts have influenced the imagery and language used in these poetic compositions? Fruitful avenues for investigation include (but are not limited to) exploration of the Psalter’s use of food language, meal scenes, and agricultural imagery; trauma or violence depicted as meal scenes (language of ‘being eaten’); and food and power in, say, the royal psalms. For the second (open) session, we especially invite papers related to the psalmic superscriptions. Proposals might (re)consider variation in the superscriptions across the early versions or perhaps focus on the MT superscriptions with an eye toward meaning, intertextuality, or the shape and shaping of the Psalter. The final session will be a panel review of Susan Gillingham's three-volume work, Psalms Through the Centuries (Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentaries).

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