In Ps 82, we are faced with a different world of thought from what one seems to encounter in most of the other psalms. This psalm most overtly carries a mythological motif common to the religious world of the ancient Near East, in particular like the "divine assembly." This mirrors the fact that the psalmist was accustomed to the milieu of the ancient Near East. What is important is that the psalmist used the mythological imagery to express some fundamental convictions about the God who had brought them into being and claimed their life. As we have already noted above, especially in the analysis of the structure of our psalm, the psalmist skillfully deals with the syntactic, stylistic and semantic aspects to create an artful cohesion of the psalm. Its chiastic structure including the prophetic speech form and the rhetorical devices he employed contributed to discovering an echo of the prophetic speech which refers to justice. Besides, the psalmist"s prayer at the concluding part constitutes a decisive element in its genre as a psalm. From this analysis, we have detected the chief themes such as Yahweh-Elohim as the supreme God and His concern for justice. These two theological themes that I have found would have been an essential question to the Israelite people who lived through the exilic period. They might have been struggling with the question of divine absence and justice. As the closing prayer of our psalm indicates, they might have expected the coming of God to happen immediately. Their struggling as the weak and the poor under the rule of foreign nations finally led them even to embrace the nations beyond themselves with the notion of God as the universal king. The other notion that the psalm clearly demonstrates is that justice is the cornerstone of the universe, while it is not found in the strongest words of the prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Micah. The intensity and centrality of justice of our psalm is unparalleled.
In Ps 82, we are faced with a different world of thought from what one seems to encounter in most of the other psalms. This psalm most overtly carries a mythological motif common to the religious world of the ancient Near East, in particular like the "divine assembly." This mirrors the fact that the psalmist was accustomed to the milieu of the ancient Near East. What is important is that the psalmist used the mythological imagery to express some fundamental convictions about the God who had brought them into being and claimed their life. As we have already noted above, especially in the analysis of the structure of our psalm, the psalmist skillfully deals with the syntactic, stylistic and semantic aspects to create an artful cohesion of the psalm. Its chiastic structure including the prophetic speech form and the rhetorical devices he employed contributed to discovering an echo of the prophetic speech which refers to justice. Besides, the psalmist"s prayer at the concluding part constitutes a decisive element in its genre as a psalm. From this analysis, we have detected the chief themes such as Yahweh-Elohim as the supreme God and His concern for justice. These two theological themes that I have found would have been an essential question to the Israelite people who lived through the exilic period. They might have been struggling with the question of divine absence and justice. As the closing prayer of our psalm indicates, they might have expected the coming of God to happen immediately. Their struggling as the weak and the poor under the rule of foreign nations finally led them even to embrace the nations beyond themselves with the notion of God as the universal king. The other notion that the psalm clearly demonstrates is that justice is the cornerstone of the universe, while it is not found in the strongest words of the prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Micah. The intensity and centrality of justice of our psalm is unparalleled.
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