2014.07.40. Cole, Psalms 1–2

Robert L. Cole, Psalms 1–2: Gateway to the Psalter
Reviewed by Richard S. Briggs

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous30 August, 2014

    The foregoing review is characterized by some serious mistakes in the quotation of the Hebrew text at the heart of the particular argument. Two out of the four, or fifty percent of the citations of the original by the reviewer, chosen presumably as prime examples of overreach by myself, are either inaccurate or backwards.

    In the first case the reviewer has rendered twice the third masculine singular verbal form yhgh of Ps 1:2 as "whgh." My argument was that its position and consonantal makeup creates consonantal resonance with colon A:

    btwrt yhwh…wbtwrtw yhgh

    The twice-repeated mistake by the reviewer obviously muddles, even if inadvertently, the evidence. He states that it is unclear why it is significant, but of course the ambiguity of the antecedent of the masculine singular pronoun suffix in wbtwrtw converges with the consonance to make it highly significant.

    The reviewer has cited in Hebrew the consonantal sequence of Ps 2:1, colon Aβ–resh-gimel-gimel-yod and yod-gimel-resh-qof in colon Bβ, but backwards. Furthermore, my claim of consonance and its significance here and elsewhere throughout is not "untested."

    Concerning the contention that the lamed of the negative particle l’ in Ps 1:1c has been ignored ("does not count") in the parallel drawn with Ps 2:4, I simply note that four lines later on the same page (p. 100) its role is illustrated as part of the convergence of parallelism on the phonological, semantic, morphological, and lexical levels between the two verses:

    lsym l’
    yl‘g lmw

    The negative particle was included in parenthesis in the first citation to highlight the contrast between "not sitting" of Ps 1 and the "sitting" of Ps 2, and it is part of the accumulation of parallels between the entirety of Pss 1:1c and 2:4.

    Robert L. Cole

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