The Intellectual Background of This Commentary

Psalm 51:17

  אֲדֹנָי שְׂפָתַי תִּפְתָּח וּפִי יַגִּיד תְּהִלָּתֶךָ׃

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O Lord, open my lips, and let my mouth declare Your praise.

            It is with great trepidation that I offer the following two-volume commentary on the book of Psalms, what many consider to be some of the most inspired literature set to parchment. Humbled by the majesty and depth of biblical poetry and prose, I am profoundly aware of my own shortcomings as a writer, and fear that I have failed to adequately display more than a few facets of the shimmering diamond that is the Miqra.[1] Nevertheless, I feel compelled to share the fruits of my investigations, as part of the legacy of my two mentors: Rabbi Solomon David Sassoon, and Rabbi Moshe Shamah. I pray that my work, building on their insights and methodology, will do some justice to the words of the prophets.

As a young rabbinical student, no older than twenty-three, I had the great merit of being introduced by my cousin, Rabbi Moshe Shamah, to one of the Torah world’s great luminaries — Rabbi Solomon David Sassoon— who enriched my life and study immeasurably from that day forward. In the decades since, I have devoted my research to applying his insights to the book of Psalms and to the rest of the Miqra. The result is the work before you. While Rabbi Sassoon’s teachings inspired and profoundly impacted this study, the thoughts developed here are my own and should not be understood as speaking for him. In many ways, I feel that I have only touched the surface of his thought; any shortcomings are, of course, my own.

A foundational principle of Rabbi Sassoon’s Bible study methodology is that the Miqra is its own first and best commentary. (Rabbi Sassoon’s definition of “commentary” includes expansion, elaboration, emphasis and sharpening of ideas in one text through the interpretive lens of another.) As a result, this book, like Rabbi Shamah’s Recalling the Covenant,[2] is replete with examples of intertextuality — biblical words, phrases, images, and ideas from different parts of the Miqra that invoke and therefore draw meaning from one another.[3] Rabbi Shamah and I were blessed with the opportunity to watch Rabbi Sassoon’s methodology develop and bear interpretive fruit over the decades, studying at first with the man himself, and then continuing to apply our teacher’s approach after his passing. I observed how Rabbi Sassoon’s methodology and conclusions evolved, as he refined his ideas over twenty years of teaching and analyzing biblical texts with us, into the paradigm-shifting methodology eventually employed by Rabbi Shamah in Recalling the Covenant. The effect of reading Psalms not only as poetry in its own right, but also as an integral part of the complex interwoven fabric of Miqra and as commentary on other texts Rabbi Sassoon referred to collectively as “prophetic literature,”[4] is to provide a three-dimensional biblical perspective by studying multiple intertexts side by side.

Rabbi Sassoon also taught that prophetic writing, including the book of Psalms, employs intricate literary structures and unique literary techniques. This book will introduce readers to many such structures and techniques. These may be simple, such as the use of theme words at high concentration within a passage, or more complex, such as the building of a psalm’s poetic structure to mirror some other, related biblical passage.[5] Thanks to Rabbi Sassoon’s influence, I have been blessed to experience the overwhelming complexity and depth of composition in biblical writing, even as each day of study has reminded me that we have surely only scratched the surface.

While some literary techniques may be easily observed or heard with a careful reading or recitation of the text, others are far subtler and emerge only with more intensive analysis. For example, a psalm may employ simple alliteration or explicit references to biblical narratives, features which have not eluded the attention of careful commentators. However, what we refer to as “prophetic literature” also exhibits many features hitherto unrecognized (or recognized in only the most superficial sense), which this book will seek to introduce to inquisitive readers. Some of these are built upon precise literary structures, where details like verse length, the precise number of times a theme word is repeated, or the number of words between such repetitions, become essential elements of the analysis.

[1] Throughout this book, which is written from a Jewish perspective, I will often refer to the Hebrew Bible by its traditional Hebrew name, Miqra, which, like the acronym Tanakh (תנ"ך) includes all of the canonical Torah, Prophets, and Writings.

[2] Recalling the Covenant: A Contemporary Commentary on the Five Books of the Torah (2nd ed.; Brooklyn: Ktav, 2015).

[3] The implication of the word “intertextuality,” as opposed to, say, “inner-biblical allusion,” is that the relationship between two linked texts is understood as going both ways: each may be understood in light of the other, rather than reading each in isolation, or reading only the later text in light of the earlier, but not vice versa.

[4] With this phrase, which is adopted throughout this study, Rabbi Sassoon referred not simply to the canonical prophetic corpus (Nevi’im) or to literature that functions to predict the future, but rather, in a technical sense, to divinely inspired writing that employs certain complex literary techniques in order to transmit divine messages, regardless of its current classification within the tripartite canon.

[5] For the former, see, e.g., our comments on the repetition of the words רחק and עני in Ps. 22 (chapter 6). For the latter see, e.g., our discussion of how Ps. 19 mirrors the structure of the Gen. 1 creation narrative (chapter 5).