Historical Theology
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 57, No. 2 – Spring 2015
Managing Editor: Terry L. Wilder
By Rolf A. Jacobson and Karl N. Jacobson. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013. 192 pages. Paperback, $17.99.
Brothers Rolf and Karl Jacobson guide the inexperienced student through the beautiful terrain of the Psalter with their work, Invitation to the Psalms. They make it decidedly clear that a reader must move from simply reading Scripture to experiencing it (1). This conviction of experiencing Scripture affects the organization and content of their book. For example, they pack examples from Psalms throughout the short book, while omitting lengthy discussion of parallelism and detailed footnotes. The outline of the book intentionally builds from the bottom-up by introducing poetry (chapter 1), genres (chapters 2-3), the voice of the psalmist (chapter 4), metaphors in Psalms (chapter 5), and the theology of Psalms (chapter 6). Noting the Jacobsons’ metaphor for themselves as tour guides, the following review will place their contribution in the domain of a guided tour.
Chapter 1 presents the argument that a reader must understand the logic of communication. Here, the communication is Hebrew poetry; the logic is parallelism. The Jacobsons, therefore, guide the tour group through different Psalms to discover parallelism within lines (i.e., cola), between lines, between verses (i.e., unit two or more lines), between entire sections, and between psalms. The guides stop the tour group to mention the classic labels of parallelism, noting the difficulty with the third, somewhat catchall category—synthetic parallelism. From there, they let the tour group sift the dirt and test the group’s analytical and creative skills by asking the group to fill out the second line that is parallel to the first example line. This type of exercise continually reinforces the Jacobsons’ objective to help students learn to experience, not label, the poetry of the Bible. The necessity of labeling, however, causes them to introduce important vocabulary for poetic analysis—echoing and extending. The Jacobsons often claim that parallelism contains both echoing and extending, thus guarding the interpreter from an erroneous either/or dichotomy.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the student to the genres of Psalms. The tour guides now show the details of form and content to the tour group so that the tourists can competently return to landscape at a later time and walk through the region unguided, as it were. First, the Jacobsons highlight the distinct forms of the Psalms, especially prayers of help (i.e., laments), hymns of praise, psalms of trust, and songs of thanksgiving. The guides give the tour group a brief breakdown of each main section of a form along with lists of psalms that fit the category. The guides then show how they categorize Psalms according to content. Here, the guides list royal, enthronement, wisdom, creation, historical, Zion, imprecatory, penitential, and liturgical as categories. The guides do not oversell the objectivity of content genre analysis to their tour group; rather, they often highlight how subjective—though important—the analysis is. Throughout both chapters, the Jacobsons underscore the continuity of material that the tour group is currently learning (e.g., prayers for help connect to songs of thanksgiving; royal connect to enthronement psalms).
Chapter 4 gives the guides the opportunity to discuss the history of the land-
scape, allowing the tour to imagine what might have happened prior to their viewing of the scenery. The Jacobsons find the persona and life situation highly important for interpretation. Upon discovery of the former, the tour group finds an important entry into the room of experience of the Psalms. Searching for the latter, the tour group finds the situations of help in a time of need and temple setting. The guides call for the group to use imagination when thinking about the history of the landscape. For the guides, this imaginative process is the underlying tool that one must use to interpret poetry correctly.
Chapters 5 and 6 stress important linguistic and theological features that occur throughout the poetic panorama of Psalms. Using common and important metaphors, such as shepherd and rock, the guides help the tour group think more precisely about images. Later, the guides take the tour into an art gallery away from the vast landscape. Once in the gallery they tell the tour to study the framed theological mosaic of Psalms. Unashamedly, the guides express that they intentionally picked out the frame and each theological piece of the mosaic. The overall theme of their mosaic is ḥesed. The guides then show how the themed mosaic appropriately takes pieces from each form genre (see chapter 2) to construct their theological art. Finally, they mention four holistic theological themes present in the landscape: God as committed to all creation, willing to be challenged, working through others, and active in the world.
The Jacobsons’ sophisticated yet down-to-earth literary tour can garner de-
tailed praise as well as scholarly debate over genre group and terminology. Rather than voicing ways in which one may agree or disagree with the authors, attention will focus on the purpose and intended audience of Invitation to the Psalms. In short, the Jacobsons hope to invite readers to read and experience the Psalms by acquainting them with the Psalter. Their target reader is the inexperienced student who has little Hebrew competency (2-3). Do they succeed? The answer is unequivocally yes! This success may be seen in several ways. First, the language that the Jacobsons choose is simple and clear (e.g., lines, verses, echoing and extending), rather than convoluted. Second, the constant active learning activities throughout the book (e.g., writing one’s own parallel line and creating metaphors) help the student comprehend. Third, the breakout boxes (e.g., “covering” the Psalms) and the use of shapes (e.g., circles and triangles to explain genre) truly inculcate the undeveloped student. Fourth and broadly, the Jacobsons keep the entire work light-hearted and accessible for their target audience. Fifth, the choice and explanation of metaphor help the student understand important and often neglected imagery.
While there are many impressive aspects to the Jacobsons’ work, there are a few areas, however minor, that should receive some constructive comments; each of the following comments connects to the purpose and intended audience of the book. First, the excursus on superscriptions should have some footnotes with helpful resources on this important and debated topic. Second, the Jacobsons, perhaps, should have balanced the attention given to persona and life setting with current discussions on how editing and canon might affect interpretation. Third, the discussion of theology seems to force (unnecessarily?) a Mitte of sorts with ḥesed. Searching for an underlying theological assumption behind the Psalter does not seem to benefit the inexperienced student; in fact, the search could be misleading. The Jacobsons could have shown various theological currents that run throughout the Psalter instead of
giving a large amount of space to abstracting ḥesed. The Jacobsons, however, were quite forthright about why they selected certain psalms and what they hoped the reader would understand after their theological presentation. Much of the theological discussion in chapter six is located in Rolf’s delightful essay in Soundings in the Theology of the Psalms. Irrespective of debates about an underlying theological assumption of the Psalter, chapter six is quite thought provoking. Despite these criticisms, this book is a wonderful contribution to introductory studies of Psalms. In sum, the literary guides serve the tour well because their communication is helpful and accessible for the tour group to discover and engagethe Psalms.
