Teaching and Learning the Psalms, Inductively
Or, Keeping Gunkel and Friends out of the Classroom

The greatest change that has taken place in the classroom in my experience of teaching has been the transition from content-centred teaching to student-centred teaching. My tattered lecture notes on the Psalms are mute testimony to my earliest concerns with the content of Psalms research, a privileging of the scholarly tradition. There are all the annotations on the Hebrew text, in an amazing variety of coloured inks, of the ideas of Weiser and Kraus and Dahood, with condensations of the latest articles in Journal of Biblical Literature and Vetus Testamentum, with more marginal notes and layers of tradition than a rabbinic Bible. My task, as I saw it for over a decade, was to convey to my students the latest thinking of scholars on the Psalms, to fill their heads with the best and the most recent research.

Now that I have given up teaching the Psalms, and turned to teaching my students instead, trying to enable them to progress in their own understanding of the Psalms, I can go a whole semester without so much as mentioning any of those worthy and sometimes quite brilliant scholars. I have gone to the other extreme, I know, but in keeping Gunkel and friends out of the classroom I have tried to put students' learning in the foreground and to privilege their own experimentation and their own progress with interpretation. Gunkel's questions, and those of the scholarly tradition, are not allowed to set the agenda in my classroom.

Student-centred teaching is the mantra of British education these days. In my department, we are at this moment preparing for a review of the quality of our teaching. Every department in every university must be reviewed and graded every five years for their teaching, just as they must, in a separate audit, be graded for the quality of their research. But in this teaching review the focus is not upon the teachers' delivery of material or their mastery of the scholarship in their subject, but primarily upon the quality of the student learning experience. A course is not a set of lectures, but 200 hours of student learning time. A teacher is not an authority or a performer, but a resource person for the students' learning. At the centre of each course is -- not the professor, but -- a set of stated Outcomes, which define what a student will be able to do at the successful completion of the course. Before they begin the course, students know that at the end of it, they will be able to explain, defend, argue, analyse, interpret, assess, present, deploy, evaluate -- a whole range of skills and knowledges. Their final grade will mark the measure of their success in achieving exactly these Outcomes, and for every piece of work they will be told how well they are doing against the standard of the Outcomes.

You need to know that my Psalms students are beginning their second year at University, all majoring in Bible, and that the Psalms is the first course in exegesis of a biblical text that they have done. They know nothing about the Psalms. What they learn in this course will be foundational for how they read the Bible for themselves throughout their degree course. If I teach them that in order to read and understand the Bible you first need to read scholars' books, they will probably believe that for the rest of their lives. And if not, not.

You also need to know that my Department is a secular department in an secular university -- and not in the least a community of faith. Although three-quarters of my students believe the Bible is the Word of God (though they have little acquaintance with it), I am teaching them to park their religious beliefs for the time being and learn to read the Psalms as a classic, with a certain degree of objectivity. I hope they will come to love the Psalms, but they will get no academic credit for that -- only for their ability to understand these ancient texts.

I have brought some samples of my work with students under this regimen.
The first thing my students have to do is to become familiar with the six psalms we will be studying. How can they become active participants in that process, what should they be doing when they are reading these psalms? They must find a piece of music and an image that they can associate with each of the psalms. For a week they must walk around looking and listening at their world with these psalms in their heads, making connections between the world of today and the world of the Psalms.
Then we start, on Psalm 2. I am a sworn enemy of surveys and introductions, and I believe that the best way of starting to study the Psalms is: to study a psalm. Not a word, then, about date or authorship or Gattung or unity, not a word about the scholarly tradition, but -- Psalm 2.

Here are some illustrations of the kind of work they will be doing, on this and some other Psalms, by accessing the website that supports their learning.

1. Couplet Composition
Students need to know that the Psalms are in poetry, and that Hebrew poetry has an important convention that makes it differ from most other poetry: what I call couplet composition, and others call parallelism (though couplet composition is a broader term, I would say).

The outcome that I intend for this task is that students should be able to identify couplets and convey the significance of a couplet as a single idea.

 

Here is a typical line of Hebrew poetry:
The Lord knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1.6)
In modern English Bibles such a line is usually printed as TWO lines:

The Lord knows the way of the righteous
but the way of the wicked will perish.

And the second line is usually indented, as it is above. That is to encourage you to read the two lines as a couplet--taking them together. It seems that Hebrew poets usually composed in such couplets (occasionally triplets)

The technical terms are these:
The Lord knows the way of the righteous
is a COLON (the A colon)

but the way of the wicked will perish.
is a COLON (the B colon)

The Lord knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish.
is a BICOLON or a LINE

The effect (and probably also the intention, but how would we know?) of couplet composition is to set up an internal relationship within every line of poetry. Each line has an A and a B (occasionally, an A, B and C). But how is A related to B? We do not know in advance of reading the line what kind of a relationship it will be--whether B will repeat, emphasize, extend, or modify A.

So couplet composition is very reader-involving. It is for you as the reader to decide what the relationship is. You might think of it as something like a haiku.

Couplets are often, but not always, parallel lines. You could visit the page on Parallelism now.
Go on to Strophes.
Go back to Seeing the Poetry in the Psalms.
Go back to Psalm 2 menu.

2. Strophes
The second Outcome is that students should become able to identify strophes in Hebrew poetry. Once they can do it for Psalm 2, they can do it, more or less, for anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, though Psalm 2 must be one of the easiest pieces of Hebrew poetry for this purpose.

This is the exercise they need to work through:

Strophes

Strophes are for poetry what paragraphs are for prose.

There are no markers in Hebrew poetry for strophes. But we can infer that Hebrew poets composed in strophes. So we have to locate / discern them.

Strophes are shown in modern Bibles by a blank line between them.

Here is an exercise:

1. Print or copy to your disk the NRSV version of Psalm 2 without strophe markers (you can do this on screen, but you need to take a note of what you have decided.)

2. Mark where you think the main divisions of the psalm occur.

3. Check your results against the NRSV version WITH the strophes marked.

4. Analyse the kinds of signs or signals in the text that influenced you to mark the divisions as you did.

5. Check your analysis with the Checklist of strophe signals.

Go to Couplet Composition.
Go to Seeing the Poetry in the Psalms
Go back to Psalm 2 menu.

3. Strophe Signals
As you will see, the Web page on Strophes requires student effort in identifying the strophes in Psalm 2. Once they have done it, and it is not too difficult for a beginning student to recognize that there are four strophes in the psalm, they can theorize what they have done by analysing the strophe signals that led them to that conclusion (note the sequence: first the task, then the theory!).

Having made their own attempt at an analysis of strophe signals, they are invited to check their results against the following:

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Checklist of strophe signals

Here are clues that one strophe has ended
and another is beginning
* change of speaker
* change of location, setting
* change of mood
* change of topic
* change of metre, rhythm

Here are clues that a strophe is ending
* a line repeats verbally or in ideas the line with which the strophe opened
* words like 'forever', 'always', 'death' may suggest something has come to an end
* a sentence summarizes the thought of the strophe as a whole
* a refrain (a line repeated at the end of several strophes)

Here are clues that a new strophe is beginning
* change of addressee
* words like 'and now', 'therefore'

Go back to Strophes
Go back to Psalm 2 menu.
Go on to Strophes in Psalm 19

4. Writing a Film Script
Students can now further reinforce their perception of the four strophes in Psalm 2 and sharpen up the differences among them by imagining they are preparing a script for filming the psalm.

Writing a Film Script for Psalm 2

Once you have studied the strophes in the psalm, you are ready to
visualize what is going on in the psalm.

A good way of doing this is to imagine you are preparing
a script for filming the psalm.

You would need to identify for each strophe:

the LOCATION

the PERSONS PRESENT

the SPEAKER(S)

theATMOSPEHERE OR MOOD

 

When you have made your own analysis,
you might like to look at some scripts
prepared by other students.

5. Finding a Reading Position
There are many more things students can now do with Psalm 2, but the last exercise I give them is to find a reading position from which to read the psalm. The Outcome intended here is that students should experience the difference in reading that depends on who one is who is reading, one's background and social location. Here is a list of reading positions that students and I together have elaborated and tried out as reading positions for the psalm:

To enter imaginatively into someone else's position takes intellectual energy and a certain kind of courage. I regard the ability to adopt more than one point of view as definitional for 'critical thinking', and I make reading a psalm from defined reading positions a key exercise later in the course, requiring a substantial 1500-word essay. This is how the prescription stands for this essay.

6. Reading Positions for Psalms 42-43

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Essay (Psalms 42-43)

For this essay, I would like you to adopt one of the following reading positions from which you should write your essay of 1500 words.

1. The position of a reader who is interested in spirituality--that is, the dimension of human experience that concerns thoughts and feelings about God, the divine, the transcendent. Such a reader would be predisposed to affinity with this psalm, which speaks of a desire for the presence of God. An essay from this perspective would analyse the key elements in this psalm's spirituality, and compare and contrast it with another form of spirituality known to the writer of the essay.

2. The position of a Christian reader who is interested in Christian doctrine, someone who would call themself a conservative or evangelical Christian, for example. Such a reader would be sympathetic to the psalm, since it is a part of their Scripture, but would interrogate it from the point of view of orthodox Christian teaching, since it is obviously not written by a Christian. They would ask, for example, whether the presence and absence of God in the psalm, or the role of the temple, is in agreement with Christian doctrine or not.

3. The position of a reader who does not personally believe in the God of the psalmist, but who sees religion as a way of coping with the difficulties of life. Such a reader would be interested in how the psalmist depicts his anxieties and in how he imagines religion can assist him. An essay from such a reader would demythologize the religious language of the psalm and treat it sympathetically as a poem of human longing and hope.

4. The position of a reader who is rather opposed to religion, and sees it as essentially a form of social control or as a means of escaping from one's own responsibility for living one's life. An essay from such a reader would explore what seem to be the self-deceptions of the psalmist, and would analyse the dangers and difficulties in the psalmist's recourse to religion.

7. Composing a Psalm
The capstone for every student's course on Psalms is to write a biblical psalm of their own. The grade for this exercise would be enough, in my view, for the course as a whole (though I would never let them do so little work!). If you can write a psalm, you know about parallelism and strophes, about the imagery, rhetoric and structure of the Psalms. And if you can't, you don't. Simple as that. The psalm must be in Elizabethan English, by the way -- my contribution to keeping the language of Shakespeare and the King James Version alive.

Note

My course on the Psalms was supported by a website for student use. It has not been updated since 1998, and looks a bit amateurish. But for what it's worth, here is a link to it.