KEEPING THE FAITHFUL : PERSUASIVE STRATEGIES IN PSALMS 4 AND 62

s. The journal is archived by Library and Archives Canada and is accessible for consultation and research at the Electronic Collection site maintained by Library and Archives Canada. ISSN 1203–1542 http://www.jhsonline.org and http://purl.org/jhs Journal of Hebrew Scriptures


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JOURNAL OF HEBREW SCRIPTURES that both readings plausibly account for some but not all the contentious points of translation and interpretation. 5No one takes the two readings as mutually exclusive; as Jacobson argues, there is no "altar of certitude" on which to decide among historical, theological, and canonical readings.However, seeking evidence for competing interpretations often highlights important elements within and across psalms.In this case, the debate on Ps 4 has thus far overlooked its similarity to Psalm 62.
The setting for Ps 62 has not seemed controversial; it is generally taken as a call from an individual for vindication or rescue.Kraus and Carleen Mandolfo see the speaker as an ordinary individual, one facing persecution and seeking judicial or divine protection at the sanctuary. 6Croft and Dave Bland see the speaker as an embattled king seeking an oracle of safety when facing treachery or a military siege. 7However, on closer examination, the case for seeing the speaker as a petitioner is actually quite weak.
In only five psalms does a speaker directly address opponents at any length: Ps 52 and Ps 58, Ps 4 and Ps 62, and Ps 82.In Ps 52 and Ps 58, the direct address takes the form of "shock and awe": The opponents are rebuked, reminded of God's might, and threatened with complete destruction.However, Ps 4 and Ps 62 both move beyond rebuking opponents to offering advice for returning to faithful or moral practice.Psalm 82 is unique not only because the speaker is God addressing opposing deities, but also because God both offers advice and threatens destruction.By employing two pieces of contemporary rhetorical theory, I will argue for viewing both Ps 62 and Ps 4 as public efforts by a confident speaker to persuade skeptical or immoral hearers to return to faithfulness.

TWO PIECES OF RHETORICAL THEORY: AMPLITUDE AND IDENTIFICATION
In modern times, the scope of rhetorical theory has broadened beyond the classical venues of courts, legislatures, sanctuaries, and civic ceremonials to all situations and settings for public or professional discourse.In order for a situation to be a rhetorical situation, a speaker has to experience a sense of exigence or urgency that can be productively addressed with language. 8The speaker fashions language into a spoken or written text and delivers it in such a way as to influence a set of hearers/readers who have some ability to affect the situation and perhaps ameliorate the urgency.
Much of rhetorical theory focuses on the challenges of addressing diverse audiences, a topic raised by two of the most important 20th century theorists, the Belgians Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and the American Kenneth Burke. 9 Both recognized that agreement is a volatile matter of degrees, not absolutes.
In any public situation, the people in an assembly are likely to represent a wide spectrum of viewpoints.A few agree on most or all points with the speaker, some are opposed on one or two points, some are somewhat negatively disposed, and a few are outright hostile.In any given crowd, all types of hearers will be present in greater or lesser proportions, so speakers adjust their strategies accordingly.To move the preponderance of a crowd in his/her direction, a speaker may well focus on winning over a swath of those opposed on a few points rather than trying to convert the small group of hostile listeners.By standing up to opponents in public, of course, the speaker also encourages those who already agree to remain steadfast.
One useful strategy for diverse audiences is the allocation of material in a text, what Perelman calls "amplitude" and Burke calls "amplification." 10While warning against unnecessary repetition, Perelman notes that repeating a point and elaborating on it increases its presence or salience in the hearers' minds.When addressing a mainly supportive crowd, a speaker's main goal may be to strengthen the hearers' adherence by vividly rehearsing points they all agree on and emphasizing their significance.But when the goal is to move hearers, to change their beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, the speaker must also anticipate points of disagreement.Perelman suggests accumulating many different arguments that all lead to the same conclusion, because each hearer may be susceptible to different reasons and appeals.
Most theorists have discussed amplitude in terms of the patterns with which a point can be developed and elaborated, overlooking its usefulness as an important clue for rhetorical analysis.In particular, as I have shown elsewhere, writers of public policy arguments regularly allocate the greatest proportion of total textual space to the most important and controversial points.In this article, I will show how identifying the points of greatest amplitude in each psalm helps to disambiguate the setting.
A second important persuasive strategy is creating psychological connections between the speaker and the hearers, a strategy that Perelman calls "association" and that Burke (for whom this concept is far more central) calls "identification."Identification can be positive or negative.In the positive form, the speaker heightens the interests that he/she holds in common with the hearers.In the negative form, a speaker works to turn hearers away from a rival's arguments by emphasizing conflicts between the hearers' and the rival's interests.Burke calls this "identification by antithesis" which creates "union by some opposition shared in common." 11Apart from explicitly criticizing rivals, a speaker may also create dissociation by challenging the meaning of a concept, distinguishing some aspect of it as true or good and disparaging the other.In some cases, as M.A. van Rees notes, the speaker puts two seemingly similar concepts side by side, assigning positive value to one and negative value to the other. 12n the readings that follow, I will show the similar ways in which identification is deployed in Ps 4 and Ps 62.In both cases, the strategies aim to turn strayers back to faithful moral behavior.

PSALM 4
Ps 4 can be divided by addressee into three sections.The speaker addresses God in the frame (v. 2 and vv.8-9) but addresses opponents in the central section, as sketched below.Clearly, the preponderance of space is devoted to the opponents.As I will show below, even the final two verses can be read as a rejoinder to opponents.Rejoinder/Expression of trust

Allocation of Space in
The opening verse, v. 2, is a fairly standard invocation of God, establishing the speaker as a faithful Israelite who calls on God in times of trouble and expects to be answered.In contrast to the opening of most laments, the speaker makes no additional calls for God's attention and gives no description of the current situation.So it is plausible that the verse is setting up a charge of false accusation, but it also sets up a dramatic reversal.The assembled hearers are led to expect a lament, but the speaker instead turns and rebukes them.
The rebuke that opens the lengthy central section (vv.3-7) comes in the form of a rhetorical question: "how long will my glory be mocked?"1 2 F 13 A strict false accusation reading depends heavily on taking ‫כבודי‬ "my glory" as pertaining to the speaker's own honor or reputation because nothing else in the psalm refers to attacks on the speaker.Such attacks are described quite explicitly in other psalms assigned to the false accusation category.1 3 F 14 In contrast, the anti-apostasy reading may read ‫כבודי‬ "my glory" as referring to Israel's glorious God.1 4 F 15 The speaker follows the rebuke with an 13 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are from JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, (2nd ed.Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999).
14 For a close discussion of the criteria that should be applied to this category, see W.H. Bellinger, Jr., "Psalms of the Falsely Accused: A Reassessment," SBLSP 25 (1986), 463-469.Bellinger distinguishes between false-accusation psalms where the context of a judicial proceeding seems justified (Pss 7, 17, and 27) from apparent cases where opponents seem merely to be engaging in malicious gossip (Pss 31, 64, and 28).Only the former include uses of legal language and forms: selfimprecation, appeals for acquittal, and oaths; references to a "just cause"; and verbs of testing and trying. 15See references in fns.4-5 for a detailed review of these options.
extended effort to persuade opponents to return to faithful observance and a specific process for doing so.The first step of this process, in v. 4, is reminiscent of contemporary self-help programs: asking hearers to admit that they have a problem in lacking God's favor.The next steps are spelled out in vv.5-6 with three pairs of imperative verbs that proceed in a logical progression: quake and refrain, speak and be still, offer and trust.The first verb in each pair is an action and the second inaction.
The first pair, "tremble, sin no more," refers to getting out of the habit of apostasy.The verb ‫רגזו‬ "quake" is found four other times in the psalms (Pss 18:9, 77:17; 19, 99:1), all of which describe the physical world exhibiting awe of God-the hills, the water, the earth.If awe of God can inspire nature to quake, then apostates can find it in their nature to do the same.Paired with quaking is the inaction of not sinning; that is, the apostate is urged to intentionally refrain from inappropriate action.The first pair, then, refers to externally manifested behavior.
The next pair are psychological steps: speaking and being still in bed, where, as Michael Barré has noted, a person is most sincere.1 5 F 16 The image of overcoming internal debate while in bed also occurs in Ps 16:7 in which the speaker is helped by God's counsel after being lashed by his conscience (or kidneys).The speaker in Ps 4:5 is instructed to engage in this internal struggle.Pairing this struggle with an effort to become still is far from contradictory.In fact, the sense of ‫דומם‬ "stilling" as a recovery from agitation is also posited in Ps 131:2 by P. J. Botha and H. Stephen Shoemaker.1 6 F 17 Achieving stillness after struggling with temptation would be quite an accomplishment for apostates.
The final pair of imperative verbs, in Ps 4:6, is "offer and trust."After feeling awe, refraining from sin, struggling with temptation, and achieving stillness, the strayer is ready to make a positive action to serve God.The emphasis on making "righteous" sacrifices may be needed for people who are partially assimilated; apostates may well have been combining practices appropriate for YHWH with those distinctly associated with foreign gods.Only purely appropriate sacrifice can lead to a final state of trust in God.The ordering of sacrifice before trust implies that practice may 16 M.Barré reviews Biblical images of conscience-stricken insomnia in "Hearts, Beds, and Repentance in Psalm 4, 5 and Hosea 7, 14," Bib 76 (1995), 53-62. 17P. J. Botha, "To Honour Yahweh in the Face of Adversity: A Socio-Critical Analysis of Psalm 131," Skrif En Kerk 19 (1998), 525-33.H. S. Shoemaker, "Psalm 13," Review & Expositor 85 (1988), 89-94.In contrast, Barré ("Hearts, Beds," 58-60) translates this pair of verbs as "quake" and "wail."P. Raabe gives a helpful suggestion that the resonance of stilling and wailing enriches the effect in "Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter," JBL 110 (1991), 213-227.precede belief, a positioning that echoes Exod 24:7, "we will do and we will hear." Thus the greatest amplitude in Ps 4, the bulk of the space, is devoted to addressing opponents with a rebuke followed by a persuasive and poetic sequence of steps that strayers can follow to return to faithfulness.While it is still possible to view the speaker as a troubled petitioner, his attention is almost exclusively devoted to the future behavior of the opponents, rather than to securing rescue or vindication.
Returning to faithfulness is also promoted through the strategy of identification.The speaker uses positive identification in the framing sections by modeling appropriate behavior and referring to first-hand experiences.While v. 2 is addressed to God, it also establishes the speaker as someone ‫בצר‬ "in dire straits," who has suffered "distress" and who calls out to God.This is not someone whose life has gone altogether smoothly-a history that hearers of all degrees of faithfulness are likely to share.While the speaker may have been unusually successful when he has called to God (v. 2 and v. 4), being answered or relieved in times of trouble is a shared goal that they all aspire to.More shared goals are set out in vv.8-9.The speaker is able to sleep soundly and quietly at night, in contrast to the quaking hearers in v. 5 and achieves joy in his relationship with God, a joy that may match or exceed "the good" that the hearers are seeking in v. 7.These positive forms of identification set up the speaker as someone who is enough like the hearers that they may feel motivated to reconnect with God.Thus the frame of the psalm strengthens the force of the process for returning in the central verses.
The most powerful strategy in Ps 4, however, is the use of disidentification in vv.7-9 where the speaker pulls receptive opponents away from extremists who are characterized as greedy and irreverent.The dissociation is accomplished in part by a change in voice.Up until now, in vv.4-6, the speaker has addressed the opponents directly using second person.He has accused all those assembled of seeking vain things and lies.But in v. 7, the voice shifts.In v. 7, the speaker figuratively points at ‫רבים‬ "the many" who are only interested in "the good(s)."The effect of the indefinite expression "many say" is like that of a school principal at an assembly announcing that many students have been sassing teachers or writing graffiti on the walls.The implication is that the culprits are present and well known to the crowd, as if the principal had said "all of you know very well who you/they are."By referring to the worst culprits in third person, the speaker is inviting the lesser offenders to distance themselves from the habitual or extreme offenders.Then the speaker reports what the offenders are saying.
The quote should be read as extending to the end of v. 7. The extremists are not seriously asking to be shown what's good or for the favor of God's face but are mockingly asserting that they do not need it; apparently, they are worshipping other gods because they have prospered materially by doing so.The indirect reference to the lifting of God's face from the Priestly Blessing (Num 6:24-26) is then an especially cheeky bit of mockery. 18The key to interpreting v. 7 is that it is the speaker who is reporting the putative words of the offenders.The bolder and more irreverent the quote, the better for the speaker's goals.Hearers who have not strayed quite so far may be shocked by the mockery at the same moment as they are pushed by the pronouns to take sides, to identify with the "us" of the extremists or to see the extremists as "them" along with the upright speaker.
In the concluding two verses, Ps 4:8-9, the speaker returns to addressing God, providing the usual closing expression of praise and trust.Goldingay sees this move as the speaker, having failed to reach people with a "bad attitude," moving on to his or her own concerns, simply hoping "that God may change these people." 19ut it is also possible to interpret vv.8-9 as a rejoinder to the extremists' view.The speaker concedes in v. 8 that the apostates have gained material rewards by referring to ‫ותירושם‬ ‫דגנם‬ "their grain and their drink."But the speaker trumps these rewards with the greater joy he receives from communion with God.Goldingay sees the speaker's joy occurring ‫מעת‬ at the same time that the opponents' grain and wine become abundant, emphasizing that the speaker feels joy even when the others seem to be rewarded.Jacobson translates ‫מעת‬ not as "at the time of" but as a comparative "more than when," implying that the speaker's joy is greater than the joy coming from material rewards.Either way, the speaker is challenging the value of the apostates' goods.
The final verse, v. 9, with its reference to sleeping well and having peace, contrasts directly with the state prescribed for the strayers in v. 5.The reference to peace, Goldingay suggests, harkens back to the final part of the Priestly Blessing, which conveys a state of physical completeness or well-being.The speaker is not joyful in the face of deprivation, but in the expectation that God also provides sufficient material sustenance.
In sum, the speaker's persuasive power derives from the considerable space devoted to addressing and referring to the strayers, the choice and sequence of imperative verbs used to address them, as well as the use of both positive and negative strategies of identification to draw the strayers toward the speaker and away from more extreme rivals.
for returning to faithfulness begin, where the speaker commands the hearers to follow his own example by trusting in God.Third is their sense.Norman Snaith argues that the exclamation ‫אך‬ always carries a restrictive or adversative meaning.2 1 F22 He translates it as "yes but on the contrary" or "despite" or "whatever may be said to the contrary."So while this speaker does not go as far as the speaker in Ps 4 in anticipating and responding to the opponents' objections, the repetitions of ‫אך‬ suggest that he sees his claims as sufficient response to whatever they might say.
Identification also plays an important role in Ps 62. Viewing the psalm as a public argument against greed-induced bad behavior changes the speaker from an aggrieved victim into moral agent.The speaker also comes across as a skillful performer, by virtue of the careful balance of space, the refrains, and the sound pattern of the verses.These qualities set the speaker somewhat apart from the crowd, as someone to be admired.Yet the speaker makes many of the same gestures of positive identification as the speaker in Ps 4. The repeated declarations of security show the speaker to be successful in calling on God in times of trouble.In v. 2, the speaker alludes to previous struggles from which ‫נפשי‬ ‫דומיה‬ he has achieved stillness and been rescued.He even qualifies his stability in v. 3: ‫רבה‬ ‫אמוט‬ ‫לא‬ "I won't be moved much."The speaker remains approachable.
The speaker's attitude to the hearers, however, is more complex than in Ps 4. The initial rebuke for plotting against the victim is aimed at ‫כלכם‬ the entire crowd.The speaker does not single out the weak-willed victim for direct address in vv.4-5; he is referred to only in third person.The victim may be a specific person, well-known to the crowd or a general type of person, some of whom may be present.But as in Ps 4, the speaker shifts to talking about the offenders in third person in Ps 62:5, again allowing for a dissociation of the worst offenders from the merely wavering.In this case, however, the most vivid and shocking charge is addressed to everyone, while the more common charges of evil intentions, lying, and hypocrisy are attributed to "them."The dissociative effect remains the same: anyone guilty of minor charges feels singled out-but can still feel superior to others in the crowd who may be guilty of the worse offenses.The advice for recovering stability and moral values in vv.9-11 is useful for everyone, waverers and offenders alike.
Overall, taking the speaker of Ps 62 as a confident and secure individual aiming to persuade an unruly crowd produces a coherent reading that accounts for the careful balancing of space between expressing security and addressing opponents, the contrast between God's power and the human instability and evanescence, and the carefully designed sound pattern that heightens attention to the command to "trust in God."The psalm presents a unified and striking statement of communal values.As Jeffrey Walker notes in his analysis of oral poetic argument in archaic Greece, "the successful poem will offer its audience an elegant, memorable, aesthetically satisfying representation of situations and attitudes with which they more or less identify already: the audience sees itself, or its values, reflected strikingly."23

CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have promoted anti-apostasy readings of Pss 4 and 62.In both cases, the speakers deploy an array of persuasive strategies to persuade strayers to return to faithful behavior, a mission that the speaker in Ps 51:15 also subscribes to: "I will teach transgressors your ways that sinners may return to you."But if the strayers are the intended hearers and the targets of the speakers' persuasive strategies, why do Pss 4 and 62 look so much like other individual psalms, whether psalms of lament, thanksgiving or trust, where both the underlying and ostensible addressee is God?Psalm 4 both opens and closes by calling on God's protection, as in many laments.Psalm 62 opens by expressing trust in God and closes by declaring God's power, as in many psalms of trust.If we assume that many first-person psalms were performed in public places by talented poets and musicians, then they may have attracted audiences of many stripes.It is possible that the speakers of these psalms used the usual setting as bait to attract crowds that included many strayers, but then switched tack to address the strayers directly.
In supporting the anti-apostasy readings, I'm not intending to offer them up on the altar of certainty that Rolf Jacobson has rightly rejected.Every psalm can support a variety of readings, even those that seem mutually exclusive.My goal here rather has been to raise attention to the value of contemporary rhetorical theory for recognizing additional aspects of a psalm that should be considered when weighing the plausibility of alternative readings.
My larger project is to show the relationship of many firstperson psalms to deliberative arguments in which a speaker/author attempts to persuade others to take action concerning an urgent problem.I have identified a small number of recurring stances that speakers in the psalms take vis-à-vis God and the rest of the community.These stances include: maintaining the status quo, establishing an innocent's right of redress, 24 denouncing others, appealing to God's self-interest, acting as a model for others, and convincing one's self.From a rhetorical perspective, it becomes clear that the speakers of the psalms experience a full range of emotions from satisfaction to smugness, from despair to vindictiveness.For these Israelites, the covenant is a two-way street; they are partners with God in an on-going relationship.In good times, they constantly remind themselves and God of the terms of this relationship.In times of trouble, they passionately challenge God for tolerating injustice and allowing the innocent to suffer.Overall, the speakers portray themselves as actively and critically engaged in religious practice, rather than promoting blind obedience, quietism, or complacency.