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Psalm 25 Exegetical Issues
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Psalm 25/Exegetical Issues
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Because of your name
Psalm 25
Exegetical Issues Video
This resource is forthcoming.
Introduction to Exegetical Issues
Presented here are the top three Exegetical Issues that any interpreter of the psalm—whether they’re reading the text in Hebrew or looking at a number of translations—are likely to encounter. These issues usually involve textual criticism, grammar, lexical semantics, verbal semantics, and/or phrase-level semantics, though they sometimes involve higher-level layers as well.
Exegetical Issues for Psalm 25
- In this verse, the psalmist asks the Lord to show him his "ways" and teach him his "paths." A key question is whether God's "ways" and "paths" in v. 4 refer (1) to his own character according to which he himself walks or (2) to the covenant instruction (Torah) in which he calls his people to walk. Or, put another way: when the psalmist asks YHWH to "make known" his "ways," is he asking him (1) to reveal his character by some act of deliverance, or (2) to guide the psalmist in living a life of covenant faithfulness? How one answers this question not only has implications for the translation of v. 4, but also for vv. 5, 8–9 and for the interpretation of the psalm as a whole.
- The interpretive difficulty in this verse centers around the word הִרְחִ֑יבוּ. The issue in this verse is fundamentally a textual issue.
- While v. 18 is rather simple to understand and translate, the difficulty is that Psalm 25 is an acrostic – a poem in which each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet – and v. 18 breaks the acrostic pattern. One would expect v. 18 to begin with qof. Instead, it also begins with resh. Is this a scribal error or an intentional design that contributes to the message of the poem?