The Psalms: Places for remembering

The Psalms feature various landscapes: many different places are mentioned or described. These depictions of locales and buildings, whether in the superscriptions or the psalms themselves, have led form critics to argue for liturgical settings, contending that these hymns and songs inform today’s theologian of the Temple cult. Yet it is more complicated. Psalms scholarship has rarely considered that such landscapes should not always be taken literally. Historical biblical scholars have recognised that the places described within the Psalms could sometimes be recollections, and such interpretations hang on the difficulty of tense in Hebrew verse translation, particularly Qal forms. Such past depictions also relate to the difficulty of dating psalms, i. e. whether the Temple was standing or not. I suggest that it is possible that the landscapes described within the Psalms are inner landscapes, places of the mind’s eye, rather than physical localities experienced at the time of the performance of the text itself. Within geographicallyresonant texts of the Psalter, there are the places where remembering and prayer occur, and the places that are themselves remembered. The relationship of these depends on the complex nexus of prayer, imagination, memory, and place. I therefore begin by exploring these ideas.