Didactics of Psalm 78 (77 LXX) in the Sources of Jewish and Christian Exegesis

Abstract

Psalm 78 MT (77 LXX) is didactic by its nature. It retells the biblical narratives about the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, wanderings in the wilderness, the election of David as leader of the people and Mount Zion for the Lord to dwell there. A poetic work full of God’s “wonderful deeds” is marked by author as a “parable”. At the same time, as the analysis of the genre and the “form criticism” show, the author of the psalm focuses not on the historiographic, but on the pedagogical task: by reminding about the “amazing deeds” of the Almighty, to root in the readers the idea of maintaining faith in the one God. Making a comparative analysis of the exegesis of this psalm in the Jewish and Christian hermeneutic traditions, the author of the article set the goal for identifying those shifts in the didactics of Psalm 78 (77) that appeared in the course of its interpretation. As the study showed, despite the fact that the methods of exegesis of the Holy Scriptures changed over time (from aggadah and allegory to rational-philological and literal-historical), the didactic basis in the interpretation of Psalm 77 in both religious traditions in the period from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages retained its emphasis on the belief in the historicity of the miraculous events associated with the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Leaving aside the discussion about the messianic reading of the psalm, one can note that in Judaism and Christianity there are similar ideas about collecting water “in wineskins” when the Jews cross the sea and the very existence of the sources of the “great abyss”. This leads to the conclusion that both exegetical traditions drew material not only from the biblical text, but also from similar traditions, which maintained their stability due to the constant repetition of the “story of salvation” from Egyptian slavery. As the article states, there are relatively few publications on a comparative analysis of the hermeneutics of these religious cultures in Russia, for this reason the expansion of ideas about how didactic techniques and theological conclusions correlate with each other in the writings of the exegetes of the first millennium seems relevant.

Keywords

• bible
• holy scripture
• psalm
• hermeneutics
• isagogics
• didactics