‘May You Redeem the Nation That Completes the Book of Psalms’: An Aramaic Poem and Its Linguistic, Literary and Historical Contexts

This article examines in detail an Aramaic poem from M. Sokoloff’s and J. Yahalom’s magisterial Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity (SYAP) (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999). It begins by offering a translation of the entire poem along with an overview of some of the poem’s key linguistic features. It then moves to an analysis of the poem’s literary artistry. The study continues by examining the poem’s central motifs; namely, the portrait of David as the learned composer of the Psalter, the role of prophecy and kingship, and their relationship to eschatology. The study then attempts to place the poem’s genesis and the practice of communal psalm recitation into an historical context. It concludes by showing how a careful analysis of a single piece of poetry can contribute to several debates about the nature and constitution of the poems collected in SYAP.