Psalm 12 Participant analysis

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Psalm Overview

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• Semantics
• Story behind the Psalm
• Discourse
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Overview

There are four participants/characters in Psalm 12:

• David
• YHWH
• The wicked
  • The wicked (רְשָׁעִים)
  • Humanity (בְּנֵי אָדָֽם)
  • Flattering lips (שִׂפְתֵי חֲלָקוֹת)
  • Boastful tongue (לָשׁוֹן מְדַבֶּרֶת גְּדֹלוֹת)
  • Generation
• The faithful
  • Loyal one (חָסִיד)
  • Faithful ones (אֱמוּנִים)
  • Afflicted (עֲנִיִּים)
  • Poor (אֶבְיוֹנִים)

Participant Relations

The relationships among the participants may be abstracted and summarised as follows:

• YHWH cuts of the lips and tongues of the wicked who puff at the faithful, and he rescues the faithful from them.

Participants in the Psalm

• In terms of participant analysis, the strongest break in the psalm occurs in the very center (vv. 5-6), where there is a change in speaker-addressee, subject, and predicative participant. This is also the point in the psalm where YHWH's words respond to the words of the wicked.
• Speech is a major theme in the psalm, and the two direct speeches at the center of the psalm (first of the wicked and then of YHWH) are thematically prominent.
• The pronominal suffix in v. 7a (תִּשְׁמְרֵם) has been understood either as "referring to the poor (Ros Phil Del)" or "to the words of God (Ibn Ezra Wei Kraus Rav)." Baethgen argues that "the suffix in תשמרם cannot go over v. 7 to the poor in v. 6" and that Aquila, Theodotion, and Jerome therefore "relate it correctly to the words of Yahweh." However, the suffix ("them") probably refers to the poor in v. 6 for three reasons:
  • The suffix is masculine, and so it probably refer to the masculine nouns in v. 6 and not to אמרות (v. 7), which is feminine.
  • The shift to the 3ms suffix in the b-line works well if the referent is to people (collective in the a-line and individual in the b-line [cf. v. 6]) but not if it refers to words.

Participant Analysis Diagram

Legend

Diagram

The following image is the grammatical diagram overlaid with information regarding the participants, or characters, of the psalm. It makes explicit who is doing what to whom.

Chart