Overview

There are four or five participants/characters in Psalm 2:

Participant Relations

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

The first major issue in this psalm with regard to participants is the identity of the speaker in vv. 1-2, 4-5, vv. 10-12 (i.e. "the psalmist"). It is possible that the speaker/narrator of some or all of these portions is an anonymous "psalmist." It is also, possible, however, that the speaker/narrator throughout the psalm is the anointed king. The king speaks in the first person in v. 7 ("I will recount") without any introduction to his speech. We may assume, therefore, that he has been speaking throughout. The third person references to the king ("his anointed one" in v. 3 and "the son" in v. 12) are no real objection to this since "illeism—the use of third-person self reference—is a valid and not uncommon form of both syntax and rhetoric” in Biblical Hebrew" (e.g. Gen. 4:23-24; 2 Sam. 7:11, 20).^[1]
The second major issue is the identity of the third person referent in v. 12 ("lest he become angry... his anger... shelter in him"). On the one hand, the "son," mentioned before the verb and the pronominal references, is the most likely referent, and we have adopted this understanding in our visuals. On the other hand, the verb יאנף refers elsewhere to divine anger (and cf. v. 5), and YHWH is usually the one in whom people take "shelter." The ambiguity is probably deliberate,^[2] intended to highlight the similarity between YHWH and his son.

↑ Andrew Malone, “God the Illiest: Third-Person Self-References and Trinitarian Hints in the Old Testament,” JETS 52, no. 3 (September 2009): 499–518.
↑ Cf. the discussion of the related problem in Psalm 110 in Paul Raabe, “Deliberate Ambiguity in the Psalter,” Journal of Biblical Literature 110, no. 2 (1991): 213–227.