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Prayer and (Im)Politeness: Reading Psalm 7

What it is about

Politeness research on the Hebrew Bible has so far looked at speeches in narrative; this article carries it into poetry, taking Psalm 7 as a test case. The method is a mix: Brown and Levinson's positive and negative face strategies, "discernment" (language that is quasi-obligatory given the power gap between speaker and addressee), linguistic ritual, and emotion read from linguistic cues rather than emotion words. Read verse by verse, the psalm opens with in-group markers (vocative YHWH + "my God"), a fronted "in you" as focus, and a qatal of trust before any request; reasons are given for each plea (positive politeness); the long imperatives with -â (קוּמָה, עוּרָה), a niphal instead of an active stem, and jussive + נָא are read as deference (negative politeness). The author's claim is that both strategies work together in prayer to a superior who is not obliged to act.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 is a rule for tools/macula/src/prag.rs (the hedge column), measured with --with/--without; the long imperative needs a morphology check on MACULA's form, since MACULA marks mood but not the -â. I2 is a count on the Torah trees for Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text (politeness section). I3 goes into 06-verb.md (volitives) and 05-pronouns-particles.md (נָא). The Psalms are outside our trees, so the paper's own examples are illustration only.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17159/2312-3621/2024/v37n3a3

@inproceedings{jones2025prayer,
  title = {{Prayer and (Im)Politeness: Reading Psalm 7}},
  author = {Jones, Ethan C.},
  booktitle = {Old Testament Essays},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.17159/2312-3621/2024/v37n3a3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2024/v37n3a3}
}

References

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