The Psalms

Biblical texts create worlds of meaning and invite readers to enter them. When readers enter such textual worlds, which are often strange and complex, they are confronted with theological claims. With this in mind, the purpose of the Interpreting Biblical Texts series is to help serious readers in their experience of reading and interpreting, by providing guides for their journeys into textual worlds. The controlling perspective is expressed in the operative word of the title---interpreting. The primary focus of the series is not so much on the world behind the texts or out of which the texts have arisen as on the worlds created by the texts in their engagement with readers. "Brown modestly describes this book as more invitational than introductory, and it is all the better for being so. This lively, gracefully written book models a pedagogy of invitation, equipping students with the tools to read the Psalms insightfully, as poetry, as a window into Israelite religious practices, and as theology. A truly excellent book for teaching Psalms."---Carol A. Newsom "William Brown has created an introduction that describes and illustrates the approaches important to a serious reading of the Psalms in a comprehensive and inviting fashion. It will be enormously useful to all who study the Psalms."---James L. Mays "William Brown has written a superb introduction to the Psalms, one that joins literary perception with theological insight to show not only how the Psalms `work' but also to invite the reader into an engagement with them that is both poetic and pastoral."---Patrick D. Miller "Bill Brown is front and center in the new wave of psalm scholarship. His work is, of course, grounded in a consensus view of genre analysis. But he pushes imaginatively beyond that in rich and perceptive ways toward the notion of sub-collections in the book of Psalms, its canonical shape, and its poetic performance. In the end he finishes with a substantial theological probe. This book supplies access to all that is needed for entry into the riches of this defining resource for faith, piety, worship, and obedience."---Walter Brueggemann