The speaker
Shepherd, refugee, king, remnant—the interchangeable first person of prayer.
Hebrew Scripture · Lyric sequence · c. 10th–2nd c. BCE
The Psalms
The Psalmists
A book of addresses: praise, complaint, royal boast, and the long wait. The ‘I’ of the psalm is sometimes a king, sometimes a people, always a voice turned toward someone.
Sacred lyric
Characters
The enemy
Named enough to be real, vague enough to outlive every court.
Themes
Address
Speech that assumes a listener, even in the pit.
Waiting
Hope as a discipline of time.
Motifs
Sheol, the cistern, the place from which one cries.
Still waters and the floods that overwhelm.
Care imagined as pasture, rod, and table.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.