Making Sense of the Non-Sensical: Reading the Communal Laments within Books II and III of
Biblical trauma studies tend to emphasize the therapeutic dimension of narrative and poetic representations of catastrophic events. However, other dynamics that require attention and are often overlooked are also at work in trauma texts and discourses. Particularly common among these are mechanisms of self-blame and attribution of responsibility. Such mechanisms can be observed in the way the psalms of communal lament were included in Books II and III of the Psalter, and “framed” by the redactors within their theological agendas.
Combining redaction criticism and insights from trauma studies, this lecture shows how the redactors of Books II and III of the Psalter sought to attribute responsibility for the Babylonian catastrophe to the entire people of Israel and, in this way, to make sense of the chaos and the disorientation emerging from the communal laments individually taken.
Danilo Verde is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome (2006–2009), at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007–2008), and at the Institute of Gestalt – Kairos in Rome-Venice-Ragusa (2010–2014). He obtained his doctoral degree at KU Leuven (2018) defending a dissertation on the warlike metaphors in the Song of Songs. In 2018, he was granted the FWO junior post-doctoral fellowship (2018–2021) to work on the relationship between trauma, poetry, and the body in the Hebrew Psalter, followed by the FWO senior post-doctoral fellowship (2021–2024) for the project entitled “Pain in Ancient Hebrew: Language, Cognition, and Culture.”