Psalms: Books 4–5

This is a commentary that combines genuinely helpful questions and pastoral insights with several interpretations that I found exegetically and theologically troubling. Nancy deClaissé-Walford challenged me to pay closer attention to women’s experiences, trauma, marginalisation, and the feminine and maternal imagery of the Psalms. At the same time, I thought the commentary too often allowed a contemporary feminist perspective to control the reading rather than letting the biblical text set its own categories. I was particularly unconvinced by the invitation to hear Woman Wisdom speaking in Psalm 119, even though the speaker presents herself as a dependent human servant who needs to be taught, saved, revived, and sought like a lost sheep; by the proposal that Wisdom or Torah replaces the earthly king despite the continuing prominence of Davidic material; and by the interpretation of Shaddai as God suckling creation, which seems to combine a disputed etymology with unrelated birth, wing, and satisfaction imagery. The commentary offers a perspective that more traditional works may neglect, and it did make me read some passages more carefully, but I ultimately found it weakened by overextended metaphors, unclear relationships between Wisdom, Torah, and God, and a blurred boundary between exegesis and contemporary appropriation.