Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Psal, Königspsalmen: Kontrast zwischen universalem Ansprüchen und politischer Realität; von Rad

Kurzinhalt: Psalmen als Ausdruck einer kosmologischen Ordnung; aber: die historische Form der Existenz Israels unter Gott wird durch die kosmologische Ordnung nicht aufgehoben

Textausschnitt: We can approach the nature of the difficulty through an occasional remark of one of the finest Old Testament scholars of our time, Gerhard von Rad, who declared himself puzzled by the universal claims of the Imperial Psalms. To be sure, he accepted the cultic interpretation of the Psalms, and he used the new methods himself in his studies on the Hexateuchal form, but he nevertheless found the cosmological symbolism of the imperial type somewhat ridiculous under the conditions of the small Kingdom of Judah. The remark illuminates a situation which must be negatively characterized through the absence of a philosophy of symbolic forms. The question raised by von Rad would be justified if the imperial symbolism were a program of world dominion in pragmatic politics; it will dissolve once it is recognized that we are dealing with the experience of cosmic order as the source of social order and with the articulation of that experience in the language of the cosmological myth. In a given instance, the language of the myth is motivated by the experience of order; it has nothing to do with the size or success of the social unit which uses the language. I want to stress that ...
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65/9 The consequences become painfully apparent when the description of "phenomena" extends beyond primitive cultures and cosmological civilizations to the existence of the Chosen People in its truly historical form under God. A study like Pedersen's Israel, for instance, will impress the reader by its magnificent array of comparative materials as much as by its regrettable historical flatness. To be sure, the "cult patterns" of cosmological civilizations can be found in Israel, too, for the good reason that Israel "wanted a King like the other nations." And since a king is the symbolic mediator between cosmic and social order, and not perhaps a ruler whom one can have with or without "ideology," his appearance in Israel was accompanied by the appearance of cosmological symbols of mediation and restoration of order. Nevertheless, it was Israel that wanted a king; and its historical form of existence, though seriously affected, was not abolished by the cosmological admixture. Hence, the heavy accent in recent literature on "divine kingship," "ideology," and "cult patterns" leaves the uneasy impression of more than a temporary neglect of the truly unique Israelite problems of existence in the presence of God: The neglect seems due, at least in part, to a genuine distortion of Israelite order as a consequence of its insufficient philosophical penetration. (292; Fs)