Biblical criticism and literary criticism : the case of Psalm 23

Abstract

When the editors of this volume had invited me to write this study as a contribution to the Festschrift in honour of Professor Peter Vassallo, I was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand I knew that I had a number of commitments for which I had a strict deadline, and on the other hand there was the honorand, a long-time friend whom I consider to be a true gentleman and a scholar. So despite the time constraints that beset me, I opted in favour of true friendship (and thus for the honorand), even at the cost of my not being able to carve out sufficient time to prepare myself as well as I would have liked to before I put pen to paper. I mulled over a possible topic, and I chose the one I did in view of the fact that Peter and I had jointly made two radio programmes that were aired on Campus FM, the radio station of the University of Malta. We chose a number of gospel passages and decided to discuss them together; each of us was free to prepare himself by way of background (Peter largely from the literary point of view and I mainly from the historical-archaeological and exegetical point of view), virtually without either of us knowing what questions we would actually be putting to each other. This was quite tough, but that was precisely what made our dialogue fresh and appealing to the listeners. It soon became very clear that in fact there was no hard and fast distinction between a literary and a biblical (exegetical) approach to the biblical texts which we discussed. The only condition was that both approaches had to be critical. In both cases, what was demanded was a close reading of the texts.