| Summary: | AbstractIn the newly introduced Third Lectionary in The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, the reading from the Old Testament on the last Sunday of the Church Year Calendar comprises Ps 63:2‒9 (1‒8 in most English translations). Unlike the readings for the same Sunday in the First and Second Lectionaries, there is no eschatological motive in Ps 63‒‒unless v. 4a is interpreted as if it expresses some sort of a death wish or a yearning for an afterlife under the aegis of the Lord. In this article, it will be argued that in the context of the psalm, “life” is not used in a quantitative biological sense (= + alive) but rather a qualitative one (= + good health, prosperity). In choosing vv. 2–9 as a reading and excluding vv. 10–12, attention is drawn to the semantic and poetic structure of the psalm, which is in some way unique. In his commentary on the Psalms, Hermann Gunkel concluded that the transmitted text of Psalm 63 was incoherent and illogical. Therefore, Gunkel concluded, its verses needed to be rearranged in order to make sense. Certainly, such conclusions are not warranted. Old Testament scholarship has since Gunkel’s time become more cautious in making major emendations of Old Testament psalms based on presupposition about the ‘correct’ metre or the ‘correct’ order of the semantic-pragmatic elements or parts of a psalm. As well as trying to shed a light on what the author means by stating that God’s lovingkindness is better than life, this article demonstrates how the poetic macro-structure of Ps 63:2‒9 in its present state reveals a structure consisting of several inclusions or ‘envelope figures’, the innermost framing of the hymnic core of the psalm. It is of course impossible to say if this framing structure was intended by the author or whether it was his compositional point of departure. However, it clearly demarcates vv. 2‒9 from vv. 10‒12 in a way which raises the suspicion that the two parts have different origins, although this cannot be asserted by the evidence of the poetic structure. Be ...
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