Resilience as Reliance: Brief Reflections on Intergenerational Resilience with Reference to Psalm 131

Abstract

Scholars applying principles of trauma studies on Hebrew Bible texts emphasise that successive devastating traumatic experiences did not obliterate ancient Israel, but caused it to thrive and endure in various guises in the three modern day monotheistic religions. Similarly, scholars reading Hebrew Bible texts through a critical-spatial lens emphasise that the concept of thirdspace as a counter space from which to transform all other spaces explains biblical authors’ ability to retell past events in such a way that it can become a source for re-imagining Israel’s future. It is a worthwhile exercise to investigate the cause of this unexpected resilience of an insignificant ancient Near Eastern people and their written documents millennia after the memory of their powerful conquerors and their achievements were all but forgotten. The present study applies trauma studies and critical spatiality as heuristic lenses to the collection of poems known as the שירי המעלות (Pss 120–134) in general and the brief Ps 131 in particular. These poems can be read in the context of individual and collective belief in Yhwh as the only true, universal, divine king against the background of the trauma caused by colonial domination from outside and inner-Judaic marginalisation from inside during the late-Persian period.