From Healing to Wounding: The Psalms of Communal Lament and the Shaping of Yehud’s Cultural Trauma

Abstract Biblical trauma studies strongly emphasize that texts and traditions that eventually formed the Hebrew Bible helped both the authors and the (former) “readers” to cope with catastrophic events. This approach, however, leads to side-lining other functions of biblical texts, for instance the extent to which biblical texts were used and transmitted not only to “heal” but also to “wound” the collectivity, namely to shape the collective identity of ancient Israel and early Judaism as profoundly damaged. The perspective of cultural trauma studies may help us to go beyond the “healing hermeneutics.” The present article aims to understand how the psalms of communal lament in Books II and III of the Psalter contributed to make the collective trauma of the Babylonian attack become Yehud’s cultural trauma during the Persian period. It suggests that by building and transmitting a coherent metanarrative of the catastrophe and through the communal laments’ dramatic images and metaphors, the redactors of these portions of the Psalter made sure that during the Persian period the people of Israel in the province of Yehud would be wounded by their ancestors’ pain.