Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The Hebrew Psalter both reflects traumatic (or potentially traumatic) experiences and provides resources for healing and resilience-building. In this book, Poe Hays presents a trauma-informed reading of the Psalms that draws out how understanding the nature of trauma, the processes of trauma healing, and the resources that facilitate resilience-building provides new perspectives on the composition, poetic dynamics, rhetorical impact, and reception of the psalms throughout history and into the twenty-first century. The book unfolds in four movements: Trauma, Healing, Resilience, and Life. Part I introduces trauma and its effects, identifies textual indicators of trauma, and offers a reading of Ps 139 in light of these observations. Part II maps the broad strokes of trauma healing, explores how the Psalter’s poetry and structures might facilitate the healing process, and reads Pss 5 and 25 as case studies. Part III identifies the primary predictors of resilience and how the book of Psalms contributes to their formation. This work of resilience-building encompasses the whole Psalter, which case studies from Pss 1, 46, and 146–150 illustrate. Part IV surveys the reception of the Psalms (in the psalmic superscriptions, within the Hebrew scriptures, in sectarian communities such as Qumran, in New Testament and early Christian readings, and in Jewish reception) as examples of how various communities have used these ancient texts as resources for trauma healing and the cultivation of resilience. The book concludes with twenty-first-century examples of the Psalter’s enduring role as a resource for survival and flourishing.</jats:p>