The Body in Human Communication with God in the Psalms | Dr. Mark S. Smith

The Psalms are one of our richest resources for praying to God. They refer often to various parts of the human body, both external bodily parts and interior ones. What do these mean? And how can they help us in our prayer to God? We will examine how words and body parts work together in the Psalms and how they form a communication system with sacrifice in Jerusalem Temple liturgy.
Guest Lecturer
Mark S. Smith is Helena Professor of Old Testament Literature and Exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary and Skirball Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He holds Masters degrees from the Catholic University of America, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale University, and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He subsequently taught at Yale University and Saint Joseph’s University. Professor Smith also served as visiting professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a two-time winner of New York University’s Golden Dozen Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching; two-time winner of the Frank Moore Cross award given by the American Schools of Oriental Research for research and publications; and two-time winner of the Mitchell Dahood prize awarded by the Society of Biblical Literature for research essays.
Professor Smith specializes in the study of Israelite divinity and religion, as well as the literatures of the Hebrew Bible and Late Bronze Ugarit. He is the author of over one hundred articles and sixteen books, including The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (1990; second edition, 2002); The Pilgrimage Pattern in Exodus, with contributions by the archaeologist Elizabeth Bloch-Smith (1997); The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (2001); God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (2008); Poetic Heroes: The Literary Commemoration of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (2014 ); How Human is God? Seven Questions about God and Humanity in the Bible (2014); Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World (2016); and The Genesis of Good and Evil: The Fall(out) and Original Sin in the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, in press, 2019). His current research includes a commentary on the book of Judges co-authored with Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, which is to appear in the Hermeneia commentary series.
This keynote was delivered on March 5, 2019 at Oblate School of Theology for the 2019 Rev. Frank Montalbano, OMI Chair of Sacred Scripture Lecture.