What do you think?
Rate this book
The Arrival of the King: The Shape and Story of Psalms 15-24
The suffering and vindicated king
The Psalter evinces meaningful arrangement. When psalms are read with attentiveness to their textual context, striking connections emerge. In The Arrival of the The Shape and Story of Psalms 15–24 , Carissa Quinn approaches these psalms as a compositional unity. When read as a unit, Psalms 15–24 tell the story of God's kingdom, established through the suffering and deliverance of his Davidic king.
Quinn interprets Psalms 15–24 as a sequence and a chiasm, revealing provocative links in adjacent and parallel psalms. These psalms have a sense of progress, beginning with the question of who may ascend the holy hill and culminating in the divine king's own ascent. They also display recursion, as themes in one psalm are developed in its chiastic parallel. At the peak of the chiasm is Psalm 19, where the king praises God's creation and Torah and prays for righteousness.
The Arrival of the King establishes and explores the rewards of approaching the Psalms as a carefully arranged literary work.
The Psalter evinces meaningful arrangement. When psalms are read with attentiveness to their textual context, striking connections emerge. In The Arrival of the The Shape and Story of Psalms 15–24 , Carissa Quinn approaches these psalms as a compositional unity. When read as a unit, Psalms 15–24 tell the story of God's kingdom, established through the suffering and deliverance of his Davidic king.
Quinn interprets Psalms 15–24 as a sequence and a chiasm, revealing provocative links in adjacent and parallel psalms. These psalms have a sense of progress, beginning with the question of who may ascend the holy hill and culminating in the divine king's own ascent. They also display recursion, as themes in one psalm are developed in its chiastic parallel. At the peak of the chiasm is Psalm 19, where the king praises God's creation and Torah and prays for righteousness.
The Arrival of the King establishes and explores the rewards of approaching the Psalms as a carefully arranged literary work.
- GenresChristian
264 pages, Paperback
Published December 13, 2023
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 25, 2026
Best treatment of Psalms 15-24 that I have come across. Quinn marshals an abundance of textual support to evince a clear chiastic structure behind this psalm grouping, and also devotes careful attention to both the narrative progression and thematic developments that transpire across the collection, synthesizing her discoveries and conclusions persuasively.
While I found Quinn's methodology and analysis of the textual data to be quite balanced overall (her appendices are terrific!), I did wonder if her numerical valuation and scaling of certain link types were a bit arbitrary. Moreover, Quinn's study leaned a bit more heavily on form criticism than I am personally comfortable with. Nevertheless, these are small quibbles.
While I found Quinn's methodology and analysis of the textual data to be quite balanced overall (her appendices are terrific!), I did wonder if her numerical valuation and scaling of certain link types were a bit arbitrary. Moreover, Quinn's study leaned a bit more heavily on form criticism than I am personally comfortable with. Nevertheless, these are small quibbles.
April 22, 2024
Studying the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible encounters many issues and wrestles with many questions. Quinn focuses on the presence of macro-parallelism in the Hebrew Psalter. In other words, parallelism extends beyond word-pairs, parallel phrases, and parallel lines of text. Entire psalms exhibit parallelism as well as participation in a purposeful literary structure identifiable within specific collections of psalms (like Psalms 15–24). I highly recommend The Arrival of the King to anyone desiring a deeper plunge into Psalms studies.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews