Matthew Montgomery, "An Intercessor Like Moses: A Key Component of the Psalter's Message" (European Hebrew Journal, 2026)

Yeah, so how did the PhD research lead to the research in the article? So to unpack the PhD argument just a little bit more, there is a number of key occurrences of inheritance from venology in the Asaph Psalms.

We can think of near the end of Psalm 50, those who... kind of inverts a number of the Decalogue commands in Psalm 50.

We'll find their portion, their chalet, with adulterers, and then the psalm proceeds to describe Yahweh's destruction of the wicked.

So that is the one Asaph psalm, Psalm 50, that's separated from the others.

And then the very next Asaph psalm, Psalm 73, ends with, a suffering righteous individual hoping that even after death they may have Yahweh as their chelek, their portion, even if their heart and flesh fail forever.

So there's these prominent occurrences often near climactic ends of poems or beginning of Asaph poems that talk about inheritance and hoping to have a relationship with the deity from a theological angle.

And then often these are problematized.

So for example, the end of Psalm 73, like I just mentioned, ends with hope that the psalmist will have the deity as their portion for forever.

Psalm 74 opens with a lament that Yahweh's Nahalah, Yahweh's land of inheritance, people of inheritance, has been destroyed by aggressors.

And that juxtaposition I don't think is coincidental.

I think there's tension that is purposely being created and wrestled with.

Because we find the same thing again at the end of Psalm 78 and the beginning of Psalm 79.

Psalm 78 ends with an idealized David in an idealized temple where David... shepherds Israel, Yahweh's inheritance with a strong right hand.

Psalm 79 opens with the same inheritance term that 78 uses at its end.

Again, lamenting the destruction of Yahweh's inheritance.

of people, land, temple.

So there's this back and forth, this push-pull, these idealized theological hopes and the harsh lived reality of exile.

And of course, it's very common to recognize that Book 3 seems to be designed, at least in part, to lament the destruction of the temple, lands, and ultimately, in the climactic Psalm 89, the Davidic dynasty itself.

um that's that's common it's also common to to note that book four has a davidic emphasis um but in this this back and forth with inheritance terminology um i i one of the things i argue for is that book three is already uh reaching for a hopeful resolution to uh to the crisis of exile And that's when Psalm 77 introduces Moses and Aaron at its conclusion, that that is an important part of it.

It's the first time either Moses or Aaron show up in the Psalter, and then they show up frequently after that.

And then within the Asaph Psalms, you also have a number of allusions to Exodus 34, where Moses is interceding to God on behalf of the covenant-breaking people, like you read in the abstract in the introduction.

And so we start to, I think, have...

some brewing hope for we have precedent in the history of the covenant people for when things have gone sour um an individual to intercede and stand between god and the people And I think what a Psalter is doing is presenting Moses as an archetype for what is needed again in the future, in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile.

And that I think plays out in the data, in the texts, in books four and five, which is what the article tries to show.

And that is, of course, what was outside of my scope for inheritance in the Asaph Psalms.