Robert Revington, Hannah Fonseca Becar & Merrill G. Greene
revingrc@mcmaster.ca; channah.fq@gmail.com; greenem@kingswood.edu
Reading the Psalms from a psychological perspective is not a new phenomenon.[1] For example, June F. Dickie, David Cohen, and Rebecca S. Watson each offer psychological readings of the psalms of lament in the 2023 essay collection When Psychology Meets the Bible and the latter two are focused on Psalm 88 specifically.[2] Brent A. Strawn has also written relevant psychological studies of the Psalms, both alone and with Brad D. Strawn.[3] This study will try a similar approach, but with one specific emphasis: the psychologist Kipling D. Williams (and others) have examined how receiving the “silent treatment” affects the same part of the brain that detects physical pain. This study will apply these insights to the Psalms to deepen our understanding of some psalms of lament. Attention will be paid to passages where the psalmist is ostracized by their community and by God. Williams’s insights on the psychological impact of the silent treatment can also be applied to the psalmists’ experience of unanswered prayer; the emotional impact may essentially be like getting the “silent treatment” from God. A parallel can be drawn to the experience of being excluded from electronic group text or computer messages; psychological research shows that the exclusion does not require another entity to be visible to have these adverse effects. Finally, this study will also reflect on the readers’ or hearers’ experience of such psalms. Initially, there are negative psychological effects to being exposed to psalms involving ostracism, but those negative effects may be overcome when most of the Psalms are read in their entirety.
Understanding Exclusion
Most people have experienced some kind of exclusion, but it is also possible to feel excluded by God. The psalmists lament that God hides God’s face, but the precise psychological dimensions of that experience deserve more attention.[4] As one article states: “Common though they are, rejection and exclusion hurt. Endured for a long time, ostracism leaves people feeling depressed and worthless, resigned to loneliness or desperate for attention—in extreme cases, suicidal or homicidal.”[5] Since the 1990s, the experience of ostracism has attracted much more attention.[6] One of Williams’s studies says: “It is intriguing that individuals can be adversely affected by exclusion even when it does not occur face-to-face and the sources of ostracism are never seen.”[7] These types of insights can be applied to the Bible where God is not seen. In both prayer and human relationships where the other party cannot be seen (such as having one’s text messages or messages on social media ignored) the person is left puzzling over why the message did not succeed and cannot verify whether they are being punished. Williams and Steve A. Nida identify three “stages” of ostracism: the “immediate” stage, the “coping” stage, and the “long-term (or resignation”) stage.[8] During the first stage, “ostracism increases anger and sadness,” but “contextual factors (e.g., who is doing the ostracism and why) and individual differences have little impact on the target’s immediate experience of pain and distress.”[9] This point is important to remember when the psalmists describe feelings of ostracism from their own community, or even from those they considered to be enemies. In Williams and Nida’s model, once someone has passed to the second stage (the “coping” stage), contextual factors do matter more, because they influence what lengths the ostracized individual will go to make the exclusion or silent treatment stop.[10] The victim may try quite hard to make the ostracism stop.[11] By the time the victim reaches the third stage, as Williams and Nida write, “if exposure to ostracism continues over a long period of time, then the individual’s resources for coping are depleted, and he or she is likely to experience alienation, depression, helplessness, and unworthiness.”[12] It takes very little for an individual to detect ostracism; the pain of ostracism is detected “quickly and crudely.”[13]
In Williams’s research, with other scholars, he developed an experiment where the research participant sits in a room with two other people, and the other two pass a ball back and forth, but exclude the participant; using a similar concept, they later developed an electronic game called Cyberball that involved research participants across the internet.[14] Again, when one evaluates the Psalms, it is significant to note that the person who is doing the ostracism or silent treatment does not have to be physically present for the impact of ostracism to register—just as God may not be physically present when the psalmists are lamenting their situation in prayer. In any event, Williams and Nida conclude:
If a 5-minute experience with ostracism in a relatively meaningless social situation in a lab or in front of a computer is sufficient to produce consistent and appreciable cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes, then it seems more than reasonable to think that extreme experiences with ostracism in the real world might have dramatic effects …. Although it is cliché to say that “humans are social animals,” it is nonetheless true. Nothing threatens this fundamental aspect of our being more than being excluded and ignored by others … ostracism causes pain—at least the affective experience of pain—and we can see this using neuroimaging technology. Unlike physical pain, this social pain can be relived over and over again whenever the experience is recalled.[15]
Williams recalled an experience he had in the 1980s when two other young men stopped throwing their frisbee to him at a park—and this experience inspired his “Cyberball” research.[16] Williams summarized his type of research as follows:
We intentionally exclude participants from face-to-face conversations, chat-room discussions or group texting. We examine how people react when others avert their eyes or how participants respond when we tell them that others do not want to work with them. Sometimes we ask participants to recall incidents in which they have been left out and observe the effects of these memories on mood and behavior. No matter how people are left out, their response is swift and powerful, inducing a social agony that the brain registers as physical pain (emphasis ours). Even brief episodes involving strangers or people we dislike activate pain centers, incite sadness and anger, increase stress, lower self-esteem and rob us of a sense of control. Remarkably, we all feel that initial ache about equally, no matter how tough or sensitive we are.[17]
The part of the brain that registers the “physical pain” of ostracism is called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).[18] In a 2003 study, the authors observed that “many languages” use “physical pain words (‘hurt feelings’) to describe experiences of social separation.”[19] The authors argued that the connection was not as metaphorical as one would think; it was here that they found that “the same neural machinery” was affected in both physical pain and social rejection.[20] The article states that the ACC “is believed to act as a neural ‘alarm system’ or conflict monitor, detecting when an automatic response is inappropriate or in conflict with current goals …. ‘pain,’ the most primitive signal that ‘something is wrong,’ activates the ACC.”[21] Granted, the ACC “is primarily associated with the affectively distressing rather than the sensory component of pain.”[22] In other words, the ACC is linked more closely to the psychological or emotional aspect of pain than the raw sensory experience, although both are components of the experience of pain. The application of “functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)” to participants excluded in a Cyberball simulation demonstrated that the ACC demonstrated “increased activity … during exclusion.”[23] The study concluded “that social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain, altering us when we have sustained injury to our social connections, allowing restorative measures to be taken.”[24] The researchers added that “understanding the underlying commonalities between physical and social pain unearths new perspectives on issues such as why physical and social pain are affected similarly by both social support and neurochemical interventions … and why it ‘hurts’ to lose someone we love.”[25] The study found that “ACC was strongly correlated with perceived distress after exclusion, indicating that the ACC activity was associated with changes in participants’ self-reported feeling states.”[26] It is hard to quantify the relationship between social exclusion and physical pain (as if a certain amount of psychological pain is equivalent to breaking one’s arm) but it is nonetheless true that “a pattern of activations very similar to those found in studies of physical pain emerged during social exclusion, providing evidence that the experience and regulation of social and physical pain share a common neuroanatomical basis.”[27] Research shows that the painkiller acetaminophen alsocan help patients cope with social exclusion—and this fact further exemplifies the connection between social exclusion and physical pain.[28] Other research shows that alcohol can limit the pain of social ostracism, although it may also reduce the pleasure of social inclusion.[29] The psalmist was in some kind of pain when excluded by their community and when God appeared unresponsive. Having said this, there are still differences between physical pain and ostracism—and sometimes, the latter can be worse. Physical pain is more likely to be “short-lived,” but there is psychological evidence that the pain of social exclusion lasts longer—and it can be relived muchmore easily, and is more painful when it is relived.[30] In an interview, Williams said that “being excluded or ostracized is an invisible form of bullying that doesn’t leave bruises, and therefore we often underestimate its impact.”[31]
Other studies support these insights. In a different study, psychologists used an essentially bogus personality test to tell the participants they would end up alone and never have a successful relationship; perhaps not surprisingly, they found a correlation between social exclusion and aggression—and suggested that that essential reality has motivated past school shootings.[32] The pain of ostracism can cause the target to be aggressive.[33] Another experiment looked at the effects of ostracism in virtual chat rooms and found that the excluded individuals consistently felt “tortured and hurt.”[34] Again, being ignored in an online chatroom—when other people cannot be seen—offers a comparison to feeling ignored by God. Other studies likewise concluded that being ignored online had negative psychological effects.[35] University students who were excluded on Facebook also felt psychological pain.[36] According to another study, if one is included in a cell phone text conversation and subsequently excluded,there are painful psychological consequences.[37] Individuals who were excluded in these triadic text message exchanges “reported worse mood; reported lower state levels of belonging, control, self-esteem, and meaningful existence; and wrote more provoking messages.”[38] The impact was “large … and comparable to the effect sizes observed for face-to-face and Cyberball ostracism.”[39] The study adds:
participants were provided with little information to help them make sense of their situation. But the pain associated with ostracism was not alleviated, even for those who did have an explanation for their ostracism … factors that should logically diminish the impact of ostracism have no effect on the immediate experience. The uncertainty associated with this text message paradigm may actually add to the ostracism effect, rather than subtracting from it. Substantial research has demonstrated that individuals are uncomfortable with uncertainty and are motivated to reduce it …. The ambiguity of the text message situation may contribute to the negative effects of ostracism because of the effort required for ostracized targets to reduce uncertainty.[40]
Much of this description can be applied to the psalmists’ pleas for God to answer prayer. Not only is the psalmist in pain in such situations, but the psalmist is in many cases uncertain as to why God is not acting and powerless to get through to God. Yet if the psalmist is in the second stage of Williams’s three-stage paradigm, the fact that the ostracism is seemingly coming from God will make the psalmist all the more desperate to make it stop.
In contrast, one study showed that remembering a past “attachment event” could help address the psychological impact of ostracism on an individual.[41] Sometimes, the Psalms reflect on God’s faithfulness in ways that perhaps fit this paradigm—even when the earlier parts of the Psalm are negative. This point will be explored in more detail.
Another study concluded that “prayer, self-affirmation, and distraction” were effective ways that people cope with the psychological effects of ostracism.[42] Yet when the feelings of ostracism are derived from unanswered prayer, the affected individual would find it challenging to turn to prayer as an effective coping strategy.
A different study concluded that the experience of having another party specifically avert their eyes from the subject has detrimental psychological effects that are tied to ostracism.[43] That study concludes:
Even briefly subjecting participants to averted eye gaze from a computerized confederate, relative to direct eye gaze, led participants to feel ostracized and to show the effects attendant to ostracism: lowered satisfaction of basic human needs, lowered experience of relational evaluation, more negative moods, lower self-esteem, and enhanced temptations to act aggressively. Moreover, participants understood averted eye gaze as intending to ostracize and send a signal that the relationship or interaction is low in value. Finally, the effectiveness of averted eye gaze may explain why it is the most frequent behavior reported … when attempting to give others the silent treatment.[44]
These insights are significant when interpreting the Psalms.
In an already-referenced article titled “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play,” Williams and his co-authors concluded that the identity of the group doing the ostracizing “did not moderate the negative effect of ostracism.”[45] Williams and his co-authors used his Cyberball concept, but this time, participants believed that a group of people they actively “despised”—such as the Australian Ku Klux Klan—was excluding them in the game.[46] Yet the pain still registered; even if the hated Ku Klux Klan ignores you in an electronic game, it still hurts.[47] The study concludes: “perhaps because people are hard-wired to detect it, ostracism is an unpleasant experience, regardless of whom or what is doing the ostracizing.”[48] Another study with different parameters affirmed Williams’s basic conclusion that a “despised” group still causes equivalent psychological pain when they exclude the target.[49] This point has ramifications for understanding situations when the psalmists are excluded by their enemies.
A different study showed that the more one ruminates about ostracism (without any external distractions), the worse the effects are; ruminating on the experience increases the amount of pain the person feels.[50] To that end, the psalmists ruminate on their ostracism within the texts of the psalms. Granted, it is not easy to avoid thinking about painful experiences. Yet as Williams writes elsewhere,
ostracized individuals may conjure up many possible explanations why others are ignoring and excluding them. When considering self-attributions for ostracism, thoughts of self-blame, inappropriate behavior, meanness, selfishness, etc. will be considered. Compare this to a verbal argument in which the cause of disagreement is articulated …. Because the reason is often withheld, targets of ostracism are forced to consider a laundry list of bad things they have done or said.[51]
When the psalmists thinks that God is ignoring them and does not know why, the psalmist’s ruminations may add to the pain.
Elsewhere, research shows that even just witnessing the ostracism of others can have adverse psychological effects; Williams participated in a subsequent study in which observers witnessed an individual being excluded in the Cyberball game and experienced feelings of distress as a result.[52] The study concluded that “ostracism detection is even more powerful than previously suggested, because vicariously, we feel the pain of others’ ostracism as our own.”[53] This research demonstrated that “the ostracism detection system triggered an ‘automatic’ empathic response in the observer.”[54] These insights should be kept in mind when we consider how hearing or reading the Psalms affects their intended audience. People may “vicariously” feel the pain of others; observing ostracism can affect the dorsal ACC and anterior insula—even though one is not the direct recipient.[55] Finally, a different study showed that if people watch television clips that involve ostracism or exclusion, they can vicariously experience psychological distress even through that medium.[56]
Applying Ostracism Research to the Bible
The psalmists’ prayers were ignored at times—and they felt sensations similar to physical pain. This insight enhances our understanding of specific passages. This study highlights a variety of psalms that could be labeled as psalms of “ostracism.” While not a hard and fixed category, there are a few dominant recurring elements in such psalms. Having said this, lament psalms are sometimes hard to neatly categorize; not every psalm that may be so categorized has a petition to God or involves a life-threatening situation.[57] William S. Morrow notes that “the distinction between individual and community complaint is not as neat as introductory discussions may suggest” and some psalms contain elements of both.[58] Finally, there are ambiguities about the use of the first person personal pronoun “I” in the psalms; although one should prioritize “an individual interpretation” for such passages, there are parts of the Bible where a first person singular pronoun nonetheless represents a larger community.[59] While acknowledging these ambiguities, this study identifies two broad categories of ostracism psalms.
The first category of psalms of ostracism includes psalms where, in at least one verse, the psalmist expresses concern that God is not listening or replying to their (or the community’s) prayers or the psalmist is imploring God to listen. Some examples include Psalms 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 17, 22, 28, 88, 142, and 143. Such psalms can also speak of God standing far off, turning away, or hiding God’s face—as though God is avoiding eye contact. As Marvin E. Tate puts it, “the concept of the hidden face of God is a major one in the literature of the Psalms” and “the hidden face of God is equal to his wrath and is the negative counterpart of the saving acts of God when his face is turned toward the distress of those in trouble.”[60] God hiding God’s face signifies “abandonment” or “a disposition of estrangement or the gesture reflecting that disposition.”[61] Still, this language should not be treated as pure metaphor; rather, such language is the only way to express a real form of psychological pain with parallels to the aforementioned studies on electronic communication. Yet it should be remembered that even if a psalm has a passage that includes elements of ostracism, it does not mean that the psalm necessarily ends on that note.
The second category of psalms of ostracism involves psalms that include passages where the psalmist is ostracized by human opponents. This can include some kind of shunning or people hiding their face. Examples include Psalms 31, 38, 41, and to some extent Psalm 22. Passages where the psalmist describes ostracism by enemies may convey a deeper psychological impact than a cursory reading would initially imply. Psalm 88 is perhaps the harshest example of a psalm of ostracism because, even at its end, the psalmist appears to be abandoned by both God and other people.
We see the psalmist resisting ostracism, exclusion, and the silent treatment from God and other people. In Psalm 4:1, the psalmist implores, “Answer me when I call, O God of my right!” (NRSV). Likewise, in the next Psalm, the writer says: “Listen to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you I pray.O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I plead my case to you, and watch” (Ps. 5:2–3). This psalm “begins with a manifold request for God to hear the psalmist’s prayer.”[62] The psalmist’s issue is that “perhaps several prayers have remained unanswered.”[63] In Psalm 6:3, the psalmist pleads: “my soul also is struck with terror, while you, O Lord—how long?” A similar complaint appears in Psalm 10:1, as the writer asks: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” In fact, in the first part of this verse, the Hebrew seems to refer to a physical distancing when it says ta’amod berahoq. While ‘amad can certainly be a metaphorical stance, in this case the word is paired up with rahoq which is to be spatially distant,[64] thus implying with the use of the two words that God is physically ostracizing the psalmist. Samuel E. Balentine notes that in such psalms, the psalmist explicitly does not think their problems are being caused by their own sin.[65] In Psalm 10 specifically, “the lament about God’s hiding is set within the context of an experience which seems to the worshipper inexplicable.”[66] In Psalm 17:1, we get another plea for God to listen: “Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry; give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit.” Here, it should be noted that the writers of the Psalms frequently use different forms of repetition for poetic emphasis.[67] In this case, the progression of “hear” (shama’) followed by “attend” (qashav) and ending the verse with “give ear” (‘azan) seem to be calling God to draw physically closer, making another allusion to God as physically distant. The verb “hear” is followed by qashav which in its semantic range can also mean “to incline,”[68] and ending the verse with ‘azan which is a denominative verb that comes from ‘ozen meaning “an ear.” From listening, to inclining, to giving an ear, the psalmist seems to be begging God to draw closer. Indeed, Ellen T. Charry draws attention to the fact in Psalm 17, “of its first six words, three are verbs that implore God to hear, pay attention, and listen to the crier.”[69]
In Psalm 28, the psalmist laments: “To you, O Lord, I call; my rock, do not refuse to hear me, for if you are silent to me, I shall be like those who go down to the Pit” (28:1). The petitions to not be silent in this verse are marked with the words heresh and hashah both meaning “to be silent.” Both these words possess the connotation that there is something to be said but the transmitter decides to stay silent instead. God could say something but is actively deciding to ignore the psalmist instead. The first lexeme here is actually “refusal,” which makes the sense of ostracism even stronger. Peter C. Craigie writes that in this psalm, “the words convey a sense of desperation, as though his situation had lasted for some time, but God had not answered.”[70] As Charry says: “The speaker experiences God’s silence as betrayal.”[71]
The psalmist calls on God to hear them again in a number of passages. These include Pss. 31:17, 54:2, 61:1, 64:1, 71:2, 77:1, 86:1–7, 102:1–2, 119:146, 120:1, 130:1–2, 141:1, 142:1–2, 143:1, and to some extent in 70:1 and 70:5; there is a primordial desire to be heard because of the pain of ostracism. In Psalm 90:13 the psalmist begs, “Turn, O Lord!” This text uses the imperative shuvah which can be used in a metaphorical sense. If literal, then the psalmist is demanding God to stop turning God’s back and face them. Likewise, Psalm 83:1 implores, “O God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still, O God!” The psalmist uses repetition here, as the same basic idea is expressed in different ways. The use of heresh (as was mentioned earlier) suggests that there is something to be said that is not being said. In addition, shaqat means to be still or undisturbed, which is an unsettling verb to use in this context. God could say something but decides to be silent and shuns the psalmist while seemingly undisturbed by their acts. Then, in Psalm 109:1, the psalmist bluntly states: “Do not be silent, O God of my praise.” On a communal level, Psalm 80:4 begs, “O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?” Psalm 108:11 asks whether God has “rejected us.” Once again, we see the psalmist believes God is purposefully ignoring God’s people. There are more examples of this pervasive theme. In Psalm 142:6, the psalmist laments: “Give heed to my cry, for I am brought very low.” In Psalm 143:7, we read: “Answer me quickly, O Lord … Do not hide your face from me.” In such passages, we can see the desperation that someone can experience when it seems they are getting the silent treatment.
Other psalms show confident hope that God hears the psalmist. In Psalm 55, the psalmist says: “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he will hear my voice” (55:17). Psalm 72:12 expresses similar optimism, as do 91:15, 102:17, 116:1–2, 138:3, and 145:19. Psalm 107:6, 13, and 28 repeat the same affirmative phrase: “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.”
Psalm 13 deserves particular attention, as the opening verses state: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (13:1–2).[72] Rolf A. Jacobson writes: “The intensity of the crisis from which this prayer is uttered is signalled by the fourfold repetition of the cry, How long?! Within this fourfold repetition, there is a staircase effect, by which the volume of the psalmist’s cry, as it were, is increased.”[73] Similarly, Craigie states that in this psalm, “it seems as though God has forgotten his servant and turned his face from him: he asks, how much longer must this go on?”[74] Psychological studies suggest that prayer can help one cope with the silent treatment from another person because it helped people return to a state of satisfaction afterwards.[75] Yet here, the psalmist cries out for relief and seems to be ignored, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that answers to the prayer are not forthcoming, and in this case, the silent treatment is the response to the psalmist’s prayers. For Psalm 13, Balentine emphasizes: “It is particularly significant that at no point in his prayer does the suppliant receive an answer to his questions. He charges God to pay attention and to answer (v. 4), but in fact no answer is given … God does not say how long the situation will last, and this is precisely the point of the lament.”[76]
It is also important to note how the psalmist had spoken of God hiding God’s face (13:1). We have previously noted that ostracism research demonstrates how having one person specifically avert their eyes has a detrimental effect on the other person.[77] While allowing for the impact of metaphor, it seems significant that the psalmists sometimes use the image of God hiding God’s face—not just in Psalm 13, but elsewhere as well. In Psalm 22:24, the psalmist is glad that God does not hide (sathar) his face. In Psalm 27:9, the psalmist implores God using sathar once again saying, “Do not hide your face from me.” Jacobson writes that here the psalmist longs for “a restored relationship—the opposite of the ‘hidden face’ motif.”[78] The same concern that God would “hide his face” is expressed in Psalms 30:7, 44:24, 69:17, 88:14, 102:2, 104:29, and 143:7. Each of these verses utilizes the verb sathar which in its semantic range means to hide or to conceal.[79] If used in the Piel verbal stem, as it is in some of the aforementioned passages, it means to hide carefully. This emphasizes the intent behind the concept of hiding or concealing. Once again, we are left with a description of God acting purposefully. In the case of 69:17, there is also some wordplay in the Hebrew with the words “face” (pnym)and “turn” (pnh).[80]
Psalm 22 follows a similar trajectory to Psalm 13. The parallel to the silent treatment is central, as the psalm states: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest” (Ps. 22:1–2). The pain of exclusion is evident, but again, like Psalm 13, this psalm ends with hope (Ps. 22:22–31). In Psalm 22, the psalmist addresses their pain by recalling an attachment event, though in this case, the psalmist also points ahead to future events. Psalm 22:24 deserves special attention, as that verse reads: “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” As Richard Elliott Friedman observes, here, “the psalmist urges those who fear Yahweh to keep the faith because God has helped in the past” and “conveys that even in conditions of deeply felt divine hiddenness, one can recall that the deity was present, listening, and answering in the past, and it suggests that the deity will be so again in the future.”[81] In other words, the psalmist points to past attachment events to make sense of God’s apparent hiddenness. Although a specific event is not cited, in Psalm 13, the psalmist also remembered that God “has been good to me” (Ps. 13:6). Incidentally, “attachment theory” has been used as a hermeneutical framework to discuss God’s relationship with God’s people in the Bible—as in Emily M. H. Cash’s recent reading of the Book of Deuteronomy.[82] Brent A. Strawn also applies attachment theory in his psychological analysis of the Psalms in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms.[83] Strawn concluded that “what is presented and what is exhorted in the Psalms is nothing short of theological, poetic attachment: attachment to God by means of poetry.”[84]
Nonetheless, in Psalm 22, it is not only God who made the psalmist feel the pain of ostracism, as we read: “But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads” (Ps 22:6–7). As Craigie summarizes: “the primary problem was the silence of God (v 3) and the secondary problem was the terrible reaction of fellow human beings, who—rather than offering comfort and consolation—spurned the sick person as if an object less than human.”[85] Charry observes that here the psalmist “mentions both the nonverbal and verbal forms of contempt he experiences (22:6); he reads contempt in people’s facial gestures (22:7).”[86] The fact that these people “shake their heads” is “a gesture of derision.”[87] Other people in the psalmist’s community are apparently ostracizing them—and the target will feel pain even if they do not like the people who are acting this way.
A useful comparison can be made with Williams’s work on exclusion from despised groups, which we have already noted.[88] We can extend that logic to other psalms. For example, in Psalm 31, “the accusations of his enemies are taken seriously by his neighbours and friends, who ostracize him.”[89] In Psalm 31:11, we read: “I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.” Charry writes that for the psalmist, “being shunned by those not directly involved, such as neighbours and acquaintances (31:11), expands the circle of adversaries.”[90] In 31:13, the psalmist adds: “For I hear the whispering of many—terror all around!—as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.” Psalm 38:11 states: “My friends and companions stand aloof from my affliction, and my neighbours stand far off.” Once again, the psalms use rahoq as a way to show that the distance between the psalmist and their neighbours is not only metaphorical, but also physical. In Psalm 41:6–9, the psalmist feels the pain of exclusion as others gossip about them and a friend betrays them by turning their heel away from them. In Psalm 109:25, the psalmist laments: “I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they shake their heads.” Despite the fact the writer calls them “accusers,” the ostracism still causes pain.
We noted earlier that ruminating about ostracism makes its effects even worse.[91] To that end, as Friedman writes, in books such as the Psalms and Job, “the biblical authors themselves seem to have questioned the reason for the divine hiddenness” and struggle to understand its reasons.[92] As Balentine says, in a number of the psalms, the psalmist “perceives God to be silent, forgetful, [and] even sleepingly disinterested,” while struggling to understand “Why? and for how long?”[93] Psalm 88 deserves special attention here. In his psychological study of that psalm, David Cohen makes a relevant distinction:
Typically, a plea found in lament psalms is a clear request for God to act in a particular way that relieves the psalmist of distress (e.g. Pss. 3.7; 26.1–2; 86.2–4 et al.). This is not the case here. It is reasonable to say then that what is placed at the beginning of Psalm 88 is a pleading for God to hear. While this can be found in other lament psalms, it is distinct from a plea for divine action on behalf of the psalmist.[94]
Likewise, in her own psychological study of this text, Rebecca S. Watson writes that Psalm 88 “is intensely relational, yearning for resolution on a personal level but simultaneously acknowledging the unequivocal nature of the suffering experienced.”[95] These observations support an important point: the key to Psalm 88 is that the psalmist wants a relationship but is not being heard. Similarly, John Goldingay writes that in this passage, God is “like an official pushing the way into the office and ignoring the line of people begging for attention at the door.”[96] The psalmist is ruminating on their experience of ostracism within the text. The silent treatment is making the psalmist desperate. Indeed, Michael D. Goulder writes that when the psalmist “cries out” (ts’q) in Psalm 88:2, it “is not a dignified prayer, but protracted wailing.”[97] In Psalm 88:13–14, the psalmist’s “agony” is “intensified by unanswered questions as to the reason for God’s apparent rejection of him.”[98]
Psalm 88 is the clearest example of someone who has passed to the third stage of Williams’s three-stage model of ostracism—from the “immediate” stage, to the “coping” stage, to the “long-term (or resignation)” stage. The psalmist’s yearning remains unsatisfied even to the end of the psalm. The psalmist complains: “O Lord, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence, let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry” (Ps. 88:1–2). Yet the closing verses of the psalm end with no grounds for hope. The psalmist asks: “O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 88:14). As Derek Kidner puts it, “the only response appears to be a rain of blows, as unremitting as his cries.”[99] Subsequently, the psalmist says, “I am desperate” (Ps. 88:15). Finally, the psalm concludes: “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness” (Ps. 88:18). The psalm ends with the psalmist feeling shunned both by God and other people in the community. Tate lists “unanswered prayer” and “spurning by God (who hides his face from the speaker)” among the psalmist’s main complaints in the closing verses.[100] In many respects, this psalm is a response to the silent treatment. This might be one psalm that “checks all the boxes” as a worst-case scenario for social exclusion. God “hides his face” (sathar), the psalmist’s friends and neighbors ostracise them, and the psalmist feels ostracism because of unanswered prayer. Since the prayer does not appear to be efficacious, it cannot address the pain of ostracism. Kidner says that “there is no sadder prayer in the Psalter.”[101] Again, in Williams and Nida’s model, the writer in Psalm 88 has clearly reached the “third stage” of ostracism; to repeat an earlier quote, “if exposure to ostracism continues over a long period of time, then the individual’s resources for coping are depleted, and he or she is likely to experience alienation, depression, helplessness, and unworthiness.”[102] That seems to be a perfect description of the psalmist’s state of mind in the last verses of Psalm 88. In other psalms, the writer has not progressed past the second stage.
Effect on the Audience
Some attention must be paid to how these psalms might make the audience feel. To that end, in the Jewish tradition Psalm 88 is typically recited on Hoshana Rabbah, the seventh day of the festivity of Sukkot. This lament is considered appropriate for Hoshana Rabbah specifically because of the impression it makes on its audience. The readers and listeners are meant to feelthat these are the last days of judgment. Sephardic communities will at times eat bitter soups and vegetables to remind themselves of the bitterness of being away from God.
As we have mentioned, ostracism can be experienced second-hand or vicariously.[103] The lament psalms may remind the readers of their own unpleasant experiences at times. As a relevant parallel, Carol A. Newsom’s study of religious experience in Qumran observed that for the Hodayot, “the linguistic magic of the pronoun ‘I,’ the use of the individual’s own voice and body, and the public nature of the performance itself would have worked together to encourage the appropriation of the experience described in the prayer as the speaker’s own.”[104] In the case of the Psalms, Morrow points out that “by the end of the monarchical period, the individual lament psalms found in the Psalter had come under the aegis of the major cultic institution that legitimated political and religious structures in ancient Israel: the Jerusalem prayer.”[105] As a result, “protest prayer was permitted to users of the psalms only under controlled circumstances.”[106] This observation relates to another point: even when the lament psalms are in the first person voice, they are commonly read in a communal setting.[107] The Psalms were also written in a society that was more collectivist than the individualistic modern West.[108] Having said this, cumulatively, these observations relate more to the experience of those reciting the text in community—and this may be different than those who merely hear or read the text. This study is more concerned with the latter than the former.
There is psychological evidence that hearing biblical passages that deal with exclusion from God can have adverse psychological—and even spiritual—effects. Williams and Ilja van Beest examined this phenomenon.[109] They noted that “research on ostracism and exclusion has—to our knowledge— not investigated how people respond to exclusion by God. Instead, prior research primarily assessed how people react to separation cues in contexts that involve other human beings.”[110] Their study involved students from Leiden University with ties to Christian student organizations.[111] The participants were divided into three categories: exclusion, inclusion, and control.[112] In the last group, the students were given innocuous passages from Genesis to read, but in the first two groups, the students read passages that involved either exclusion or inclusion from God—and also had to fill out a survey after.[113] Between these three groups, the total number of participants in the study was 110 and 61 were female.[114] The study functioned as follows:
In the exclusion condition they were given two quotes that emphasized God’s exclusionary orientation (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” Mark 15:34; “Then Saul became afraid, because he noticed the LORD had abandoned him,” [1] Samuel 18:12). In the inclusion condition the quotes emphasized God’s inclusionary orientation (“Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you,” Deuteronomy 31:6; “Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 8:39).[115]
It is relevant to note that the passage from Mark 15:34 is derivative of Psalm 22:1. In other words, a passage that is connected to a psalm that involves ostracism was used in the study. Ultimately, the researchers concluded that being exposed to the exclusionary passages hurt the psychological well-being of the people in the “exclusion” group.[116] Moreover, the participants in the study were given the chance to make charitable donations after seeing their Bible passages and the people who were exposed to the exclusionary passages were found to be less generous in the aftermath of the experiment.[117] As a result, the study concluded that religious people
experience a decrease in well-being when reminded that God could exclude … the overall conclusion remains that participants in the exclusion condition donated less than people in the inclusion condition. Although we would not presume to advocate that church leaders avoid God’s exclusionary tendencies in their sermons, this suggests that they may find that their coffers are fuller if they stick to the inclusionary passages (emphasis ours).[118]
In short, in a worship context, people may be less likely to give generously after hearing a passage about exclusion. In turn, this is evidence that, initially, hearing such passages does not offer psychological benefits to the audience. Although the metric of charitable donation may not be as relevant for the ancient context, at the very least, this study demonstrates that reading or hearing exclusionary passages may have a negative effect on the audience—at least when those passages are read in isolation. It also seems that exclusionary psalms are not preached on or read as frequently; unwittingly, the Liturgy of the Hours and the Common Lectionary support the findings of that study. Lament psalms (and curses) are more likely to be omitted in such liturgical uses.[119] William L. Holladay observes that churches have a “constant tendency … to bypass material with a negative import.”[120] Holladay believes Christians should not avoid laments in worship—even though Williams’s research actually shows that there are potentially good reasons to do so.[121] Still, although reading the psalms of lament could have negative psychological consequences, Brent A. Strawn argues that censoring the lament psalms
neglects a significant portion of the real life and real faith of the psalmists. And it neglects a significant portion of the real life of those who pray (or should be praying) the Psalms now and their real struggle to correlate their lives with something approaching reality and the real faith of the Psalms. In brief, if the Psalms are censored, one will not get the full anatomy of the soul, but something far less, partial, and grotesque—perhaps even hideous, like a skeleton: strangely attractive in its whitewashed articulations but utterly devoid of the parts that make a human being alive.[122]
In isolation, the Psalm passages containing ostracism may have a short-term negative impact on the readers or hearers if they experience this ostracism second-hand. Yet that might not be the effect after an entire psalm is read; there is a “shift from lament to praise,” as Brent A. Strawn and Brad D. Strawn put it.[123] For example, Psalm 22 begins with the speaker feeling forsaken by both God and other people, but it ends happily. The ostracism is resolved. Granted, in Psalm 88, the ostracism is not resolved. Nonetheless, there are many psalms where the psalmist calls on God to hear and the psalm ends with a positive conclusion—and these endings could ultimately have positive psychological effects on the reader or hearer. Likewise, Strawn and Strawn use “subtractive therapeutic action” as a framework to discuss the lament psalms.[124] They use the schema illumination to subtraction to addition to undergird their psychological discussion of the psalms; in essence, they argue that it is the very process of lament which enables the exorcism of psychological demons.[125] They argue that without lamentation, we lose “the very mechanism by which one can move to hope and praise through and in the midst of suffering and lament” and “that loss … is exactly the subtractive element of grief and mourning that facilitates the deconstruction of the false self and the (re)construction of something new.”[126] When recited in their entirety—and including the positive ending—many of the psalms that involve ostracism nonetheless could have a cathartic quality.
Furthermore, biblical scholars have begun to turn to Trauma Theory as a hermeneutical lens. Chwi-woon Kim suggests that “psalms of communal lament bear witness to ancient Israelites’ transgenerational transmission of their ancestors’ unresolved trauma rooted in historical experiences of divine anger.”[127] It is necessary to read and incorporate the psalms of lament into the liturgy in order to “shape a faith that resists self-blame for collective trauma.”[128] The Jewish faith and the commemoration of Tisha B’Av are clear examples of this.[129] Once a year, Jews gather to commemorate the disasters that occurred in Jewish history. Through fasting and reading the Book of Lamentations, Jews from all over the world acknowledge on this day the pain and suffering weaved into the laments. Many Jews will dress as if mourning, will not wash or bathe, will not wear leather, and will abstain from activities that produce joy. While these customs generate a feeling of sorrow in those observing, the distress is not pushed away as it is at the heart of what one is meant to feel.
The psalms of lament can still speak to people today. Although hearing psalms of lament could cause minor psychological distress for the listeners because such pain can be experienced second-hand, the fact that psalms of “exclusion” such as Psalm 88 are in the canon might, paradoxically, be a sign of hope. The psalmist is still trying to be in a relationship with God despite not getting a response. The psalmist remains hopeful that God will reveal themselves—because even in the worst and darkest psalms, the psalmist still continues to address God.[130] As Tremper Longman III said with respect to the psalmist in Psalm 88, “by virtue of the fact that he is still speaking to God, he maintains hope that perhaps this time God will hear.”[131] Likewise, Goldingay writes that “Psalm 13 shows that trust does issue in insistent questioning of God that asks why God is ignoring us in our need.”[132]
Overall, psychological research shows that the pain described in psalms of ostracism and unanswered prayer can be as potent—if not worse—than some forms of physical pain. The pain can be experienced second-hand. Both of these factors deserve more scrutiny. Granted, Naomi I. Eisenberger and Matthew D. Lieberman write that “over the course of evolutionary history, avoiding social rejection and staying socially connected to others likely increased chances of survival. Hence, the experience of social pain, while distressing and hurtful in the short-term, is an evolutionary adaptation that promotes social bonding and ultimately survival.”[133] Furthermore, the positive ending of most of the Psalms counteracts some of the negative psychological effects of the passages when they are read in full. Although hearing lament psalms may cause minor psychological distress, the communal experience of sharing the psalms might also counteract the very sensations of social exclusion that such psalms have. Finding a good community is one of the best ways to address the bad feelings of social exclusion—and even if reliving such experiences is not pleasant—the Psalms have been a focal point of communal gatherings for thousands of years.
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[1] We would like to thank Brian Irwin, Christine Mitchell, and Richard S. Ascough for reading earlier drafts of this material.
[2] June F. Dickie, “Biblical Lament Intersects with Psychotherapy as a Means of Healing the Effects of Trauma,” in When Psychology Meets the Bible, Bible in the Modern World 83/Sheffield Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies Monographs 6, edited by Heather A. McKay and Pieter van der Zwan (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023), 18–42; David Cohen, “Psalm 88: Divine Hiddenness, Theistic Dissonance, and the Enigmatic God,” in When Psychology Meets the Bible, 43–65; Rebecca S. Watson, “Psalm 88: A Psalm without Hope?,” in When Psychology Meets the Bible, 66–102.
[3] Brent A. Strawn, “Poetic Attachment: Psychology, Psycholinguistics, and the Psalms,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, edited by William P. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 404–423; Brent A. Strawn and Brad D. Strawn, “The Shift from Lament to Praise in the Psalms: A Psychodynamic Phenomenon,” JSOT 48.4 (2024): 433–457, doi:10.1177/03090892231225252.
[4] For more on the hiding of God’s face, see Samuel E. Balentine, The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Richard Elliott Friedman, The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995).
[5] “Ostracism Hurts, But How? Shedding Light on a Silent, Invisible, Abuse,” Association for Psychological Science, 27 April 2011, https://tinyurl.com/56f9ynaz.
[6] Kipling D. Williams and Steve A. Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20.2 (2011), 71, doi:10.1177/0963721411402480.
[7] Karen Gonsalkorale and Kipling D. Williams, “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play: Ostracism Even by a Despised Outgroup Hurts,” European Journal of Social Psychology 37.6 (2007), 1177. doi:10.1002/ejsp.392.
[8] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 71. See also, see Eric D. Wesselmann and Kipling D. Williams, “Ostracism and the Stages of Coping,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Exclusion, ed. C. Nathan De Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20–30; Kipling D. Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 41, ed. Mark P. Zanna (n.p.: Elsevier Academic Press, 2009), 308, doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00406-1.
[9] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 71.
[10] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 71.
[11] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 71.
[12] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 71.
[13] Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” 279.
[14] Kipling D. Williams, Christopher K. T. Cheung, and Wilma Choi, “Cyberostracism: Effects of Being Ignored over the Internet,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79.5 (2000), 748–762, https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.79.5.748.
[15] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 73–74.
[16] Kipling D. Williams, “The Pain of Exclusion,” The Scientific American Mind 21.6 (2011): 30–37.
[17] Williams, “The Pain of Exclusion,” 32.
[18] Williams, “The Pain of Exclusion,” 32.
[19] Naomi I. Eisenberger, Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams, “Does Rejection Hurt?: An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” Science 302.5643 (2003): 290, doi:10.1126/science.1089134.
[20] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 290.
[21] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 291.
[22] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 291.
[23] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 291.
[24] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 292.
[25] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 292.
[26] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 292.
[27] Eisenberger et. al. “Does Rejection Hurt?”, 291.
[28] C. Nathan DeWall et al., “Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence,” Psychological Science 21.7 (2010): 931–37, doi:10.1177/0956797610374741.
[29] Andrew H. Hales, Kipling D. Williams, and Christopher I. Eckhardt, “A Participant Walks into a Bar … Subjective Intoxication Buffers Ostracism’s Negative Effects,” Social Psychology 46.3 (2015): 157–66, doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000235.
[30] Zhangsheng Chen et al., “When Hurt Will Not Heal: Exploring the Capacity to Relive Social and Physical Pain,” Psychological Science 19.8 (2008): 789–95, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02158.x. Williams was also involved with this study.
[31] Amy Patterson Neubert, “Professor: Pain of Ostracism Can Be Deep, Long-Lasting,” Purdue University, May 10, 2011, https://tinyurl.com/6y79k3ak.
[32] Jean M. Twenge et. al., “If You Can’t Join Them, Beat Them: Effects of Social Exclusion on Aggressive Behaviour,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81.6 (2001): 1058–1069, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1058.
[33] Dongning Ren, Eric D. Wesselmann, and Kipling D. Williams, “Hurt People Hurt People: Ostracism and Aggression,” Current Opinion in Psychology 19.1 (2017): 34–38, doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.03.026.
[34] Ana Paula Gonçalves Donate, et al., “Ostracism Via Virtual Chat Room—Effects on Basic Needs, Anger and Pain,” PLOS One 12.9 (2017): 1, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0184215.
[35] Frank M. Schneider et al., “Social Media Ostracism: The Effects of Being Excluded Online,” Computers in Human Behavior 73.1 (2017): 385–93, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.052; Wouter Wolf et al., “Ostracism Online: A Social Media Ostracism Paradigm,” Behavior Research Methods 47.2 (2015): 361–73, doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0475-x; Peter Vorderer and Frank M. Schneider, “Social Media and Ostracism,” in Ostracism, Exclusion, and Rejection, ed. Kipling Williams and Steven A. Nida, Frontiers of Social Psychology(New York: Routledge, 2017), 240–57.
[36] Rebecca Smith, Jessica Morgan, and Claire Monks, “Students’ Perceptions of the Effect of Social Media Ostracism on Wellbeing,” Computers in Human Behavior 68.1 (2017): 276–85, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.11.041.
[37] Anita Smith and Kipling D. Williams, “R U There? Ostracism by Cell Phone Text Messages,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 8.4 (2004): 291–301, doi:10.1037/1089-2699.8.4.291. See also, Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” 308.
[38] Smith and Williams, “R U There,” 291.
[39] Smith and Williams, “R U There,” 298.
[40] Smith and Williams, “R U There,” 298.
[41] Erez Yaakobi and Kipling D. Williams, “Recalling an Attachment Event Moderates Distress After Ostracism,” European Journal of Personality 30.3 (2016): 258–73, doi:10.1002/per.2050.
[42] Andrew H. Hales, Eric D. Wesselmann, and Kipling D. Williams, “Prayer, Self-Affirmation, and Distraction Improve Recovery from Short-Term Ostracism,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 64.1 (2016): 8–20, doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2016.01.002.
[43] James H. Wirth et al., “Eye Gaze as Relational Evaluation: Averted Eye Gaze Leads to Feelings of Ostracism and Relational Devaluation,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36.7 (2010): 869–82, doi:10.1177/0146167210370032.
[44] Wirth et al., “Eye Gaze as Relational Evaluation,” 880.
[45] Gonsalkorale and Williams, “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play,” 1183.
[46] Gonsalkorale and Williams, “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play,” 1183.
[47] Gonsalkorale and Williams, “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play,” 1183.
[48] Gonsalkorale and Williams, “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play,” 1183.
[49] Marie-Pierre Fayant et al., “Is Ostracism By a Despised Outgroup Really Hurtful?: A Replication and Extension of Gonsalkorale and Williams (2007),” Social Psychology 45.6 (2014): 489–94, doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000209.
[50] Eric D. Wesselman et al., “Rumination Hinders Recovery from Ostracism,” International Journal of Developmental Science 7.1 (2013), 33–39, doi:10.3233/DEV-1312115.
[51] Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” 289.
[52] Eric D. Wesselmann, Danielle Bagg, and Kipling D. Williams, “‘I Feel Your Pain’: The Effects of Observing Ostracism on the Ostracism Detection System,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45.6 (2009): 1308–11, doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.08.003.
[53] Wesselmann et. al., “‘I Feel Your Pain,’” 1308.
[54] Wesselmann et. al., “‘I Feel Your Pain,’” 1308.
[55] Eric D. Wesselmann, Kipling D. Williams, and Andrew H. Hales, “Vicarious Ostracism,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7.1 (2013): 1–2, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00153; Naomi I. Eisenberger and Matthew D. Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8.7 (2004): 294–300, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.05.010.
[56] Sarah M. Coyne et al., “Is Viewing Ostracism on Television Distressing?,” The Journal of Social Psychology 151.3 (2011): 213–17, doi:10.1080/00224540903365570.
[57] William S. Morrow, Protest Against God: The Eclipse of a Biblical Tradition, Hebrew Bible Monographs 4 (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 2007), 43.
[58] Morrow, Protest Against God.
[59] Morrow, Protest Against God, 43–44.
[60] Marvin E. Tate, Psalms 51–100, Word Biblical Commentary 20 (Dallas, TX: Word Publishing, 1990), 197.
[61] Tremper Longman III, Psalms, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 15–16 (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 159; Craig C. Broyles, The Conflict of Faith and Experience in the Psalms: A Form-Critical and Theological Study, JSOTSup 52 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), 75.
[62] Nancy deClaissé-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms, NICOT (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2014), 94.
[63] Samuel Terrien, The Psalms: Strophic Structure and Theological Commentary, The Eerdmans Critical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 104.
[64] F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2014), 935.
[65] Balentine, The Hidden God, 53.
[66] Balentine, The Hidden God, 55.
[67] Wilfred G. E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, JSOTSup 26 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1986), 275–286.
[68] Brown, Driver, and Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, 904.
[69] Ellen T. Charry, Psalms 1–50: Sighs and Songs of Israel, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2015), 78.
[70] Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1–50, Word Biblical Commentary 19 (Dallas, TX: Word Publishing, 1983), 238.
[71] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 144.
[72] Cf. Ps. 89:46.
[73] Walford, Jacobson, and Tanner, The Book of Psalms, 159.
[74] Craigie, Psalms 1–50, 141–42.
[75] Cf. Hales, Wesselmann, and Williams, “Prayer, Self-Affirmation, and Distraction,” 8–20.
[76] Balentine, The Hidden God, 120.
[77] Cf. Wirth et al., “Eye Gaze as Relational Evaluation,” 869–882.
[78] Walford, Jacobson, and Tanner, The Book of Psalms, 270.
[79] Brown, Driver, and Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, 711.
[80] Tate, Psalms 51-100, 197.
[81] Friedman, The Disappearance of God, 75; 135.
[82] Emily M. H. Cash, “Clinging in Love: Attachment Indicators and Implications in Deuteronomy 10.12–11.1,” JSOT 49.4 (2025): 407–434, doi:10.1177/03090892241308264.
[83] Strawn, “Poetic Attachment,” 404–423.
[84] Ibid., 418.
[85] Craigie, Psalms 1–50, 199.
[86] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 110.
[87] Longman III, Psalms, 130.
[88] Gonsalkorale and Williams, “The KKK Won’t Let Me Play,” 1176–1186.
[89] Geoffrey W. Grogan, Psalms, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 84.
[90] Charry, Psalms 1–50, 160.
[91] Wesselman et al., “Rumination Hinders Recovery from Ostracism,” 33–39.
[92] Friedman, The Disappearance of God, 97.
[93] Balentine, The Hidden God, 117.
[94] Cohen, “Psalm 88,” 53.
[95] Watson, “Psalm 88,” 91.
[96] John Goldingay, Psalms, vol. 2, Psalms 42–89, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 655.
[97] Michael D. Goulder, The Psalms of the Sons of Korah, JSOTSup 20 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982), 204.
[98] Grogan, Psalms, 155.
[99] Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150: A Commentary on Books III–V of the Psalms (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1975), 318.
[100] Tate, Psalms 51–100, 403.
[101] Kidner, Psalms 73–150, 316.
[102] Williams and Nida, “Ostracism: Consequences and Coping,” 71.
[103] Wesselmann, Bagg, and Williams, “‘I Feel Your Pain,’” 1308–11; Wesselmann, Williams, and Hales, “Vicarious Ostracism,” 1–2; Eisenberger and Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts,” 294–300; Coyne et al., “Is Viewing Ostracism on Television Distressing?,” 213–17.
[104] Carol A. Newsom, “Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Two Case Studies,” in Experentia, vol. 2, Linking Text and Experience, eds. Colleen Shantz and Rodney A. Werline, SBLEJL 35(Boston: Brill, 2012), 221.
[105] Morrow, Protest Against God, 42.
[106] Morrow, Protest Against God, 42.
[107] Morrow, Protest Against God, 43–44.
[108] We owe this observation to Richard S. Ascough.
[109] Ilja van Beest and Kipling D. Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’ The Effect of Thinking About Being Ostracized by God on Well-Being and Prosocial Behavior,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2.4 (2011): 379–86, doi:10.1177/1948550610393312.
[110] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’ 380.
[111] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’ 381.
[112] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’ 381.
[113] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?,’” 381.
[114] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?,’” 381.
[115] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?,’” 381.
[116] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?,’” 384.
[117] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?,’” 384.
[118] van Beest and Williams, “‘Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?,’” 384.
[119] William L. Holladay, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 304–15.
[120] Holladay, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years, 314.
[121] Holladay, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years, 315.
[122] Brent A. Strawn, “The Psalms: Types, Functions, and Poetics for Proclamation,” in Psalms for Preaching and Worship: A Lectionary Commentary, eds. Roger E. Van Harn and Brent A. Strawn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 36.
[123] Strawn and Strawn, “The Shift from Lament to Praise,” 433–457.
[124] Strawn and Strawn, “The Shift from Lament to Praise,” 440–450.
[125] Strawn and Strawn, “The Shift from Lament to Praise,”443.
[126] Strawn and Strawn, “The Shift from Lament to Praise,” 446.
[127] Chwi-woon Kim, “Psalms of Communal Lament as a Relic of Transgenerational Trauma,” JBL 140.3 (2021), 531, doi:10.15699/jbl.1403.2021.5.
[128] Kim, “Psalms of Communal Lament,” 556.
[129] For details on this holiday, “Tisha Be-Av,” Yahadut, https://tinyurl.com/mwyxraha.
[130] We owe this observation to Brian Irwin.
[131] Longman III, Psalms, 319.
[132] John Goldingay, Psalms, vol. 1, Psalms 1–41, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 209.
[133] Eisenberger and Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts,” 160.