Research Article Danilo Verde* From Healing to Wounding: The Psalms of Communal Lament and the Shaping of Yehud’s Cultural Trauma https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0208 received April 25, 2022; accepted June 20, 2022 Abstract: Biblical trauma studies strongly emphasize that texts and traditions that eventually formed the Hebrew Bible helped both the authors and the (former) “readers” to cope with catastrophic events. This approach, however, leads to side-lining other functions of biblical texts, for instance the extent to which biblical texts were used and transmitted not only to “heal” but also to “wound” the collectivity, namely to shape the collective identity of ancient Israel and early Judaism as profoundly damaged. The perspective of cultural trauma studies may help us to go beyond the “healing hermeneutics.” The present article aims to understand how the psalms of communal lament in Books II and III of the Psalter contributed to make the collective trauma of the Babylonian attack become Yehud’s cultural trauma during the Persian period. It suggests that by building and transmitting a coherent metanarrative of the catastrophe and through the communal laments’ dramatic images and metaphors, the redactors of these portions of the Psalter made sure that during the Persian period the people of Israel in the province of Yehud would be wounded by their ancestors’ pain. Keywords: Psalter, trauma Ever since the rise of biblical trauma studies, scholars have emphasized that various kinds of traumatic experiences are at the origins of biblical literature, and that the Hebrew Bible in general and the psalms in particular had a sort of therapeutic function for both the authors and the (former) readers.¹ In light of the broad archipelago of scholarly research called “literary trauma studies,”² the psalms are often seen as literary works that bear the marks of individual and collective traumas and as religious texts that constitute a sort of “equipment for living”³ to process, give meaning to, and healing from trauma. It is certainly sensible to assume that, being texts for prayer, the psalms helped the former readers to cope with and recover from disruptive experiences in many ways, for instance by providing words and thoughts to make  * Corresponding author: Danilo Verde, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, e-mail: danilo.verde@kuleuven.be ORCID: Danilo Verde 000-0002-5193-2030  1 For an overview of biblical trauma studies, see Markl, “Trauma/Traumatheorie.” For studies on the psalms in light of trauma hermeneutics, see Frechette, “Destroying the Internalized Perpetrator;” Strawn, “Trauma, Psalmic Disclosure, and Authentic Happiness;” Hays, “Trauma, Remembrance, and Healing;” Groenewald, “A Trauma Perspective;” Verde, “Trauma, Poetry, and the Body;” Móricz, “Wie die Verwundeten – Derer du Nicht Mehr Gedenkst.” 2 For the first literary trauma studies, see Felman and Laub, Testimony; Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge;” Caruth, Trauma; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Tal, Worlds of Hurt. For more recent developments, see Kurtz, Trauma and Literature; Davis and Meretoja, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. 3 The notion of literature as “equipment for living” comes from American literary theorist Kenneth Burke. See Burke, Literature as Equipment for Living, 593–98. Open Theology 2022; 8: 345–361 Open Access. © 2022 Danilo Verde, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.