Tull P. Bakhtin’s Confessional Self=accounting and Psalms of Lament

Biblical Interpretation 13, 41-55 p., 2005.This essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism to help explore a neighboring genre, the biblical Psalms of lament. These psalms display moods and movements analogous to those of confessional self-accounting — isolation, inner chaos, and the turn toward God as loving other for reconstructing a beloved self. The psalms have also functioned similarly to confessional self-accounting in the religious experience of generations of subsequent readers, who respond by reading their own griefs, fears, and hopes in the “I” and “we” of the ancient Psalms.