Bibliographic record
Abstract
We Are the Wicked Stephen Breck Reid The Batman character Two-Face indicates that the impulse for good and virtue eventually turns; heroes become villains. The Catholic Biblical Association of America annually convenes an international meeting. When people from many parts of the world hear Western scholars identify with the righteous psalmist, we sound either disingenuous or naïve. The binary moral rhetoric seems out of place in a postindustrial and postmodern world. I want to argue that, reading in an international context, we should recognize that we are both the righteous psalmist and the wicked person in the Psalter. The way of the wicked is a trope in the Psalter, popular culture represented by theater and film, and moral theology. It provides a strategy for a community that identifies some as belonging while the adversaries bear the mark of "other." Three psalms examine the nature of the "wicked": Psalms 1, 37, and 73. After discussions of these psalms, I will examine how popular culture in literature, stage, and cinema reflects on the topic of "the wicked" in a postindustrial and postmodern Western society. Third, I will review how the work of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on reading the Bible and Jewish interpretation can inform biblical interpretation. Finally, I will note how biblical interpreters and creators of popular culture can learn from one another on the topic of "the wicked" in a postindustrial and postmodern Western society. We in the United States live in a partisan conflictual time. Moreover, the partisanship occurs far beyond North and/or South America. Russia and Ukraine, Hutu and Tutsi tribes in Rwanda,1 provide examples that religious nationalism occurs not only in Canada and the United States but also in other regions of the [End Page 1] Americas, Africa, and Asia. All the more reason to recognize the flaw in a binary: the good, righteous, on the one hand, and the evil and wicked, on the other. This presentation will begin with an exploration of a historical-critical reading strategy. I note that the biblical text is written to invite the reader/listener to identify with the speaker, here the psalmist. If we embrace this binary reading, we must be ready to be the villain. I. Psalms 1, 37, and 73 Psalm 1 Psalm 1 is a Torah psalm that invites the careful reader to associate with the psalmist and the righteous person, who belong to the valued group, and with the adversaries of both God and the psalmist as the designated "others." The binary in ancient readings of the psalms depicts the righteous as us and the wicked as the adversaries not only of the righteous but also of God. It is easy to accent the positive "belonging" and forgo the concomitant "othering" that is also part of the psalm.2 Psalm 1 has received significant scholarly attention.3 Its chiastic structure consists of an overarching antithetical parallelism in two parts, vv. 1–2 and 4–5. A (vv. 1–2) saying that contrasts the happy righteous with the hapless sinners, adversaries, and scoffers, including (1:1) through the lens of observance; description of and value of the positive B (vv. 3a–b) tree metaphor gestures to the person C (v. 3b) prosperity C′ (v. 4a) pivot "not so the wicked" B′ (v. 4b) chaff metaphor for the wicked A′ (v. 5) description of the failure of the wicked; success of the righteous The binary of the righteous and wicked depends on the centrality of Torah in this psalm. However, Psalm 1 represents an antithetical parallelism that provides a more complex rendering of belonging and othering. The symmetry or asymmetry of the psalm points to its poetic function.4 Either way the psalm points to belonging and othering. [End Page 2] Commentary on the Text Verses 1–3 In the Psalter, a benefit of belonging is happiness. Nonetheless, the language of in Psalm 1 functions as a cipher. The contrast of the happy righteous person and the forlorn wicked one uses locations and types of persons that signal belonging and othering, such as the metaphor of trees. The image of the tree is that of a substantial plant that depicts...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".