Bible Verse Lookup
Literary Genre.
This penitential prayer, or confession of sin, spoken in the first person singular, has relatively few counterparts among the individual laments of the canonical psalter. Its closest parallel is Psalm 51 , whose language it appears to echo (OTP ii. 630). Despite its prevalent concern with the covenant, it differs significantly from such penitential prayers as Ezra 9, Neh 9, Dan 9, Bar 1:15–3:8 , Song of Three, the Qumran ‘Words of the Heavenly Lights’, and Tob 3:2–6 . Its focus is consistently personal rather than national, and it lacks the language of the Deuteronomic tradition that permeates these prayers.
