He realized the "Hermeneia" had done its job. It had stripped the familiar words of their paint and varnish and revealed the heavy oak beams underneath. The Psalm wasn't a nursery rhyme about trees. It was a challenge. It offered two paths: the slow, meditative, rooted life that produces fruit, or the social slide into cynicism that results in weightlessness.
A hallmark of the Hermeneia approach is determining the Sitz im Leben (setting in life) and the compositional layers of the text. Hossfeld and Zenger argue that Psalm 1 was not composed as an independent liturgical song for temple worship. Instead, it was explicitly written to serve as a to the finalized Psalter. hermeneia psalms 1