Psalm 1 and wisdom

Scholars generally concede that there are poems in the Psalter that can be labelled as wisdom psalms. There are no clear-cut criteria that can be applied to the Book of Psalms in order to determine which of them belong to the corpus of wisdom psalms. The aim of this paper is to determine whether Psalm 1 is a sapiential poem. A set of criteria pertaining to content and form is applied to Psalm 1 by which the Psalm is evaluated. In order to ensure that the criteria of content and form are not used arbitrarily, a definite discipline is set for their application: according to this there should be significant characteristics of both the categories of form and content before Psalm 1 can qualify as wisdom psalm. The overarching principle for the identification of Psalm I as wisdom psalm is the convergence of relevant evidence.