All the Day Long

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As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

Unlike the questions that Paul asks and answers in the diatribes of the earlier chapters, 14 the principal function of these questions is not to advance an argument by introducing new ideas or anticipating possible objections; rather, as Jewett correctly suggests, they perform the recapitulative function of an ἐρώτησις, inviting the audience to join in asking (and, in some cases, answering for themselves) questions whose answers have already been given or implied earlier in the letter. But thou, O LORD, knowest me: thou hast seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee: pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter. I spread out my hands all day long to my rebellious people, who lived in a way that is morally unacceptable, and who did what they desired. I won't give more details, because the plot meanders quietly, as a life does, and it needs to be read in the same manner.It is not faith’s last word on suffering, but it is still a valid word to be spoken by God’s people in response to sufferings that are unexplained and (at least from a human standpoint) inexplicable. Then, secondly, there is the fact that the proposition asserted in Psalm 44:22 does not function simply to record the fact of Israel’s tribulations but to protest against them, and (within the larger context of the psalm) to cry out for their cessation.

Starling, Not My People: Gentiles as Exiles in Pauline Hermeneutics, BZNW (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 147. We may also be prepared to grant the possibility, as Stewart goes on to claim, that on this reading of the psalm citation’s intended force within Paul’s rhetoric it is capable of functioning “simultaneously” as “an appropriate lamentation of affliction” and as “a declaration of the gospel of the crucified Lord. Admittedly, theories regarding the composition history of the psalter and the intentions of the collection’s editors are necessarily somewhat speculative, and a post-exilic date for the psalm, and for the composition of Book II, cannot be ruled out.Just as it is written, “FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG; WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.