Psalms of Solomon

← Encyclopedia

The Psalms of Solomon are a set of eighteen Jewish poems composed in the first century BCE and attributed, long after his death, to King Solomon — a name that lent old authority to writing that is not his. The original Hebrew is lost. What survives is a Greek translation, with a later Syriac version made not from the Hebrew but from that Greek, preserved on the margins of Christian manuscript collections rather than within any canon; the text was unknown to modern readers until a Greek manuscript was published in the early seventeenth century. For a work so small it carries an outsized weight, because tucked inside it is one of the sharpest portraits of a hoped-for Davidic king that any Jewish writing before the New Testament has left behind.

A book that almost vanished

The history of the collection is largely a history of near-disappearance. The poems were written in Hebrew, in Second Temple Judea, and then — like much of the literature of that age — translated into Greek for readers who no longer worked easily in the older tongue. The Hebrew disappeared entirely; not a line of it has been recovered, not at Qumran, not in the Cairo Geniza, not anywhere. The Greek survived only because it traveled inside the baggage of Christian scribes, copied at the back of biblical codices as an appendix to the sacred books proper, never quite part of them and never quite discarded.

The earliest trace of that survival is an absence. The fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, one of the great Greek Bibles, listed the Psalms of Solomon in its table of contents, placed after the canonical Psalter — but the leaves that once held the text itself have perished, leaving only the title in the index, a name pointing at a gap. The text proper is known from eight Greek manuscripts ranging across the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, none of them complete, and from three Syriac manuscripts, also defective. The whole edifice of modern knowledge rests on this thin and damaged tradition, recopied for centuries by hands that revered the canonical books beside which these psalms sat without ever ranking them among them.

In 1626 the Jesuit scholar Juan Luis de la Cerda printed the Greek for the first time, working from a faulty copy of a manuscript now in Vienna; the witness had been brought to scholarly notice by the Augsburg librarian David Hoeschel. With that printing the collection re-entered the reading world after more than a thousand years on the shelf. The Syriac version, recovered later, turned out to descend from the Greek rather than the Hebrew, so it offers a control on the Greek wording but no independent window onto the lost original. Behind both stands a Hebrew that can be reconstructed only in fragments, by reading the Greek against the grain for the Semitic idioms it preserves.

The conqueror on the sand of Egypt

The poems are unusually datable for their kind, because they appear to react to events still raw. Several psalms describe a foreign conqueror who breaches the walls of Jerusalem, marches into the sanctuary, and treads where no foreigner should tread, profaning the Temple — and who is then struck down far away, killed on the shore of Egypt with no one to bury him, his body left on the sand. The description fits Pompey, the Roman general who took Jerusalem in 63 BCE, forced his way into the Temple’s innermost room, and was assassinated on the coast of Egypt in 48, his corpse abandoned at the water’s edge. The match is close enough that the psalmist seems to be writing with the news of that death in hand, reading it as the verdict of heaven on a man who had laid hands on the holy place.

That anchor lets the collection be placed, more firmly than almost any other pseudepigraphon, in the decades around the middle of the first century BCE. It also fixes its politics. The hostility runs in two directions at once. The Roman intruder is the obvious villain, the arrogant outsider whose pride heaven humbles. But the anger reaches inward as well, toward the Hasmonean priest-kings whose internal feud had invited Rome into the city in the first place, and who had, in the psalmist’s eyes, usurped a throne that was never theirs to hold — for the kingship belonged to the line of David, not to a priestly dynasty. The conquest is read as judgment on both: on the Gentile for his sacrilege and on the native rulers for the corruption that opened the gate. The poems belong to a current of devout opposition that watched the catastrophe of 63 and saw in it not the failure of God but the failure of the men who had presumed to govern in his name. The arrival of the Roman Empire in Judea is, in these pages, less a political event than a theological one.

The righteous and the sinners

The religious temper of the collection is exact and severe. Its world is cut cleanly in two, between the righteous and the sinners, the devout and the lawless — categories that map onto the psalmist’s own community and its enemies, foreign and domestic alike. The governing conviction is that God’s judgment is just, always and without exception, even when its edge falls on Jerusalem and on the Temple itself. Suffering is not evidence that God has turned away; it is the discipline of a father who corrects the son he loves, a chastening meant to purge rather than destroy. The righteous, who accept the rod and confess their sins, are refined by it; the sinners, who do not, store up a heavier reckoning. This is theodicy in the key of confidence — the catastrophe explained without the covenant abandoned.

It is a theology with sharp edges. The psalmists do not soften the line between the saved and the lost, and they have little patience for the prosperous wicked, whose comfort they read as the fattening before the slaughter. Yet the same poems are full of an intimate piety: confession, the fear of God, the trust that the one who watches the heart will not let the faithful fall. The collection carries the cadences of the canonical Psalms, the hundred and fifty Hebrew poems of the Hebrew Bible to which it owes its form and its name — though it is a wholly separate work, a late and pointed imitation rather than any part of the Psalter. The borrowed shape is deliberate: it lends the new grief the authority of the old prayers.

The king who is coming

Out of that conviction comes the feature for which the collection is best remembered. The seventeenth and eighteenth psalms turn from grief to petition and ask God to raise up a king, a son of David, to restore what the Hasmoneans had usurped and the Romans had defiled. The portrait is unusually full. This king will purge Jerusalem of the nations that trample it, shatter the unrighteous rulers, and gather a holy people to himself; he will judge the tribes of a sanctified Israel and divide the land among them in righteousness; he will tolerate no injustice to lodge among them, and no man practiced in wickedness will dwell with them. He is wise, pure, free of sin, so that he may rule a great people and rebuke princes and bring down sinners by the strength of his word. The seventeenth psalm is emphatic that his power is not the power of cavalry and siege engines: he will not trust in horse and rider and bow, nor multiply gold and silver for war, but will strike the earth with the word of his mouth. He is, in one of the poem’s phrases, the Lord’s anointed — in the Greek, christos kyrios, a striking reading preserved across the manuscripts and long debated by editors, some of whom would emend it to “the anointed of the Lord.”

This is among the clearest pre-Christian portraits of a Davidic messiah in Jewish writing, and the reason the work matters far beyond its size. The seventeenth psalm is the earliest surviving Jewish text to attach the title “son of David” to the awaited king, naming a hope that the older scriptures had left implicit in the dynastic promises to David’s house. The figure is royal, not priestly — a deliberate rebuke to the Hasmoneans, who had joined crown to altar — and human rather than heavenly, a righteous monarch raised by God to do on earth what no Hasmonean had done. He is one strand, and a vivid one, in the wide and various weave of Second Temple expectation, which ran from the two messiahs of the Qumran community to the heavenly Son of Man of the Enochic Parables to the priestly deliverer of other texts. The Psalms of Solomon give that hope a face: a king who rules a purified people by the authority of his words.

A community without a name

What earlier readers made of the collection, and who first prayed it, is harder to recover. The community behind it cannot be pinned to a known group. The old guess — embedded in the title of the collection’s first major modern edition, which called these the Psalms of the Pharisees — was that the authors belonged to that party, on the strength of their belief in resurrection, their reverence for the Law, and their hostility to the ruling house. That identification is now held loosely. The piety of the poems fits a broader stratum of devout opposition to the Hasmoneans, and nothing in them requires a specifically Pharisaic authorship as against, say, a circle with affinities to the Essenes or some other pious group estranged from the Temple establishment. What can be said is that the psalmists were not Sadducees: the priestly aristocracy who staffed the very Temple administration these poems condemn, and who denied the resurrection these poems assume, stand on the far side of the line the collection draws. Beyond that the authors keep their anonymity, a community visible only in the shape of its grief and its hope.

The collection’s later resonance lies almost entirely in Christian hands, since it was Christian scribes who preserved it and Christian readers who, centuries on, recognized in its waiting king a vocabulary their own scriptures had taken up. The seventeenth psalm’s son of David, ruling by the word of his mouth, cleansing Jerusalem, gathering a holy people, reads in hindsight like a sketch the Gospel writers would fill in differently — but that recognition belongs to the later reading, not to anything the psalmists set out to foretell. They wrote in the aftermath of a particular conquest, for a particular grief, asking God for a particular king. The continuity of vocabulary is real; the intention behind it was their own.

Text and scholarship

The Psalms of Solomon are gathered among the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha — the writings that hover at the edge of the biblical collections without belonging to any canon — alongside such works as the Assumption of Moses, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch. Within that company the collection has its own dense modern literature.

The text re-entered scholarship in earnest with the Cambridge edition of Herbert Edward Ryle and Montague Rhodes James, Psalmoi Solomontos: Psalms of the Pharisees, Commonly Called the Psalms of Solomon (Cambridge University Press, 1891), whose very title fixed the Pharisaic hypothesis for a generation. The collection then took its place in the great compendium edited by R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913), where G. Buchanan Gray supplied the translation and introduction; that two-volume work is hosted in this library at /library/apocrypha/charles-apot/ and remains a serviceable public-domain entry into the text. The standard reference today is Robert B. Wright’s Psalms of Solomon: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (T&T Clark, 2007; in the Jewish and Christian Texts series under James H. Charlesworth), the first complete critical edition of the Greek, with an apparatus that registers the readings of all the Greek and Syriac witnesses and a facing English translation; a listing of the volume is available from its publisher (https://www.torrossa.com/en/resources/an/5211909), and Wright’s translation also forms the basis of the version in the New English Translation of the Septuagint.

On the historical setting, the fullest study is Kenneth Atkinson’s I Cried to the Lord: A Study of the Psalms of Solomon’s Historical Background and Social Setting (Brill, 2004; https://brill.com/display/title/8820), which works through the collection psalm by psalm, sorting the Pompeian poems from the earlier and the undatable and reading them against the classical sources, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the archaeology of first-century Judea. The current state of the field is gathered in Patrick Pouchelle, G. Anthony Keddie, and Kenneth Atkinson, eds., The Psalms of Solomon: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts (SBL Press, Early Judaism and Its Literature 54, 2021; https://www.sbl-site.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/PsalmsofSolomon_Bons_SBL.pdf for a representative conference treatment), which takes up the textual history, the messianism, and the still-unsettled question of who wrote them.

Scholarship treats the poems as evidence of how varied messianic expectation already was before the Gospels — a hope for a cleansing king, set down in grief and confidence at once. The psalms themselves end not in triumph but in submission: blessed, they say, are those alive in those days, and the rest is left to God.

→ In the library: R. H. Charles (ed.) — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Assumption Of Moses · Testaments Of The Twelve Patriarchs · Prayer Of Manasseh · Clementine Literature · David · Psalms · Apocrypha · Second Temple Judaism · Book Of Baruch · Old Testament · New Testament · Roman Empire · Sadducees · Essenes