Psalms

← Encyclopedia

The Psalms are a collection of one hundred and fifty Hebrew poems — praise, lament, thanksgiving, and petition — gathered as a single book in the third division of the Hebrew Bible and, in Christian Bibles, placed among the Old Testament. The Hebrew title is Tehillim, “praises”; the English name comes through the Greek psalmoi, songs sung to a stringed instrument, by way of the Latin psalterium that also gives the book its other name, the Psalter.

Tradition long ascribed the whole collection to King David, and many psalms carry a superscription naming him; others name Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, or Moses, and many name no one. Scholarship treats these headings as later additions and reads the book as an anthology assembled over centuries, with material reaching back into the monarchy and editing continuing into the postexilic period. The collection is itself arranged into five books, a shape later readers compared to the five books of the Law. The poems work by parallelism — a line stated, then restated in a second clause that echoes, sharpens, or turns it — the device that gives Hebrew verse its characteristic balance even in translation.

What the psalms say covers an unusually wide emotional range for a sacred book. They exalt and they accuse; they praise the creator and demand to know why he is absent; some bless, and a few curse with a violence that has troubled readers for centuries. This breadth is much of why the book has been held so close. In Jewish practice the Psalms saturate daily and Sabbath liturgy and are recited in mourning, in illness, and at the deathbed. In Christianity the Psalter became the backbone of the monastic hours, chanted in full on a weekly or monthly cycle, and the early church read many psalms as prophecy of Christ. The Reformation made metrical psalm-singing the common voice of Protestant congregations, turning ancient Hebrew laments into vernacular hymns sung by ordinary people.

The interpretive question that recurs is what kind of writing this is: temple liturgy, royal ceremony, or private devotion. The likely answer is all of these, at different points in the book’s long formation — texts composed for public rite that were gradually read as the inward speech of any single person before God. Across Jewish and Christian use alike, the Psalms have functioned less as doctrine to be examined than as words to be borrowed, a fixed vocabulary lent to feelings the borrower could not otherwise say. That borrowing, rather than any one reading of the text, is what has kept the book continuously in use longer than almost anything else in either scripture.

→ Related: Leviticus · Ecclesiastes · Reformed Christianity · Communion