Psalms

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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. The title sits a little crooked on its contents. Far more of the book pleads than praises, and the singular noun that heads most of the individual poems is not tehillah but mizmor — a song set to the pluck of strings. A book called praises is held together as much by the cry that precedes praise: the voice in the dark that has not yet been answered, and sings anyway.

A book of one hundred and fifty

The number is firm but the boundaries are not. The Hebrew Masoretic text counts one hundred and fifty psalms; the Greek Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate that followed it, count them differently — joining the Hebrew Psalms 9 and 10 into one, splitting others apart — so that for most of the book the Greek number runs one behind the Hebrew, and the Greek carries a hundred-and-fifty-first psalm besides. This is why the same poem is Psalm 23 to a Protestant and a Jew and Psalm 22 to a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian: the discrepancy is not error but two ancient countings preserved side by side, the Hebrew kept by Jewish and Reformation readers, the Greek kept by the churches that prayed in Greek and Latin.

The hundred and fifty itself was reached late. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls the great Psalms scroll from Cave 11, copied in the first century, runs the last third of the book in an order unlike the received one and threads through it poems absent from the standard Psalter — a plea, an apostrophe to Zion, a hymn to the creator, the last words of David, and a prose paragraph crediting David with three thousand six hundred psalms and four hundred and fifty songs, four thousand and fifty compositions in all, spoken through prophecy. Whatever its own status, the scroll shows that as late as the turn of the era the contents and sequence of the Psalter’s later books were still open. The book closed; it did not begin closed.

The names at the head of the poems

Tradition long ascribed the whole collection to King David, the shepherd-poet whose harp soothed Saul, and seventy-three of the psalms carry a superscription bearing his name. But the headings name others too. Twelve belong to Asaph, a temple singer, and eleven to the sons of Korah, a guild of Levitical musicians; two are assigned to Solomon, one to Moses, and single poems to Heman and Ethan the Ezrahites. Roughly a third carry no name at all — the “orphan” psalms. Even the Davidic ascription is less plain than it looks: the Hebrew particle le-David can mean by David, but equally for David, belonging to David, or in the manner of David, the way a melody is named for the king it honors rather than the hand that wrote it.

Scholarship reads the superscriptions as later additions — editorial labels attached as the poems were gathered, not bylines from the authors — and treats the book as an anthology assembled over centuries. Material reaches back into the monarchy, when court and temple needed songs for coronation, victory, and rite; editing continues into the period after the exile, when a people without a king or a standing temple read the old royal songs as the prayer of every soul. The ascription to David is not thereby dissolved. It marks something true at a level the question of penmanship does not touch: the Psalter is David’s in the way the Law is Moses’s — the book gathered under the name of the figure who stands at its source, the singer to whom Israel’s whole life of song is referred.

Five books

The collection is itself arranged into five books, each sealed by a doxology — a burst of blessing that does not belong to the poem it ends but to the seam. Book I runs to Psalm 41, Book II to 72, Book III to 89, Book IV to 106, and Book V to the end; the last book needs no separate doxology because its closing psalms, the great Hallel of 146 through 150, are doxology entire, each opening and shutting on Hallelujah, “praise the LORD.” Early Jewish tradition, in the midrash on the Psalms, compared this five-fold shape to the five books of the Torah: as Moses gave Israel five books of the Law, David gave Israel five books of praise. The comparison is old and was meant.

Modern study has found the arrangement more deliberate still. Psalms 1 and 2 stand together as a portal — the first praising the man who meditates on the Torah day and night, the second proclaiming the LORD’s anointed king — so that the reader enters the book through both the Law and the throne. Royal psalms then fall at the joints: at the head of Book II, at the close of Book II, and at the shattering end of Book III, where Psalm 89 mourns the broken covenant with David’s house, the crown thrown to the ground. Book IV answers the wound. Opening with the one psalm ascribed to Moses and built around the cluster that cries the LORD reigns, it lifts the eye past the failed earthly monarchy to the kingship that does not fall. The five books are not five filing drawers. They are a route — from the Torah-blessed life and the promised king, through the collapse of that promise, to the throne above the throne — laid down by editors who arranged inherited songs into an argument.

How the lines move

The poems work by parallelism, the engine of Hebrew verse: a line stated, then restated in a second clause that echoes, sharpens, or turns it. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork. The second clause is not filler and rarely mere repetition. The eighteenth-century bishop Robert Lowth, who first named the device in his Oxford lectures De sacra poesi Hebraeorum, sorted it into three kinds — synonymous, where the halves say the same; antithetic, where they oppose; and synthetic, where the second builds on the first. Later readers found Lowth’s “synonymous” too tame. James Kugel argued that the second clause almost always adds — not “A, and again A,” but “A, and what is more, B” — and Robert Alter described the movement from first line to second as one of heightening and intensification, a focusing, a concretization, a small dramatization that drives the couplet forward rather than letting it rest. The effect survives translation as little else in poetry does, because it lives in the relation between two thoughts rather than in sound. A psalm can be carried into Latin, German, or English and keep its gait. This portability is part of why the book became the common prayer of peoples who never spoke a word of Hebrew.

What the psalms dare to say

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. How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? The lament is the single most common form in the book — far outnumbering the hymn — and it does not soften its complaint into resignation. It addresses God as one with a grievance addresses a person who owes him an answer. The thanksgiving songs are its mirror, the voice of the same sufferer once the trouble has passed, recounting the descent and the rescue. Between them the Psalter holds the whole arc of a life turned toward God: enthronement and exile, harvest and plague, the pilgrim climbing to Jerusalem in the Songs of Ascents, the penitent confessing in the great fifty-first.

And some psalms curse. A handful — the imprecatory psalms, among them the hundred-and-ninth and the hundred-and-thirty-seventh — call ruin down on enemies with a violence that has troubled readers for centuries: the exile by the rivers of Babylon who blesses the one who will dash the children of his captors against the rock. Jewish and Christian readers alike have wrestled with these lines. Augustine, reading the whole Psalter as the voice of Christ — head and body, the Christus totus speaking — heard in the curses the cry of the suffering Church and the announced judgment of God rather than a model for private hatred. The modern Roman office went further and simply removed the harshest psalms and verses from its weekly round. The lines remain in the book. Their refusal to be edited out of scripture is itself a statement: that the rage of the wronged, too, is speech that may be brought before God, not hidden from him.

The book at prayer

This breadth is much of why the Psalter has been held so close. In Jewish practice the Psalms saturate the liturgy. The morning service is built around the Pesukei de-Zimra, the “verses of song” drawn from the final psalms; the Hallel — Psalms 113 through 118 — is sung at the festivals; Psalm 145 is recited thrice daily; a psalm of the day marks each weekday as the Levites once marked it in the temple. The book follows the individual as it follows the calendar: psalms are said over the sick, at the deathbed, and for the dead, and the recitation of Tehillim is a labor of mercy performed on another’s behalf. To know the Psalter by heart is to have, ready at every threshold of a life, words already given.

In Christianity the Psalter became the backbone of monasticism and the daily office. The Liturgy of the Hours is, at root, the Psalms distributed across time: the Rule of Benedict, in the sixth century, lays out a scheme by which the monastic community chants all one hundred and fifty psalms in the course of a single week, gathering in the dark and at the hinges of the day to pray the book straight through and begin again — the cycle that has run, in choirs East and West, for fifteen centuries. The early church also read the Psalter as prophecy. Psalm 22, beginning My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, was heard from the cross and read as the passion foretold; Psalm 110, The LORD said to my Lord, became the verse the New Testament quotes most often; psalm after psalm was taken as the voice of Christ before Christ. To pray the Psalms, in this reading, was to overhear the Messiah at prayer — and to lend him one’s own mouth.

The Reformation gave the book back to the congregation. Where the medieval office had been sung by clergy and choir, the Reformed churches put the Psalter, set to meter and tune, into the mouth of every worshipper. Calvin’s Geneva produced a complete metrical psalter in 1562, its texts versified by Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze and many of its melodies shaped by Loys Bourgeois; the same year the English Sternhold and Hopkins psalter appeared in full, and the line ran on to the Scottish Psalter and to the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, the first book printed in British North America. For generations of Protestants the Psalms were not read but sung — ancient Hebrew laments turned into vernacular hymns, the common voice of farmers and weavers who had no Latin and now needed none. A book composed for a temple that no longer stood became, in plain words and a few unison tunes, the most democratic poetry in Christendom.

Reading the text

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. Modern Psalms scholarship turns on this question. Hermann Gunkel, the German scholar who founded form criticism, argued in his Einleitung in die Psalmen — finished by his pupil Joachim Begrich and published in 1933 — that the way to read a psalm is to know its genre, its Gattung, and the Sitz im Leben, the “setting in life,” from which that genre arose: the hymn, the communal lament, the individual lament, the song of individual thanksgiving, the royal psalm, each shaped by a recurring situation in the worship of Israel. His successor Sigmund Mowinckel pressed the cultic setting harder, locating much of the Psalter in the festival worship of the temple. Against and alongside this, a later generation — Gerald Wilson foremost — turned from the single psalm to the book, asking what the editors meant by the order in which they set the poems and the five-book frame in which they bound them; his The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (1985) and the essay that condensed it opened the study of the Psalter as a deliberately shaped whole rather than a hymnal in no particular order.

The text itself is among the best attested in scripture, its critical foundation the Masoretic tradition, checked now against the Psalms manuscripts from Qumran — some thirty-seven of them, more copies than of any other biblical book — edited for Cave 11 by James A. Sanders in the fourth volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (1965). The history of the book in English is also a history of its translation. Lowth’s eighteenth-century lectures named the parallelism that organizes the verse; the literary readings of James Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981) and Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985) and his The Book of Psalms (2007) carried the compactness of the Hebrew line into modern English. The renewed attention to the Psalter as a single composed book — the shape of the whole, not merely the form of its parts — has made the question of how the editors ordered their inheritance one of the liveliest in the field. The poems’ very wandering — the way a single psalm can drift from numbering to numbering and survive each move intact — has made the book a natural object for the study of how a text is shaped, transmitted, and read across the long centuries of its use. Some Jewish mystics went further still and read the Psalter as a key to the architecture of the cosmos, threading its verses into the contemplative practice of Kabbalah; the same lines that the monastery chanted and the congregation sang were, for them, a ladder of ascent.

(The Psalms of Solomon, a separate collection of eighteen pseudepigraphal poems from the first century before the common era, are not part of this book and never entered the Hebrew canon; they borrow the form, not the place.)

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.

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