Introduction to Psalms

Title and authorship

The Hebrew title is Tehillim, praises, which is a slightly surprising name for a collection in which laments outnumber every other kind. The English title comes through Greek from a word for songs sung to stringed instruments. Both are accurate about part of it, and neither covers the whole: this is a hymnbook that contains more complaint than celebration, and a prayer book that argues with God on almost every page.

Authorship is stated inside the book rather than deduced. Seventy-three psalms carry David's name in their headings, twelve Asaph's, eleven the sons of Korah's, two Solomon's, one Ethan's and one Heman's; the oldest is attributed to Moses Psalms 90. Around fifty carry no name at all.

The headings are part of the Hebrew text, not later editorial labels, and the New Testament treats them as evidence. Jesus builds an argument on the fact that David wrote Psalms 110 and stakes a question to the scribes on it Mark 12:36; Peter argues from David's authorship of Psalms 16 at Pentecost Acts 2:25–31; Paul cites the second psalm as spoken by God through David's mouth Acts 13:33. The attributions are taken here as the book gives them.

What no single author explains is the arrangement. These are individual compositions written across roughly a thousand years and gathered, sorted and edited into five books, each closed by a doxology, with an introduction placed at the front and a burst of five hallelujah psalms at the end. Someone shaped this collection, and the shaping is itself a statement about what the collection is for.

Date

No book in Scripture covers so long a span. The ninetieth psalm is headed a prayer by Moses, the man of God, which places its composition in the fifteenth century before Christ, in the wilderness. The bulk of the collection belongs to David and to the temple singers he organized, around 1000. Psalms attributed to the sons of Korah and to Asaph reflect the temple's established worship, and several clearly belong to the monarchy's later centuries.

The latest are unmistakable. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion Psalms 137:1 is written by someone who was there, and the psalm's rawness is not the work of a later imitator. Others assume the temple in ruins Psalms 74:7 or pray for a scattered people to be gathered Psalms 106:47.

The final compilation therefore belongs to the period after the return from exile, when the collection was closed in the form it now has. That is a range of about nine hundred years between the earliest and the latest, and it means the Psalter was assembled by people editing material far older than themselves.

Individual psalms are dated in their headings where it matters, and thirteen of David's carry a specific occasion — flight from Absalom, the cave, the night the house was watched, the visit of Nathan the prophet. Those headings are the reason a handful of these prayers can be read against a known event, and where one exists it is used here.

Backgrounds

Hebrew poetry rhymes ideas, not sounds. The governing device is parallelism: a line is stated, and the second half answers it — repeating it in other words, sharpening it, or reversing it. The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork Psalms 19:1 says one thing twice. This is why the Psalms survive translation better than almost any poetry ever written; what is being patterned is meaning, and meaning crosses languages.

Acrostics. At least eight psalms are alphabetical, each line or stanza beginning with the next Hebrew letter in order Psalms 34 Psalms 145. The largest is the longest chapter in the Bible: twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, every verse of a stanza starting with the same letter Psalms 119. The form is invisible in English and it explains features that otherwise look like repetition without progress.

Five books, five doxologies. The collection is divided into five parts, and the division is marked in the text itself: each of the first four closes with a burst of blessing that belongs to no particular psalm Psalms 41:13 Psalms 72:19 Psalms 89:52 Psalms 106:48, and the fifth is closed by an entire psalm of praise Psalms 150. The five-part shape has long been read as deliberately answering the five books of Moses — the law given to Israel, and Israel's answer sung back.

Musical directions. The headings name a chief musician, instruments, tunes now lost, and a word, Selah, whose meaning is unrecovered. These were performance notes for a working temple choir; the collection was sung, and much of it was sung by trained musicians in a building rather than prayed privately.

Superscriptions that name an occasion. Where a heading gives one, the psalm is anchored to a moment in the historical books, and reading the two together is often the whole key to it.

Theology and purpose

Everywhere else in Scripture God speaks to people. Here people speak to God, and the book was placed in the canon so that they would keep doing it.

It licenses the whole range of what a believer feels. Roughly a third of the Psalter is lament, and the complaints are not softened before being written down. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Psalms 22:1. How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? Psalms 13:1. One psalm ends in the dark with no resolution at all Psalms 88. That these were preserved, set to music, and sung in public worship establishes something about God that no statement about him could: he is not offended by being addressed this way, and the prayers he chose to keep include the ones that accuse him.

It is honest about the wicked in a way that is hard to read. The imprecatory psalms call down ruin on enemies, and the hardest of them are unbearable Psalms 137:9. Three things hold them inside the frame. They are prayers, not plans — the speaker asks God to act rather than picking up a weapon. They appeal to an announced standard of justice rather than to private taste. And they are uttered by people with no recourse of any kind, whose alternative to handing the matter over was doing nothing while it continued. They are handled where they occur, and not explained away.

It is the church's oldest prophecy of Christ. The New Testament quotes the Psalms more often than any other book, and the quotations are not decorative. A crucifixion is described in detail centuries before the method existed Psalms 22; a resurrection is asserted Psalms 16:10; a priest-king after an order older than Aaron is announced in two verses that the letter to the Hebrews spends four chapters on Psalms 110. Jesus reads the book this way himself, telling his disciples that everything written about him in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms had to be fulfilled Luke 24:44.

And it teaches by placement. The collection opens on a man who delights in the law and a king the nations rage against, and closes with everything that breathes praising God. Between those two points lies almost every condition a human being can be in.

Additional notes

The headings are part of the text. In Hebrew manuscripts the superscription is verse one of the psalm, which is why English verse numbers here often run one behind the Hebrew. Nothing in the interpretation turns on it, but it explains a discrepancy readers notice.

Selah. It occurs seventy-one times, always in a psalm with musical directions, and nobody knows what it means. A pause, an instrumental break, a lifting of the voice, and a direction to reflect have all been proposed. It is left untranslated here because it cannot honestly be translated.

The numbering differs between traditions. Some versions combine the ninth and tenth psalms and split the hundred and forty-seventh, so their numbers run one behind through most of the book. The total is the same and the text is the same.

Two psalms appear twice. The fourteenth and the fifty-third are nearly identical, as are the fortieth's closing verses and the seventieth. This is what an edited collection of separately circulating material looks like, and the duplication was left standing rather than tidied away.

On the enemies. A modern reader meets the wicked on nearly every page and can find the constant division into two camps uncomfortable. It is worth remembering who was writing. These are prayers from people being hunted, slandered in court, defrauded, or led into exile behind an army, and the enemy in question is usually a specific person doing a specific thing. Where a psalm generalizes, it generalizes about conduct rather than about persons, and the same collection is candid that the line runs through the speaker too Psalms 51 Psalms 139:23–24.

Length. This is the longest book in Scripture by verse count and the shortest per verse in the treatment here, which is a matter of scale rather than of estimate. One hundred and fifty separate compositions cannot each receive what a chapter of narrative receives, and the psalm rather than the verse is treated as the unit throughout.

Outline

How the book is built

The two psalms that open the book inclusio 1:1-2:12

• A 1:1-6 Blessed is the man who delights in the law — two ways, a tree by water and chaff on the wind.
• A′ 2:1-12 Blessed are all who take refuge in the Son — nations raging, and a king set on the holy hill.

Neither of the first two psalms carries a heading, which sets them apart from almost everything that follows in the first book, and they are bracketed by the same word at each end: blessed is the man Psalms 1:1 at the opening, and blessed are all those who take refuge in him Psalms 2:12 at the close. Between those two the subject changes completely — the first is about a private individual and a book, the second about kings, nations and a throne — and the bracket is what says they were meant to be read as one introduction rather than as the first two entries in a list.

What the pairing asserts is that the collection has two doors and they open on the same room. The way of blessing is delight in God's law, and the way of blessing is refuge in God's anointed king; the Psalter is placed under both statements at once and never afterward separates them. It is also why the second psalm's coronation language is not an intrusion into a devotional book. From its first page this collection is about a king the nations reject and God installs anyway, and the New Testament's habit of quoting the second psalm at the decisive moments of Christ's life follows the book's own lead rather than importing something foreign to it.

A psalm built around the nations chiasm 67:1-7

• A 67:1-2 May God bless us and make his face shine — so that his way is known on all the earth.
• B 67:3 Let the peoples praise you, God. Let all the peoples praise you.
• C 67:4 The center: let the nations be glad, because God judges the peoples with equity.
• B′ 67:5 Let the peoples praise you, God. Let all the peoples praise you — the refrain repeated exactly.
• A′ 67:6-7 God will bless us — and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.

Seven verses, and the shape is exact enough to be checked line by line. The psalm opens asking God to bless us and closes promising that he will, and the two blessing verses are worded almost identically. Inside them stands a refrain repeated word for word — let the peoples praise you, God. Let all the peoples praise you Psalms 67:3 Psalms 67:5 — and between the two occurrences of the refrain, alone and unrepeated, sits the center.

The center is the point of the psalm and the arrangement is what identifies it. Oh let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you will judge the peoples with equity, and govern the nations on earth Psalms 67:4. Everything else in the psalm is either a request for blessing or a call to praise; only here does the singer say why the nations would want any of this, and the reason given is that God governs fairly.

Read as a whole the structure carries an argument that the words alone state only in passing. The blessing asked for in the first verse is not requested for its own sake — the very next line gives its purpose, that your way may be known on earth Psalms 67:2 — and the psalm's own architecture puts the nations, not Israel, at the middle. It is the clearest statement in the Psalter that the covenant was never meant to terminate on the people who received it.

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