The Book of Psalms

Overview

The Psalms are a hundred and fifty poems, about a hundred and fifty pages, written over several centuries by many hands and collected into five books, an arrangement that deliberately echoes the five books of the Torah. Each of the first four ends with a doxology, and Psalm 150 closes the whole thing with everything that has breath called on to make noise.

The headings attribute seventy-three to David, and a few to Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon and Moses. The Hebrew preposition can mean by, for, or belonging to, so these are best read as traditional associations rather than as claims about authorship, and some of the psalms are plainly later than David by centuries.

A practical warning. The numbering differs between traditions, because the Greek Septuagint joins and splits some psalms differently from the Hebrew. Catholic and Orthodox editions that follow the Greek are usually one number behind for most of the book, so Psalm 23 in a Protestant Bible may be Psalm 22 in another, and older writers cite the Greek numbers.

They are poems, and Hebrew poetry does not rhyme or scan in the way English does. Its structure is parallelism: a line makes a statement and the next restates, intensifies, or reverses it. Once you hear that, the poems open up, and translations that preserve the line breaks are much better than those that run it into prose.

What happens

The useful way in is by kind rather than by number, since the collection is not ordered by subject.

Laments. About a third of the book, and the largest single group, which surprises people who expect a hymnbook. Some are individual and some national. The form is regular: an address to God, a description of the trouble, often in stock images of pits, floods, dogs and enemies, a petition, frequently a protest of innocence or a confession, and then a turn to confidence and a vow to praise.

That turn is the most interesting feature in the Psalter. It usually arrives abruptly and without any change in the circumstances, and nobody is sure what it represents. Some scholars think a priest spoke an oracle of assurance at that point in the liturgy and the answer is missing from the text. Psalm 22 is the classic case: it begins with the cry of abandonment quoted from the cross and ends with a congregation praising.

One psalm never turns. Psalm 88 complains, petitions, and ends with the line about darkness being the speaker’s only companion. Its presence in the collection is a fact worth sitting with.

Hymns of praise. Psalm 8 on what a human being is that God should notice one, Psalm 19 on the heavens declaring glory and then, in a sudden shift, on the law, and Psalm 104, a long and joyful catalogue of the created world, which resembles an Egyptian hymn to the sun closely enough that borrowing is likely.

Thanksgivings. Individual and communal, looking back on a rescue that has already happened.

Royal psalms. Coronations, royal weddings, and prayers for a king, including Psalm 2 and Psalm 110, both of which the New Testament reads messianically.

Wisdom and Torah psalms. Psalm 1 on the two ways, which is placed first as a gate to the whole book, and Psalm 119, an acrostic of a hundred and seventy-six verses in twenty-two stanzas of eight, every one of which mentions the law. It is the longest chapter in the Bible and a formidable piece of engineering.

Songs of ascents. Psalms 120 to 134, short and mostly beautiful, apparently sung by pilgrims going up to Jerusalem.

Imprecations. The psalms that call for harm to enemies, and they are not marginal. Psalm 69 asks that their table become a snare and their eyes be darkened. Psalm 109 asks that a man’s children be fatherless and his wife a widow. Psalm 137, which contains the loveliest opening in the book, ends by pronouncing happy the one who takes Babylonian infants and dashes them on the rock. Lectionaries omit these verses. Whether that is pastoral sense or a refusal to face what the book contains is a fair argument, and it is worth noting that they are honest about a feeling people actually have.

How to read it

Do not read the collection through at one sitting. It is a hymnbook, and reading it end to end is like reading a hymnal end to end.

Read by kind instead. Take Psalm 13, a short lament, and follow its five movements. Then Psalm 22 for the same shape at length. Then Psalm 88 for the one that refuses to resolve. Then 8, 19, 23, 51, 104, 121, 130 and 139.

Read them aloud. They were written to be sung and the parallelism carries in the ear in a way it does not on the page.

Choose a translation for what you want. Alter’s is the one to think with; he keeps the compactness of the Hebrew and his notes explain what the imagery is doing. Coverdale’s version in the Prayer Book is the one to say aloud, and it is what five centuries of English speakers have actually sung, inaccuracies included.

Read the imprecatory psalms rather than skipping them. They are in the book, they were prayed, and the question of what to do with a prayer for revenge that someone included in scripture is more interesting than the tidy version.

Watch how much later writing runs through them. Augustine wrote a commentary on all hundred and fifty. The monastic offices work through the whole Psalter every week. Herbert, Donne, Milton, Smart and Hopkins are all downstream. And when Jesus is quoted from the cross, he is quoting Psalm 22.

Questions it raises

• The lament is the commonest form. What does it mean that a tradition preserved complaint at the centre of its worship?
• The turn from complaint to trust usually has nothing to explain it. Is that faith, liturgy, or an editorial join?
• Psalm 88 ends in the dark. Why keep it, and what would be lost if it were removed?
• The imprecatory psalms ask for terrible things. Are they a record of what people feel, a permission, or a failure?
• The headings attribute most of these to David. Does it change anything to read Psalm 51 as his confession after Bathsheba rather than as an anonymous poem?
• These are poems and they are also liturgy. Does reading them privately, as literature, do something to them that singing them does not?