Theopedia

Book of Psalms

“Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.”

— Psalm 33:3

Overview

The Book of Psalms is the Old Testament’s collection of one hundred and fifty sacred songs and prayers, gathered for the worship of God at the tabernacle and temple.1 Within the Hebrew canon’s threefold division of Law, Prophets, and Writings, Psalms stands first among the Writings and lends its own name, in Jesus’s own speech, to that whole third division (Luke 24:44).2 It is poetry, not narrative or law, and its subject is the whole range of the believer’s experience before God: praise, confession, complaint, thanksgiving, and hope, addressed to him directly rather than taught about him at a distance.1

Author and Date

The Psalter gathers the work of several authors across many centuries rather than a single hand. Of the 150 psalms, seventy-three carry a Davidic title, and the whole book is referred to under David’s name in the New Testament (Acts 4:25; Heb. 4:7).3 Beyond David, twelve psalms are ascribed to Asaph, eleven to the sons of Korah, two to Solomon (Ps. 72, 127), and one each to Moses (Ps. 90) and to Ethan the Ezrahite (Ps. 89); the remaining fifty are anonymous, some of them apparently written as late as the exile and the return from Babylon.3 David himself is remembered in his own last words as one who “spoke by the Spirit of the Lord,” the word of the Lord on his tongue (2 Sam. 23:1-3), language Bavinck applies directly to his psalms as Scripture.4 The Psalter’s final compilation into its present five-book arrangement is usually credited to Ezra and cannot be earlier than his day, though the individual collections it draws together, the Asaph psalms, the Korahite psalms, the “songs of ascents,” were assembled for temple use well before that.5

Historical and Literary Context

The individual psalms arose across an unusually long span of Israel’s history, from Moses’s song in Psalm 90 to the exile lamented in Psalm 137, and were composed for the worship of the covenant community rather than for private reading alone.3 Many bear musical and liturgical notations, such as the dedication “to the chief musician” found in fifty-three psalms, marking them for use by the temple choir, and the fifteen “songs of degrees” (Ps. 120-134), traditionally associated with pilgrimage to Jerusalem’s feasts.6 The Psalter’s own compilation shows an editorial hand at work: it groups psalms sharing a title, such as the Asaph psalms (Ps. 73-83) and the Korahite psalms (Ps. 42-49), and psalms sharing similar content, and it closes with a doxology at the end of each of its first four books.5

Structure

The Psalter is arranged in five books, each closing in doxology except the fifth, for which the final psalm itself serves as the closing doxology for the whole collection.5 Book One (Ps. 1-41) is almost entirely Davidic and favors the divine name Yahweh over Elohim; Book Two (Ps. 42-72) opens with the Korahite psalms and closes with a subscription marking “the prayers of David the son of Jesse” as ended;5 Book Three (Ps. 73-89) is dominated by Asaph; Book Four (Ps. 90-106) is largely anonymous and liturgical in character; and Book Five (Ps. 107-150) gathers the remaining Davidic psalms alongside the songs of ascents and the closing hallelujah psalms.6 Some interpreters have compared this fivefold shape to the five books of the Torah, though the Psalter’s own text does not state that correspondence directly. Various attempts have also been made to classify the individual psalms by subject rather than by book. Modern scholarship, following this same impulse, groups the psalms into recurring types, laments, hymns of praise, royal psalms, wisdom psalms, and imprecatory psalms among them, a categorization one recent Christian ethicist calls “not only convenient for us” but bearing “a fair amount of objectivity,” even though the ancient poets themselves worked without these labels.7

Major Themes

The Psalms display the whole range of God’s grace toward his covenant people. Bavinck places the Psalter alongside Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes as poetic books that apply Israel’s earlier, objective revelation to the “religious-ethical aspects” of the believer’s own life; where Job wrestles with the justice of God and Proverbs teaches wisdom for daily living, “in the mirror of the experiences of God’s devout people, the Psalms display the manifold grace of God.”4

A large number of the psalms are messianic, prophesying the person and work of the coming Christ. Barrows traces this to the typical character of David’s own kingship: because David and his royal line were divinely appointed heads of the covenant people, their conflicts and final triumph over their enemies foreshadowed the greater conflicts and triumph of the Messiah, and “unless we adopt this principle, the view which the New Testament takes of a large number of Psalms…becomes utterly visionary.”8 This is why, Barrows notes, the Psalter is quoted in the New Testament more often than any other Old Testament book, Isaiah included.6

Some psalms call on God to judge the psalmist’s enemies. These imprecatory psalms (for example, Ps. 35, 69, 109, 137) raise their own distinct interpretive questions, addressed at length in Imprecatory Psalms.

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References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 265-267. ↩ ↩2

  2. Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: A. M. for William Lee, 1654), 29-30: “Our Saviour himself mentions this most ancient distinction, Luk. 24. 44. calling all the rest of the books (besides the Law and Prophets) Psalms.” ↩

  3. Barrows, 284-285. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture”: “in the mirror of the experiences of God’s devout people, the Psalms display the manifold grace of God. David, the sweet psalmist of Israel, spoke by the Spirit of the Lord, whose word was on his tongue (2 Sam. 23:1-3).” ↩ ↩2

  5. Barrows, 285-286. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Barrows, 286-287. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Ken Magnuson, “4. Aspects of Biblical Ethics: Old Testament,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2020), quoting Oliver O’Donovan: “Israel, I take it, never dreamed of the distinction between Wisdom literature and priestly code, royal psalms and psalms of lament; and yet such categorisation is not only convenient for us, but may claim a fair amount of objectivity.” ↩

  8. Barrows, 582-583. ↩