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The Psalms and the Bible

The book of the Psalms – sometimes also called the Psalter – has been at the centre of Jewish and Christian worship for over 2000 years, though individual psalms have been used in worship for much longer even than that. Indeed one of the most inspirational features of the Psalter is that it has been in constant use as a prayer book for at least 2000 years, if not longer. When we pray the words of the Psalms, we join our words to the words of those millions of Jews and Christians who have gone before us and have used this collection as their own prayer book.

Our English word ‘psalm’ comes from the Greek word psalmos, which means a song sung to harp music. Our name for the Psalms then seems to reflect how they were prayed. The Hebrew name for the Psalter is Tehillim, which means literally ‘praises’ and appears to be more connected to the content of the Psalms than to how they were prayed.

Five major types of psalms

The Hebrew name for the Psalter may have been ‘praises’, but you do not have to read very far through the Psalms to realize that not all psalms are psalms of praise. Some psalms contain far more grief and anger than they do praise. The further you read, the clearer it becomes that there are different types of psalms in the Psalter, and being able to recognize what type of psalm you are reading can be very helpful in understanding it better. There are five major types of psalms, although, of course, not all psalms fit easily into one category or another.

• Hymns – Many of the Psalms fall into the category of hymns. Hymns are focused around God, who he was and is, and what he has done. They often begin and end with a call to praise, with a middle section that describes more about who God is (as, for example, in Psalm 33).

• Laments – Another large group of psalms are best described as laments. Some laments are communal; others are individual. These psalms all have a similar form: they begin and end with a plea to God begging him to hear their cry, with a middle section that lays out the nature of the disaster. With the exception of Psalm 88, which is full of despair from beginning to end, the psalms of lament are striking in that they express their faith in God despite what is going on around them.

• Thanksgiving psalms – Connected to the laments are the thanksgiving psalms, which give thanks to God for what he has done to help the psalmist. They are most likely to have been used to accompany a sacrifice of thanksgiving in the temple.

• Royal psalms – The royal psalms are all, as their title suggests, about kings. They praise God for the king; they celebrate the king and all he has done; they pray for the king and declare his righteousness. Royal psalms are in form quite different from each other, and the only thing that connects them is their interest in the king.

• Wisdom psalms – The wisdom psalms stand out from the rest since they appear to arise less from immediate events of catastrophe or celebration and more from a particular way of looking at the world (a perspective that they share with books such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). As a result they focus attention on the importance of wisdom and the fear of the Lord, and seem to be instructing their hearers into a better way of being. A good example of a wisdom psalm is Psalm 1.

As well as these five major types of psalms there are a number of psalms that would best fit under the heading of miscellaneous. These psalms are quite different from each other and almost defy categorization.

Orientation, disorientation and reorientation

Scholars use the five major categories as a tool for understanding more about the Psalms and how they were first used. The Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann picked up this classification and took it a helpful step further as a means for us to read and understand the Psalms today. He observed that the majority of psalms in the categories above had one of three effects: orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

What he meant by this was that there are some psalms that reflect the ordinariness of life. These he identified as psalms of orientation (see for example Psalm 33). These psalms arise out of and speak into lives that are settled, clear and purposeful. In these God’s presence is easily discerned and identified.

The problem is that our lives can all too easily fall apart – with very little notice. When they do, we feel as though we are sucked down into a deep pit and that God is absent and uncaring. Psalms of disorientation (such as Psalm 22) are written out of such an experience, but nevertheless are addressed to God and reflect the assurance of a relationship with God despite the events that crush us.

Psalms of reorientation (such as Psalm 103) reflect faith after catastrophe and explore the nature of faith in God following such an experience.

In other words, the majority of psalms speak out of and into genuine experience – experience that resonates as strongly today as it did when the Psalms were first written. Indeed, it is the genuineness of this experience that means that the Psalms still speak powerfully to so many people; they are not just of historic interest, but remain profoundly relevant as prayers that speak out of real emotion. Many people have found over the years that praying with the Psalms has helped them bring what they are feeling to God in both the good times and the bad.

The five books of the Psalter

So far we have looked at the groupings of individual psalms based on their form and content. It is worth noting, however, that the Psalter has already grouped the Psalms together in five collections (1–41; 42–72; 73–89; 90–106; 107–150). The collections are each marked at the end with a doxology or blessing (see 41.13; 72.18-19; 89.52), and the final book ends with a grand doxology of a whole psalm. It appears that these five collections had a life as collections before they were all gathered together into one book. This is because there are some duplicates (see, for example, Psalms 14 and 53). Every time there are duplicate psalms, they appear in two different collections. The best explanation for this is that by the time the Psalter was gathered together as a whole collection, the smaller collections were so well known as they were that it was not possible to take the duplicate psalms out.

Having said this, the whole Psalter itself has movement within it. Although lament and praise are woven together throughout the whole book, there are many more laments in the first half of the Psalter and many more thanksgivings in the second half, until you get to the end of the Psalter, which contains pure unadulterated praise. It is also worth noting that the central psalm (if you count volume of words not psalm numbers) is Psalm 88, which is the psalm mentioned above as being despairing from beginning to end. It is almost as though the whole Psalter sinks into deep disorientation at its heart before turning the corner into reorientation. As a result, the Psalter as a whole reflects the movement of many psalms of lament, which journey into the depths of despair and then out again in praise and thanksgiving.

Poetry and parallelism

Hebrew poetry, while recognizable as poetry, is quite different from English poetry, since rhythm and rhyme are less important for it than assonance and parallelism. Parallelism, in particular, is an unusual and striking feature of Hebrew poetry. In its basic form parallelism, as its name suggests, means that what has just been said is repeated in a slightly different form in the line below. See, for example, Psalm 24.1-2:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that fills it,

the compass of the world and all who dwell therein.

For he has founded it upon the seas

and set it firm upon the rivers of the deep.

As this example illustrates, it is this parallelism that lends the psalms poetic rhythm, rather than the syllables of individual lines. Another key feature is that the parallel lines match each other in word order and structure. You can see this particularly clearly in the next verse of Psalm 24 (v.3):

‘Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord,

or who can rise up in his holy place?’

The balancing of the question word in the two lines again lends a poetic rhythm to the text.

The parallelism is not, however, always symmetrical. Sometimes it contains opposites (and is therefore called antithetical parallelism). See for example, Psalm 18.27:

With the pure you show yourself pure,

but with the crooked you show yourself perverse.

Or it can develop an idea (called step or synthetic parallelism), as in Psalm 103.13:

As a father has compassion on his children,

so is the Lord merciful towards those who fear him.

As a result, one of the key features of Hebrew poetry is the way in which the form of the poem carries its content through repetition, contrast and development.

An extreme version of this is acrostic psalms, in which each paragraph, line or couplet begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Examples of this can be found in Psalms 9, 10, 25, 34, 111, 112, 119 and 145. Unfortunately, as these are almost impossible to translate into English like this, we cannot normally see them. The most elaborate of these is Psalm 119, which begins each paragraph (of 8 lines each) with consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

A note on Selah: A little word that occurs 71 times in the Psalms is the word selah (see Psalm 3, for example) – it is there in most English translations too. Much has been written about this very small word, largely because it is hard to be sure what it means. Possibly the most likely explanation is that it indicated a break when the musicians played some music before the words of the psalm began again.

Titles and authorship

Many people want to discuss the authorship of the book of Psalms, but the problem is that it is very difficult to do so with any level of certainty. Most psalms have a title or ascription. Two thirds of these attribute the Psalms to David; the others are ascribed to a wide variety of other authors. There can be no doubt that some of the Psalms are very old indeed, but it is almost impossible to prove (or disprove) actual authorship. In reality, the authorship of the book of Psalms is of lesser importance than for other books. The Psalms have been prayed, prayed again and re-prayed for such a long time that who first said them has become less relevant than who is praying them again now. The Psalms have many, many authors – a new one each time they are prayed from the heart.

Paula Gooder