and thanksgiving. Whereas prayers of lament or complaint psalms dominate Books I-III, the hymns and songs of praise are more numerous in Books IV-V. Broadly speaking, most of the psalms in Books I-III are thought to be of pre-exilic origin while the latter Books IV and V are usually considered to be mostly postexilic in origin. In this same manner praise becomes the goal of the Psalter in the way that praise is the goal of human life.
Praise is fundamental to any right understanding of the Psalms. A dialogical relationship between God and the people of God reflects the faith experience of the community that cries out in hope for the plenitude of God’s mercy, deliverance and redemption. The Psalms speak directly to the human heart. This dynamic element lies more often than not in an inherent ambiguity which is the subject of the Psalter: יהוה, who in love or anger, forgiveness or punishment, seeks to be the God of Israel, and Israel, which can only exist as the people of this God, in each historic moment, seeks to hear and respond to God’s call to them. It is YHWH who gives this particular people their corporate identity.
The compositions of the Psalms are primarily poetic but certainly not in the way we have come to understand poetry. Biblical prose is highly linear and sequential, moving from one event in time to the next through the ever present and in our English Bible versions. Prose is much more accessible to the contemporary reader, encouraging and inviting a dynamic interaction with the text. But the various poetic forms of the Psalms do not move so smoothly. Hebrew poems don’t typically tell a story so they lack the connective sinew which ties prose together. The short half-verses are bonded together in verbal parallelism and in turn mark the transition from one line to the next -a relatively tenuous exercise. Each line in Hebrew poetry functions more like a brick in a wall than it does a length of rope or a cable. However, very few languages are better suited to the form of noble poetry than is biblical Hebrew. In part, this is due to its very great strength of accent which normally falls on the last syllable, thus bearing the weight of sound and meaning carried by the word. The result is such that even Hebrew prose has a very strongly marked cadence or rhythm. Although our efforts to reproduce the sounds of the sung psalms it in its ancient and original state are completely futile, its sung sound must have been melodious–even ethereal–and exceedingly pleasant to the human ear. Because of this style of composition, and combined with the fact that Hebrew is a terse, pithy language all make the poetry of the psalms more difficult to access than the “friendlier” prose to which we are accustomed in the Bible.
When it comes to the translation of the Hebrew text into English the terseness of the original is almost always lost. Translation is more art than science and translators typically elongate and smooth out features of Hebrew poetry making it more challenging to access the original meaning of the text.
Nevertheless, we are not without a relatively high degree of confidence that—with some very few exceptions—the text of the Psalter is fundamentally reliable. In conveying accurately, the essence of these poetic compositions, they are affirmed as a whole and contribute to some of the most deeply intimate, moving and affective language in the entire Bible. The Psalms are the product of a community of faithful and observant worshipers. Together they sang and prayed what would gradually become, over a very long period of time, these unparalleled poems, songs, and prayers in praise of יהוה. Taken as a whole, they tell us that this is the way of Israel’s life and standing before יהוה.
This too is the genius of the Psalter. Its poetry speaks the language of every person because it mirrors not only the general and the typical, but also the particular and the specific. The first word is very often the personal divine name of God, יהוה. In the Book of Common Prayer, and in most English Bible versions as well, the name יהוה is translated LORD (all upper case); אדני Adonai, or Lord (lowercase), is translated as the epithet meaning Sovereign. This feature again represents the psalmists’ concern to preserve the sanctity of the holy and sacred Name: יהוה. In the use of this one word so much is compressed, especially allusions to the personal relationship with יהוה and the confession that [he] alone can save. Claus Westermann explains the structure of Hebrew poetry and rhyme in this way:
It is a feature of the Hebrew language (as well as the neighboring Semitic languages) that sentences rather than words or syllables are rhymed. The rhyme occurs neither in sound nor in the number of words but in the meaning of the sentences. In this feature the ancient idea is kept alive that all human speech consists not of words, but sentences. Not the single word but the sentence as a whole is the basic unit.51
It is from this perspective that thought-rhymes or sentence-rhymes called parallelism are to be understood. In the Psalms, singing and praying are still united; psalms are sung prayers or prayed singing. As songs they are at the same time what we call poetry but in a different sense than our modern poetry. The Psalms unite in themselves three separate types of word formulations: prayers (words directed to God in petition or praise), poetry (poetically formulated language), and songs (that go beyond the speaking or recital of a poem and become music). Poetic language, then, becomes the voice of the Hebrew Bible. This voice calls out to us from the distant vistas of history and is the community’s witness to ancient and foreign encounters with the Holy. It is never easy to determine the exact meaning of the text amid its many layered forms.
The full hearing of the psalms will be greatly enhanced when the familiar tendency to abstract content from form or to empty form of its content is overcome. To know the psalms are poetic is not to forget that they are Scripture. To read and hear them as Scripture requires that one receive them also as poetry. From either direction, understanding is all. 52
Establishing the historical context of a given psalm is all but impossible. The titles, where provided, are considered to be later additions. They are not part of the early text, and are thought not to be reliable for establishing any historical frame of reference. So at best we are confronted with material that is book-ended by the Babylonian exile–pre-exilic and post-exilic.
A critical and essential component of the hermeneutical task then involves interpreting the Psalms through a continuous reinterpretation as a method of studying how each psalm may be understood. Interacting with the texts themselves and paying close attention to the details of the language is demanded. Discerning the shape and shaping of the Psalter can provide the serious exegete with an interpretative vantage point. This is no modest task, as Klaus Seybold remarks:
In the practical work of exegesis on the Psalms it proves useful to begin by seeing how a psalmist opens his psalm, and how he closes it. In all speech, the first word is of paramount importance, as it marks the speaker’s point of attack, where he himself stands or professes to stand, from where he makes himself heard, in which direction he speaks or calls, and where he knows or presumes the listener to be. 53
An added complexity to early biblical Hebrew was the absence of vowel markings, punctuation, and cases. Sentence divisions—as we know them—as well as a system of notation indicating grammar were only added to the Hebrew text in the Middle Ages. The present division of the biblical text was adopted by Stephen Langton (1150–1228 CE) and was incorporated into the Hebrew text in the fourteenth-century CE. These divisions do not reflect the text’s original arrangement. With precious few exceptions, the dates and relative setting at which the hymns and prayers as they are now preserved in the Psalter, were originally composed, cannot be determined with anything like precision. It clearly appears that the great majority of them, like the proverbs and hymnic poems later collected in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, surfaced orally and were chanted or sung in communal worship in the temple before the fall of Jerusalem in the early sixth-century (587 BCE).
It is likely that some of them may come from David himself; others, not so likely. For example, we know that the psalms of Korah (Psalms 42, 44–49; 84–85; 87–88) most likely originated in at least the early eighth-century BCE near the ancient sanctuary of Dan in the far northern frontier of Israel. The head-waters of the ravines and torrents in the foothills of Mount Hermon is the most probable geographic location for many of these psalms. These “northern songs” most likely made their
