J. Hastings.
PSALMS, BOOK OF.— The most important book, Biiil ill inipilern Heb. liililes the first in order, of the tliinl section of the OT Canon— that known as KithuhUim OT Hagiogrnjihft. It has been thought that in the time of our Lord the lik. of P.saliiis furnished a name for the KHimlihim as a wliole (see Lk 24" and cf. Jos. c. Ap. i. 8, who speaks of ' the remaining four liooks' as containing ' hymns to God and precepts for hnnian life'). It is not probable, however, that at this stage in the history
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of the Canon the title ' psalms ' would be .so used. The onler of tlie books in the Ilagio^'iapha, more- over, has varied gieatly. The earlie.st Rabbinic list (Bahn Bathra 146) gives the order as Ruth, I'.salms, .lob, Proverbs, etc., Ruth apparently being jilaceil before Psalms because it contained an ac- count of David's ancestry. Jerome {Prut. Gal.) gives the order as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, I'cclesi- astes. Canticles, etc. ; but this is not in accordance with pre\ailing Heb. tradition. In many MSS, especially the Spanish, the Books of Chronicles come first, then Psalms, Job, Proverbs, etc. The usual order is that of the German MSS followed in the printed edd. of the Heb. Bible — Psalms, Pro- verbs, Job (the poetical books, sometimes known by the technical name ncK, 'Trutli,' formed by tlie initial letters of the three books Job, Proverbs, P.salms), followed by the five Megilloth or rolls, the narrativ e books coming last (see Ryle, Canon of or, p. 22!) iX.). The present article will deal with the Name and Number of the psalms, the Formation of the Collection, the Date and Author- ship, the Titles and the Poetical Construction of the psjilms, the Moral and Religious Ideas pre- vailing in the Psalter, the Text and Versions, and finally with the Literature of the subject.
i. N' AME AND Number. — No name for the psalms collectively is found in the book itself or in the text of the OT. The nearest approach to such a designation is found in the name given to a portion of the Psalter in the subscription to Ps 72 (v.^) — ' The prayers (niV;;^) of David, son of Jesse, are ended, 'flie word ' jirayer' must here be understood in its broadest sense as any turning of the lieart towards God in supplication or in praise. See ahso 1 S 2' and Ilab 3'. Ps 17. 86. 90. 102 and 142 are also called ' prayers ' in their several inscriptions. The title for the book used by tlie Jews is ifp L'i-Ji (shortened D''?fi, apocop. '^b, Aram. I'Vn), i.e. Book of Praises, a name which was current in the time of Origen and Hippolytus, though the genuineness of the passage in which the latter dis- cusses the general introduction to Psalms has been questioned. In that passage the name stands trans- literated into Greek as Zi(ppa QcXd/j., and in Eus. HE vi. 25 Origen's title of the book is preserved as pifiXoi \fa\nCii' -(pap$e\>Kclii. Jerome confirms this by describing (in the preface to his Psalt. juxta licb.) the Heb. title as Scphar Tallim. Eusebius elsewhere transliterates Ziip-qp QiW-^v. The word which thus appropriately gave a name to the wliole book is found once only in the HeVi. te.xt as a title, Ps 145 being called n-'rici a Song of Praise. The regular plural of this word is tihilltith, Ps 22", this feminine form being distinguished from the ma.sc. tihillim, in that the former points more distinctly to the subject-matter, the latter to the form of the composition. Cf. Baethgen, who distinguishes (Pref. to Coram, p. iii) between ein Buck der Gesdngc and ein Gesanr/onch.
The usual name for a separate psalm is ■I'iDiO mizmOr, found in the titles ot 57 i).salms, from the third— probalilv the first in the earliest collection — onwards. Tlie word by its derivation indicates that which is to be sung to a musical accompani- ment, and in practice it is used only of a religious song. The more general word tj' shir, used for secular songs in Is 23'" and Am 8'", is found in combination with mizmOr 13 times in the titles ; 5 times the order is shir mizmur, and 8 times this order is reversed. Once (Ps46) the word shtr '\» used alone, and once it occurs in the form shiruh (Ps 18). The word corresponding to mizmir in Greek is \pa\)ibt, projierly a song to the accom- paniment of stringed instruiiicnts ; and the usual title of the book in the LXX is ^i/SXot ^aXyuuv. But in Cod. Alex, we find faXriiptoK, which i? properly the name of a stringed instrument.
146
PSALMS, BOOK OF
PSALMS, BOCK OF
adopted as a title of the book; hence Eng. 'Psalter.' The usual Greek title is quoted in St. Luke's writings, Lk 20''^, Ac 1°". The Syriac name Ktthahti de-rnazmiir6 presen'es a name which is not found in the O T as a plural, and which did not prevail as a collective title in subsequent Jewish usage.
The number of the psalms is 150, both according to the MT and the LXX. But the same total is preserved with a ditierent arrangement in detail. Only the first eight psalms and the last three are married by the same number in the two versions, the Greek combining Ps 9 and 10 in one, also Ps 114 and 115, whilst it divides Ps 116 and Ps 147 each into two parts severally numbered. This may be more clearly shown by the following table : —