THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
tive purpose here, intending them for worship. Those psalms which refer to appearance in God's presence, or to abiding in that presence, indicate for themselves a relation to the temple and to worship. Examples of this significant type of expression are found in xv 1, xxiv 3, xxvii. 4, xxvi. 8, lxxxiv. 3. As there can be no doubt that to the poets of these psalms the highest good results from intimacy with God, so this intimacy is achieved by presence at the services of the temple. Indeed, presence in the temple, lingering in the presence of God, enjoying the hospitality of his house, are often the external means of participation in communion with God. Indeed, relation to the temple and its services has a great part in the Psalter. Psalms such as those cited were written with the eye upon the center of worship and the cult there domiciled, and had their motive been other than this, had they been merely figurative, they would have read differently.
Nevertheless, such an impression is not derived from all the psalms. Some psalms exist which echo the declaration that obedience is better than sacrifice^— a purely prophetic thought (cf. 3. Varied Pss. xl., 1., li.). Were there not such Voices of passages as Isa. i. 1 1 sqq. ; Amos v. 21 the Psalms, sqq., proving that there was present in Israel a realization that the external cultus as opposed to the ethical content and intent to worship God was of little worth, there might be doubt how such psalms as those just cited are to be taken; as it is, their meaning can not come into question. The twisting of these into a sense friendly to sacrifice is a rabbinical achievement, the value of which is to show how Jewish exegesis made it possible to include such compositions in the Psalter; it shows us the course of rabbinic thought. That the rabbis would receive into the worship-book psalms which, as they were understood, opposed sacrifice seems very strange; the only way to account for the phenomenon is that the sense was taken as different from the literal. Matthes has rightly acknowledged the importance of the exegesis of Jakob in interpreting Ps. xl. 6, li. 17, as not referring to a slain victim but to a repast, and in xl. 6, eliminating the ".offering" after "sin." •Yet in the place of these conceptions something little better is placed. What is said here is simply that exactness of performance at a given time is not what God wants. During the exile and the Syrian persecution, for external reasons the office of sacrifice was suspended, and God was satisfied with repentance and fulfilment of the other requirements of the law. As soon as the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt, then would God take delight in sacrifice (Ps. li. 18-19). To explain 1. 14 as referring to personal, special, and private offerings in opposition to the regular and public sacrifices is opposed to the immediate context and to the drift of the entire psalm (cf. verses 12-13). In short, the Psalter is full of references to the service of the temple, but this does not justify one in calling it the hymn-book of the second temple, especially if he regards the original purpose of its songs; indeed originally not a few of its psalms were not suited for such a service, but were accommodated to that use by the secondary process of editing.
III. History of the Collection: The history of
psalm composition as well as the discussion of the origin of the individual poems must start with a consideration of the origin of the collection. The points made by William Robertson Smith give the line of departure. The division of the 1. Indica- Psalter into five books has already
tions of been mentioned. The first book (Pss. Early i.-xli.) is ascribed to David (except i.,
Smaller ii., x., xxxiii.); the second (xlii.-lxxii.) Collections, chiefly to David and Asaph; the third (lxxiii.-lxxxix.) to Asaph, Korah, and other temple singers (only lxxxvi. to David); the fourth (xc.-cvi.) is of psalms principally anonymous; the fifth contains many ascribed to David, and the " songs of ascents." This analysis shows a close connection between books two and three, in that those alone contain the psalms of the gilds of temple singers, which have a prominent position. There is implied either composition by these gilds or (more likely) a legitimate adaptation to service, perhaps by setting the compositions to music after the manner of modern makers of hymnological collections. In this case, the " of " of the superscriptions stands not for authorship but for possession. It is to be noticed that the hymns attributed to these authors or gilds stand in little collections. But there are other leading facts. Prominent among these is the verse lxxii. 20, indicating that at this point a Davidic collection once ended; alongside this must be put another fact that in this collection are psalms which are not ascribed to David (note the Asaphic and Korahitic psalms), and, still further, despite the ending of Ps. lxxii., other Davidic psalms are in the present collection in the books which follow. It looks, moreover, as though the Davidic collection consisted of Ps. i. (iii.)-xli. and li.-lxxii., the last of which, ascribed to Solomon, was included because ascribed to David's son. Next is to be noted that the two parts named above, Pss. iii.-xli. and li.lxxii. contain duplicates (Ps. xiv.=liii., and xl. 13- 17 = lxx.). This suggests two collections for the most part different, but in these cases containing identical pieces. Possibly the collections contained other identical psalms, which were eliminated when they were united, these two doublets alone being left. Tradition is firm that a division existed early after Ps. xli. And the indications are that there were two Davidic collections and two smaller Davidic books, embracing Ps. iii., xli., and li.-lxxii. (lxxii.). A step in advance is made when it is observed that the change in the name of the deity familiar from study of the Pentateuch exists also here. Thus books two and three are prevailingly Elohistic, while books one, four, and five are prevailingly Jehovistic. This is noteworthy when it is seen that the doublets cited above are in different recensions in this respect, each corresponding in use of the divine name with the collection in which it stands. Of course this variation was not original, it must have come in through editorial work. Analogous phenomena in Chronicles reveal that there was a time when people began to avoid the name Yahweh and to use the more general term Elohim — passages from Samuel and Kings which are Jehovistic become Elohistic in Chronicles. This is not