The Book of Psalms, known in Yehudit (Hebrew) as Tehilim (תהלים), is generally regarded as the first book of the "Writings" (Ketuvim or Hagiographa), which is to say the third section of the Tanach, the complete Yehudit Scriptures comprised of Torah (the 5 Books of Mosheh), Neviyim (the historical and prophetic writings) and Ketuvim (the poetry and literature).
However, some Masoretic manuscripts, especially the Spanish, begin the "Ketuvim" with Chronicles (Paralipomena, Παραλειπομένων - Divrey ha Yamim in the Masoretic version). The confusion probably arises from the Septuagint - the Greek translation by the Jewish community of Egypt that began in the 3rd century BCE but took until 132 CE to complete - which separates the Wisdom Literature within Ketuvim, and places Psalms first there. The Wisdom literature is itself (see "Codex Alexandrinus") placed as the third section, and follows the Prophets.
None of this really matters of course, except insofar as it establishes controversy around the Psalms, alerting us to the amount that we simply do not know, and cannot know, and never will know, about when they were written, by whom, for what purpose, where, and at what time - or more likely multiple plurals for every one of those items.
Even the name is a matter of debate, dispute and controversy. The Yehudit, as noted above, is Tehilim or "praises" (from HALAL = "to praise" - though there is great irony in its being so similar to TAHALAH, which appears in Job 4:18 and means "folly" or "going astray"); whence "Book of Praises" - though there is also the very specific group of Psalms known as "Hallel", which likewise means "praise", but which is usually only used for certain groups of Psalms - though which Psalms are in that group is itself disputed:104-107, 111-117, 135-136, 146-150 have all been used at some point of Jewish history (in the Vulgate and elsewhere these are listed as 103-106, 110-116, 136-138, 145-150) but 113-118 are the most commonly used today.
Hippolytus (the Roman theologian rather than the Greek demi-deity), writing his "Hebraioi periegrapsanten biblon Sephra theleim" around 200 CE, used Tehilim, but alas many scholars doubt the authenticity of this fragment. They do not, however, dispute the title of Origen's transliteration of the Psalms into Greek, known as the "Spharthelleim"; nor, picking up the Oregon, "sephar tallim, quod interpretatur volumen hymnorum” which is how Saint Jerome (P.L. 28:1124) referred to them. However - and there is always a however - the name "praises" does not actually indicate the contents of all the Psalms; and only Psalm 144 (which in some versions is Psalm 145) actually carries the word "praise" in its title.
So a Psalm is a poem of set structure, its words to be sung to the accompaniment of one or more stringed instruments, and very often the addition of ... you can find as full a list as the scholars can compile here. So, as you will see, there are among the Psalms Mizmorim, Shirim, Mizmor Shirim, and Shir Mizmorim (and others which have entirely different descriptors, or no descriptor at all), which are four different ways of describing the connection between the music and the words. This will become self-explanatory as you read on through the anthology. See for example my translation of Psalm 105:2.
But just to complete this complicated picture of confusions, the Greek Christian Bible when it refers to the Psalms calls them Psalmoi (Luke 24:44), Biblos Psalmon (Luke 20:42; Acts 1:20), and simply "David" (Hebrews 4:7), while the Latin Vulgate follows the Greek text and translates Psalmi as "Liber Psalmorum", but the Syriac Bible names the collection "Mazmore".
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Let me break all of the above down, and try to flesh it out.
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First: how many Psalms are there?
Most editions that you can buy in shops or find at your religious shrine, whether in Yehudit or translation, whether Jewish or otherwise, will have 150, though they may vary in which 150, and in what order.
Some Masoretic manuscripts, which is to say the mediaeval Jewish versions, have fewer than 150, though how many fewer, and which ones are left out, also varies.
All three Septuagint manuscripts (Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus) have 151, but expressly state that the last Psalm is an addition.
The Syriac, as well as the three Septuagint codices, also have Psalms 152-155, the texts of which (in English) are at this link, as well as being included in my collection.
The Latin "Vulgate" uses the same numbers as the Septuagint, but leaves out Psalm 152.
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And then, if you think that was complex: How many sub-sections are there?
The Psalter (which is itself a decision to create an anthology out of pieces that were not written with that anthology in mind, but in their own context, individually) is thought to be divided into five books, and most translations follow this. The first four are determined as being ended because they end with what is called in Greek a doxology, a hymn of praise to the deity. The fifth does not have a doxology; but as made clear above, it is also uncertain whether the fifth has an ending at all, and if so, where - or if we accept the 150 as definitive, the text of 150 could perfectly well be regarded as closing doxology, and so it does have one.
The five sections, in the traditional version, are 1-41, 42-72, 73-89, 90-106 and 107-150; the "doxology" verses are 41:14, 72:18-20, 89:53, 106:48 and 150, as noted above, both is itself one and does not have one.
This may of course be a complete falsehood, especially as the closing hymns of the first three books have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Psalms that have precded them in that book; and besides, praising the deity is common to 90% of the Psalms, so why make the distinction with these in particular?
Plus, the one at the end of book four belongs to Psalm 106, rather than it being an added phrase, and it is highly debateable whether 106 is the end of a book, precisely because 107 appears to be its continuation.
In the Masoretic text, the doxology is immediately followed by an ordinal adjective indicating the number of the succeeding book; not so in the Septuagint and Vulgate. And the Masoretic is anyway a late mediaeval addition, a means of supporting the 5-book theory rather than a source of that theory.
The division into five parts is explained in a Midrash on Psalm 1, which tells us that David gave the Beney Yisra-El five books of Psalms to correspond to the five books of the Law given them by Mosheh. As we know that Mosheh did not actually give any books, that at the very most (if he even existed) he may have left behind some wax or clay tablets with laws inscribed on them in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and that the Mosaic books are the creation-and-redaction-and reredaction of several later eras, the Midrashic theory is more a matter of faith and theology than archeological forensics, and so may be discounted by the non-religious.
Which brings us to the titles of the individual Psalms:
First, the addressee:
All but thirty-four ("the orphan Psalms") have some kind of a title in the Yehudit version; both the Septuagint and the Vulgate have supplied their own titles where titles were lacking. The thirty-four "orphans" are numbers 1, 3, 10, 23, 43, 71, 91, 93-97, 99, 104-106, 107, 111-119, 135-137, 146-150.
In Book 1, Psalms 1, 2, 10 and 33 are anonymous (Psalm 33 is Davidic in the Septuagint), the rest are "attributed to David" though LE DAVID really means "for" or "to", and not "by". It is highly improbable that there even was a human king named David (or fully Yedid-Yah, "the beloved of the moon-goddess"), let alone the one whose "history" is told in the Tanach, let alone one who could write poetry and compose music between cabinet meetings and local wars.
In Book Two:
Psalms 43, 46, 71 are anonymous;
Psalms 42-49 are addressed to "the Beney Korach", which, like all of these prophetic and musical "Beney", does not mean "sons", though they may well have been family originally, but guilds - and guilds throughout history have guaranteed apprenticeships to sons, at some epochs even required sons to follow fathers.
The Beney Korach are described as "a family of Temple singers" in 2 Chronicles 20:19, so we can read them as the choir; however, Ezra 2:41 states very clearly that the Beney Asaph were the choir, though numerous other references are just as clear that the Beney Asaph, as well as the Beney Eitan, provided the main instruments - strings and reeds, possibly also percussion though that may have been the provenance of the women, using cymbals and tambours - and Heman was probably the Menatse'ach, the conductor cum artistic director - see my notes on this later in this essay, but also note from Psalm 75:1 that Asaph was not the Menatse'ach.
Much more detail on all of this in 1 Chronicles 15, and even more in 1 Chronicles 16.
Did the Korachites write the Psalms, or were they written for them to sing? Quite possibly both, but probably one individual author on each occasion, and at any point of history from their Davidic inception (whenever that was) to their Babylonian demise - probably about six hundred years; though the constant theme of Messianic idealism, and the specificity of their historical allusions, does seem to limit them to the latter third of that time-frame, the epoch of First Yesha-Yah (Isaiah) and the return from exile (circa 650-536 BCE). What we can say is that there appears to be a "house style" in the Korachic Psalms: "a great love for the Holy City; a yearning for the public worship of Yisra-El; a supreme trust in YHVH; and a poetic form which is simple, elegant, artistic, and well-balanced", and I only wish I had written down which scholar wrote that, but I am afraid that I failed to do so and cannot now locate it.
Psalms 46 and 47 are Davidic in the Septuagint and Vulgate.
Psalm 50 is "attributed to" Asaph, for more detail on whom see below.
Psalms 51-72 are "for the Director" (whoever was standing in for von Karajan or Bernstein or Rattle that evening).
Psalms 62 and 77 are described as Al-Yedutun - my fuller explanation of this, and of all these names, titles, etc, can be found in the page for the Psalm in question.
Psalm 72 is dedicated to Shelomoh (Solomon), as is 127.
In Book 3:
73-83 are all "for Asaph", who may be a person, or may be the word "anthology" itself (LE'ESOPH means "to collect"). All the Psalms attributed to him are national in character, but pertain to such widely-separated periods of Yisra-Eli history that they cannot be "by" the same person. Psalm 74 appears to have been written during the Babylonian Exile, which is to say after 586 BCE. Psalm 83 may belong to the early Persian period, at or after 536 BCE, but more likely to the havoc wrought by the Assyrian invasion of Tiglath-pileser III in 737 BCE. Either way, this cannot have been the same Asaph who appears in the "history" of King David, circa 1000 BCE; though it may be that Asaph, like the names of the Prophets, was a title, and each head of that particular Guild assumed the name upon appointment (Oxford and Cambridge colleges work on the same principal - and yes, I do mean principal, as well as principle).
For the [little] information [that we have about him], Asaph was a Levite, meaning the priestly "guild" rather than the tribe, the son of Berech-Yahu (Barachias in the English, probably Berech-Yah originally), according to 1 Chronicles 6:39, and one of the three chiefs of the Levitical choir (1 Chronicles 15:17). The Beney Asaph were set aside "to prophesy with harps and with psalteries and with cymbals" according to 1 Chronicles 25:1, or "harps, lyres and cymbals according to 1 Chronicles 15:16) - though "prophesy" clearly does not mean reading the tea-leaves so much as providing the orchestra (Yedutun also gets a mention in that passage) - and that orchestra was primarily liturgical, not cultural: in the royal tombs of Ur the king and his celestial court died to the playing of a harp, leading us to wonder if David was actually playing for Sha'ul's death, rather than his migraines; or is this simply further confirmation that Sha'ul = She'ol?
In Book 5 there are 27 anonymous Psalms:
108-110, 122, 124, 131, 133, 138-145 are Davidic.
127 is adressed to Shelomoh (Solomon).
The Septuagint and Vulgate both assign Psalm 137 to David, which is simply absurd as it was self-evidently written, in Babylon, during the exile, at some point between 586 and 536 BCE; and 146-148 to Aggeus (the Prophet Chagi or Haggai) and Zechar-Yah, who likewise belong to that epoch.
Then, the type of Psalm:
Mizmor: the musical accompaniment rather than the words (the lyre, rather than the lyric); probably a string instrument, of which there were several, including the lyre, the lute and harps with various numbers of strings, from one to ten - see 98:5. The Septuagint translates Mizmor as Psalmos, as noted earlier, picking up, or should I say plucking out, from all its possible meanings, the sound achieved by fingering those strings. The Vulgate then Latinizes it to Psalmus, and the word Psalm enters the English language from there. So a Mizmor is "a song set to stringed accompaniment", with the emphasis on the accompaniment. There are 57 Psalms, most of them Davidic, with the title Mizmor.
Shir: literally means "song" (though it is not easy to distinguish a song from a poem, the latter also being a Shir), which the Septuagint calls an Ode, and the Vulgate a Canticum; a song either way. As a generic term it is used thirty times in the titles of the Psalms, twelve of them coupled in one direction or the other with Mizmor, and even more often in the texts of the Psalms and of other books. When the term is used in the Psalms (see for example 42:9; 69:31 and 28:7) it usually denotes a sacred song; but elsewhere in the Tanach it is of a much more generally lyrical sort, even to the point of being a folk-song or a party-tune (cf Genesis 31:27 and Isaiah 30:29), even a love poem, as in the "Song of Songs", which is Shir ha Shirim in Yehudit; and in Isaiah 24:9 and Ecclesiastes 7:5 it provides what ROAC in its exegesis of the Psalms splendidly calls "a bacchanalian ballad".
Zenner also argues that the original form of Psalms 14 "originally combined" with 15 appears to have been a choral ode too. The two strophes and the epode (explanation of these terms comes later), he claims, belong to Psalm 14, but the two antistrophes to Psalm 70, and he insists that, when the Redactor broke up the original ode, he put each portion into the Psalter twice: so Psalm 14 repeats as Psalm 53, Psalm 80 is found again in Psalm 40:14-18, as are Psalm 108:2-6 in Psalm 57:8-12, Psalm 108:7-14 in Psalm 60:7-14, and Psalm 71:1-3 in Psalm 31:2-4 (not obvious why he places them this way around when the other is surely more logical).
Maskil: which the (Greek) Septuagint renders as "Synedeos", or "Eis Synesin", and the (Latin) Vulgate as "Intellectus" or "ad intellectum", all of which can best be stated in English as "a didactic poem", and which can be found in Psalms 32, 42, 44, 45, 52, 55, 74, 78, 88, 89 and 144.
The word is used inside several of the Psalms as well, giving us a better context to determine the precise meaning. In the Hiph'il form, for example, in Psalm 32:8, as well as 1 Chronicles 28:19, both infering that a Maskil is a Psalm for teaching purposes, though what exacly it is teaching is not obvious - perhaps how to write a Maskil, in at least one case. The only two that are overtly didactic in the dreadful way that we expect front-loading in the classroom to provide catechism by rote-learning are Psalms 32 and 78.
Other uses of the word are worth tracking, such as 2 Chronicles 30:22 and Psalm 47:7, Isaiah 41:20 and Job 34:27.
Tephilah: which is "Proseuche" in the Septuagint, "Oratio" in the Vulgate, occurs in Psalms, 17, 86, 90, 102 and 142, and appears inside the text in the doxology to Book II, which is to say Psalm 72:20: "The prayers of David ben Yishai are now ended". LEHITPALEL, presumably from the same root (bear with me!), means "to pray", and Tephilah (or Tefilah, as you prefer) is still the word used for Jewish prayers to this day.
I have to digress again though, because the word TEPHILAH is fascinating - to an etymologist anyway. TOPHEL is a village (today called Tufileh) to the south-east of the Dead Sea (Deuteronomy 1:1), but it definitely does not get its name from the vast quantities of bitumen and potash that are almost certainly the lavic residue of an ancient volcanic eruption, the one depicted in the story of Lot in Genesis 18 and 19, the one depicted in the legend of the "pillar of cloud by day" and the "pillar of fire by night" in Exodus 13.
The root is TAPHAL, which means "to spit out", which of course volcanoes do, and is also used for "gluing" and "sticking", probably because it became the word for "lime" (not the fruit); but mostly it was the adjective for anything "unsalted" or "unseasoned" or "insipid" (cf Job 6:6), whence, metaphorically, it became the colloquialism for "foolish" (cf Lamentations 2:14), even "impious" (cf Jeremiah 23:13), or plain "silly" (cf Job 24:12).
How do we get from that to TEFILAH as "prayer"? Look at 2 Kings 19:4, Isaiah 37:4 (the same text, but in a different book), Jeremiah 7:16 and 11:14, and there is a sense of intercession as a process, figuratively anyway, of putting lime on the soul so that it adheres better; and to pray to the deity is to ask the deity to intercede. Look at Psalm 4:2 or 109:4 and there is a sense of something being "spat out", "unsalted and unseasoned", straight from the heart, the gut even, as prayer with Kavanah (intensity and sincerity) should be. Even better Nehemiah 1:6, where both Tefilah and Leitpalel are used in the same verse - and then we realise that, wait a minute, the root of the verb "to pray" - LEHITPALEL - is not the same as the root of the word for "prayer" - TEFILAH!
No indeed, but at some point along the way - definitely before Nechem-Yah as the text I just cited confirms - the two became one, and the root PALAL, which has the sense of "executing judgement", in the reflexive and hopefully the reflective HIPHIL, fulfills both goals of a service of worship, the intervention of the deity and the forgiveness that follows confession and judgement.
Tehilah: which the Septuagint renders as "Ainesis", and the Vulgate as "Laudatio", is the word that gives us the Yehudit title of the anthology, "Tehilim"; ironically, or perhaps for this reason deliberately, there is only one Psalm which has this as its title, Psalm 145.
Michtam: which is "Stelographia" or "Eis Stelographian" in the Septuagint, "Tituli Inscriptio" or "In Tituli Inscriptionem" in the Vulgate, is used as a descriptor of just eight Psalms, 16, and 54-60, all of them Davidic. And the truth is: we have no idea what the root was, or what the word meant; and the only other usage outside the Psalms is Isaiah 38:9, which anyway the Masoretes reckoned was a scribal error, and most versions (as per the link) have now altered Michtam to Michtav, which translates as "writing", though really, being in the Hiphil, that means something "dictated", to a scribe or secretary. Should we then regard the usages in the Psalms as the same error? Or has the scriptural error simply been replaced with a different one?
Or is it possible, based on the "unsalted" and the "foolish" of Tefilah, that the logical root does apply? KATAM (כתם), which means "stained" or "soiled" in Jeremiah 2:22, its only textual appearance, and decidedly figurative in that cameo.
Or there is another possibility, though how that root gets from "stained" to "gold" is a question for the psychologists of lucre! Gold is KETEM repeatedly in Job (28:16, 31:24), and significantly for us in Psalm 45:10. The clue lies in the Arabic, where the same root means "to lay up" or "hide away", and the gold in question in all these references is the lucre placed in the Treasury. So is a MICHTAM simply a poetical "treasure"? Gold in other contexts is always ZAHAV (זהב).
Shigayon: which the Septuagint ducks by simply calling them "Psalmos", and the Vulgate pretends that it understands the meaning by showing off multivalences with "Psalmus", "Aquila", "Agnonma", "Symmachus and Theodotion", "hyper agnoias", and in Jerome's notes "ignoratio or pro ignoratione" as well, this latter exclusively for Psalm 7. The root means "to wander", and "to reel", and in today's slang anything awesome wonderful or marvellous is Shigayon with an exclamation mark! The overall sense is either a speight of madness (the word is also used today for an obsession or an idée fixe), and/or a Scottish-style jig (they had bagpipes back then so it could be), and/or "a wild dithyrambic ode with a reeling, wandering rhythm", which may actually be a combination of the first two definitions.
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Which brings us to the titles of the individual Psalms:
First, the addressee:
All but thirty-four ("the orphan Psalms") have some kind of a title in the Yehudit version; both the Septuagint and the Vulgate have supplied their own titles where titles were lacking. The thirty-four "orphans" are numbers 1, 3, 10, 23, 43, 71, 91, 93-97, 99, 104-106, 107, 111-119, 135-137, 146-150.
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In Book 1, Psalms 1, 2, 10 and 33 are anonymous (Psalm 33 is Davidic in the Septuagint), the rest are "attributed to David" though LE DAVID really means "for" or "to", and not "by". It is highly improbable that there even was a human king named David (or fully Yedid-Yah, "the beloved of the moon-goddess"), let alone the one whose "history" is told in the Tanach, let alone one who could write poetry and compose music between cabinet meetings and local wars.
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In Book Two:
Psalms 43, 46, 71 are anonymous;
Psalms 42-49 are addressed to "the Beney Korach", which, like all of these prophetic and musical "Beney", does not mean "sons", though they may well have been family originally, but guilds - and guilds throughout history have guaranteed apprenticeships to sons, at some epochs even required sons to follow fathers.
The Beney Korach are described as "a family of Temple singers" in 2 Chronicles 20:19, so we can read them as the choir; however, Ezra 2:41 states very clearly that the Beney Asaph were the choir, though numerous other references are just as clear that the Beney Asaph, as well as the Beney Eitan, provided the main instruments - strings and reeds, possibly also percussion though that may have been the provenance of the women, using cymbals and tambours - and Heman was probably the Menatse'ach, the conductor cum artistic director - see my notes on this later in this essay, but also note from Psalm 75:1 that Asaph was not the Menatse'ach.
Much more detail on all of this in 1 Chronicles 15, and even more in 1 Chronicles 16.
Did the Korachites write the Psalms, or were they written for them to sing? Quite possibly both, but probably one individual author on each occasion, and at any point of history from their Davidic inception (whenever that was) to their Babylonian demise - probably about six hundred years; though the constant theme of Messianic idealism, and the specificity of their historical allusions, does seem to limit them to the latter third of that time-frame, the epoch of First Yesha-Yah (Isaiah) and the return from exile (circa 650-536 BCE). What we can say is that there appears to be a "house style" in the Korachic Psalms: "a great love for the Holy City; a yearning for the public worship of Yisra-El; a supreme trust in YHVH; and a poetic form which is simple, elegant, artistic, and well-balanced", and I only wish I had written down which scholar wrote that, but I am afraid that I failed to do so and cannot now locate it.
Psalms 46 and 47 are Davidic in the Septuagint and Vulgate.
Psalm 50 is "attributed to" Asaph, for more detail on whom see below.
Psalms 51-72 are "for the Director" (whoever was standing in for von Karajan or Bernstein or Rattle that evening).
Psalms 62 and 77 are described as Al-Yedutun - my fuller explanation of this, and of all these names, titles, etc, can be found in the page for the Psalm in question.
Psalm 72 is dedicated to Shelomoh (Solomon), as is 127.
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In Book 3:
73-83 are all "for Asaph", who may be a person, or may be the word "anthology" itself (LE'ESOPH means "to collect"). All the Psalms attributed to him are national in character, but pertain to such widely-separated periods of Yisra-Eli history that they cannot be "by" the same person. Psalm 74 appears to have been written during the Babylonian Exile, which is to say after 586 BCE. Psalm 83 may belong to the early Persian period, at or after 536 BCE, but more likely to the havoc wrought by the Assyrian invasion of Tiglath-pileser III in 737 BCE. Either way, this cannot have been the same Asaph who appears in the "history" of King David, circa 1000 BCE; though it may be that Asaph, like the names of the Prophets, was a title, and each head of that particular Guild assumed the name upon appointment (Oxford and Cambridge colleges work on the same principal - and yes, I do mean principal, as well as principle).
For the [little] information [that we have about him], Asaph was a Levite, meaning the priestly "guild" rather than the tribe, the son of Berech-Yahu (Barachias in the English, probably Berech-Yah originally), according to 1 Chronicles 6:39, and one of the three chiefs of the Levitical choir (1 Chronicles 15:17). The Beney Asaph were set aside "to prophesy with harps and with psalteries and with cymbals" according to 1 Chronicles 25:1, or "harps, lyres and cymbals according to 1 Chronicles 15:16) - though "prophesy" clearly does not mean reading the tea-leaves so much as providing the orchestra (Yedutun also gets a mention in that passage) - and that orchestra was primarily liturgical, not cultural: in the royal tombs of Ur the king and his celestial court died to the playing of a harp, leading us to wonder if David was actually playing for Sha'ul's death, rather than his migraines; or is this simply further confirmation that Sha'ul = She'ol?
It is of course possible that members of this "family" also composed the Psalms which later were collected into an Asaph Psalter. The features of these Asaph psalms are uniform: frequent allusions to the history of Yisra-El with a didactic purpose; sublimity and vehemence of style; vivid description; an exalted conception of the deity.
84, 85, 87 and 88 are again for the Beney Korach.
But 88 is also specifically for Heyman (see 1 Chronicles 6:33 where he is described as a singer, though also listed first among the musicians), and 89 is for Eitan (see 1 Chronicles 6:42 and 6:44, where two different Eitans are listed among the musicians, the first in Asaph's section, on Heyman's right hand, the second among the Beney Merari, who sat on Heyman's left hand - a separation, we have to assume, of strings from wind instruments, though which is which is more difficult to speculate; and it may even be a separation of rows rather than instruments, or stereophonic pairings). Having parenthesised which, the Eitan of Psalm 89 may well be neither of these, but rather the Eitan ben Kusha-Yahu refererred to in 1 Chronicles 15:17 (having qualified which, Kusha-Yahu is highly likely a Redactor's editing of the second Eitan's name, which was Eitan ben Kishi in 6:29 - 6:44 in some versions - and so they are in fact the same person).
There are also scholars down the centuries who have wondered whether Eitan and Yeditun are not in fact the same name. I leave it to them to make their own case. Yeditun is named in Psalms 39, 62 and 77, though actually 62 has AL YEDUTUN, the word sourced in the Hiphil form of YADAH, which means "thanks" and is used to mean both "praise" and "celebration" - not a person's name at all, but the title of a previous Psalm or hymn that is being borrowed here.
Psalm 90 has LE MOSHEH in its dedication, but clearly it was not written by him, or if it was then this must be a translation from either Egyptian or Kinnahu, the only languages he is likely to have known, unless perhaps he acquired some Midyani while he was with Yitro. The author imitates Mosheh's songs in Deuteronomy 32 and 33, and pays due homage and acknowledgement through the dedication.
In Book 4:
101 and 103 are Davidic.
Septuagint assigns 91, 93-97 and 104 to David. The remainder are anonymous.
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84, 85, 87 and 88 are again for the Beney Korach.
But 88 is also specifically for Heyman (see 1 Chronicles 6:33 where he is described as a singer, though also listed first among the musicians), and 89 is for Eitan (see 1 Chronicles 6:42 and 6:44, where two different Eitans are listed among the musicians, the first in Asaph's section, on Heyman's right hand, the second among the Beney Merari, who sat on Heyman's left hand - a separation, we have to assume, of strings from wind instruments, though which is which is more difficult to speculate; and it may even be a separation of rows rather than instruments, or stereophonic pairings). Having parenthesised which, the Eitan of Psalm 89 may well be neither of these, but rather the Eitan ben Kusha-Yahu refererred to in 1 Chronicles 15:17 (having qualified which, Kusha-Yahu is highly likely a Redactor's editing of the second Eitan's name, which was Eitan ben Kishi in 6:29 - 6:44 in some versions - and so they are in fact the same person).
There are also scholars down the centuries who have wondered whether Eitan and Yeditun are not in fact the same name. I leave it to them to make their own case. Yeditun is named in Psalms 39, 62 and 77, though actually 62 has AL YEDUTUN, the word sourced in the Hiphil form of YADAH, which means "thanks" and is used to mean both "praise" and "celebration" - not a person's name at all, but the title of a previous Psalm or hymn that is being borrowed here.
Psalm 90 has LE MOSHEH in its dedication, but clearly it was not written by him, or if it was then this must be a translation from either Egyptian or Kinnahu, the only languages he is likely to have known, unless perhaps he acquired some Midyani while he was with Yitro. The author imitates Mosheh's songs in Deuteronomy 32 and 33, and pays due homage and acknowledgement through the dedication.
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In Book 4:
101 and 103 are Davidic.
Septuagint assigns 91, 93-97 and 104 to David. The remainder are anonymous.
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In Book 5 there are 27 anonymous Psalms:
108-110, 122, 124, 131, 133, 138-145 are Davidic.
127 is adressed to Shelomoh (Solomon).
The Septuagint and Vulgate both assign Psalm 137 to David, which is simply absurd as it was self-evidently written, in Babylon, during the exile, at some point between 586 and 536 BCE; and 146-148 to Aggeus (the Prophet Chagi or Haggai) and Zechar-Yah, who likewise belong to that epoch.
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Then, the type of Psalm:
Mizmor: the musical accompaniment rather than the words (the lyre, rather than the lyric); probably a string instrument, of which there were several, including the lyre, the lute and harps with various numbers of strings, from one to ten - see 98:5. The Septuagint translates Mizmor as Psalmos, as noted earlier, picking up, or should I say plucking out, from all its possible meanings, the sound achieved by fingering those strings. The Vulgate then Latinizes it to Psalmus, and the word Psalm enters the English language from there. So a Mizmor is "a song set to stringed accompaniment", with the emphasis on the accompaniment. There are 57 Psalms, most of them Davidic, with the title Mizmor.
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Shir: literally means "song" (though it is not easy to distinguish a song from a poem, the latter also being a Shir), which the Septuagint calls an Ode, and the Vulgate a Canticum; a song either way. As a generic term it is used thirty times in the titles of the Psalms, twelve of them coupled in one direction or the other with Mizmor, and even more often in the texts of the Psalms and of other books. When the term is used in the Psalms (see for example 42:9; 69:31 and 28:7) it usually denotes a sacred song; but elsewhere in the Tanach it is of a much more generally lyrical sort, even to the point of being a folk-song or a party-tune (cf Genesis 31:27 and Isaiah 30:29), even a love poem, as in the "Song of Songs", which is Shir ha Shirim in Yehudit; and in Isaiah 24:9 and Ecclesiastes 7:5 it provides what ROAC in its exegesis of the Psalms splendidly calls "a bacchanalian ballad".
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And because the Septuagint translates SHIR into the Greek word for an ODE (wrotten as ᾠδή, pronounced as, guess what! "ode"), we need to digress for a very brief moment and explore "The theory of the Choral Ode":
It was promulgated by one S.J. Zenner in a book entitled "Die Chorgesange im Buche der Psalmen", published in Germany in 1896, and reckons that certain of the Psalms have so much in common that they should be regarded as a Book of Psalms, or Choral Odes, all to themselves, and must have been that before the Ezraic Redaction broke them up and re-presented them as they are now. The Odes in question are now:
Psalms 1; 2; 3 and 4;
6 "originally combined" with 13;
9 "originally combined" with 10;
19, 20 and 21;
46 "originally combined" with 47;
49 "originally combined" with 50;
114 "originally combined" with 115;
148 and 149.
Zenner also argues that the original form of Psalms 14 "originally combined" with 15 appears to have been a choral ode too. The two strophes and the epode (explanation of these terms comes later), he claims, belong to Psalm 14, but the two antistrophes to Psalm 70, and he insists that, when the Redactor broke up the original ode, he put each portion into the Psalter twice: so Psalm 14 repeats as Psalm 53, Psalm 80 is found again in Psalm 40:14-18, as are Psalm 108:2-6 in Psalm 57:8-12, Psalm 108:7-14 in Psalm 60:7-14, and Psalm 71:1-3 in Psalm 31:2-4 (not obvious why he places them this way around when the other is surely more logical).
I leave my readers to judge this general speculation about Choral Odes and repetitions for themselves. Those of a Catholic faith already have - Zenner was excommunicated for heresy and blasphemy some years ago.
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Maskil: which the (Greek) Septuagint renders as "Synedeos", or "Eis Synesin", and the (Latin) Vulgate as "Intellectus" or "ad intellectum", all of which can best be stated in English as "a didactic poem", and which can be found in Psalms 32, 42, 44, 45, 52, 55, 74, 78, 88, 89 and 144.
The word is used inside several of the Psalms as well, giving us a better context to determine the precise meaning. In the Hiph'il form, for example, in Psalm 32:8, as well as 1 Chronicles 28:19, both infering that a Maskil is a Psalm for teaching purposes, though what exacly it is teaching is not obvious - perhaps how to write a Maskil, in at least one case. The only two that are overtly didactic in the dreadful way that we expect front-loading in the classroom to provide catechism by rote-learning are Psalms 32 and 78.
Other uses of the word are worth tracking, such as 2 Chronicles 30:22 and Psalm 47:7, Isaiah 41:20 and Job 34:27.
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I have to digress again though, because the word TEPHILAH is fascinating - to an etymologist anyway. TOPHEL is a village (today called Tufileh) to the south-east of the Dead Sea (Deuteronomy 1:1), but it definitely does not get its name from the vast quantities of bitumen and potash that are almost certainly the lavic residue of an ancient volcanic eruption, the one depicted in the story of Lot in Genesis 18 and 19, the one depicted in the legend of the "pillar of cloud by day" and the "pillar of fire by night" in Exodus 13.
The root is TAPHAL, which means "to spit out", which of course volcanoes do, and is also used for "gluing" and "sticking", probably because it became the word for "lime" (not the fruit); but mostly it was the adjective for anything "unsalted" or "unseasoned" or "insipid" (cf Job 6:6), whence, metaphorically, it became the colloquialism for "foolish" (cf Lamentations 2:14), even "impious" (cf Jeremiah 23:13), or plain "silly" (cf Job 24:12).
How do we get from that to TEFILAH as "prayer"? Look at 2 Kings 19:4, Isaiah 37:4 (the same text, but in a different book), Jeremiah 7:16 and 11:14, and there is a sense of intercession as a process, figuratively anyway, of putting lime on the soul so that it adheres better; and to pray to the deity is to ask the deity to intercede. Look at Psalm 4:2 or 109:4 and there is a sense of something being "spat out", "unsalted and unseasoned", straight from the heart, the gut even, as prayer with Kavanah (intensity and sincerity) should be. Even better Nehemiah 1:6, where both Tefilah and Leitpalel are used in the same verse - and then we realise that, wait a minute, the root of the verb "to pray" - LEHITPALEL - is not the same as the root of the word for "prayer" - TEFILAH!
No indeed, but at some point along the way - definitely before Nechem-Yah as the text I just cited confirms - the two became one, and the root PALAL, which has the sense of "executing judgement", in the reflexive and hopefully the reflective HIPHIL, fulfills both goals of a service of worship, the intervention of the deity and the forgiveness that follows confession and judgement.
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Tehilah: which the Septuagint renders as "Ainesis", and the Vulgate as "Laudatio", is the word that gives us the Yehudit title of the anthology, "Tehilim"; ironically, or perhaps for this reason deliberately, there is only one Psalm which has this as its title, Psalm 145.
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Michtam: which is "Stelographia" or "Eis Stelographian" in the Septuagint, "Tituli Inscriptio" or "In Tituli Inscriptionem" in the Vulgate, is used as a descriptor of just eight Psalms, 16, and 54-60, all of them Davidic. And the truth is: we have no idea what the root was, or what the word meant; and the only other usage outside the Psalms is Isaiah 38:9, which anyway the Masoretes reckoned was a scribal error, and most versions (as per the link) have now altered Michtam to Michtav, which translates as "writing", though really, being in the Hiphil, that means something "dictated", to a scribe or secretary. Should we then regard the usages in the Psalms as the same error? Or has the scriptural error simply been replaced with a different one?
Or is it possible, based on the "unsalted" and the "foolish" of Tefilah, that the logical root does apply? KATAM (כתם), which means "stained" or "soiled" in Jeremiah 2:22, its only textual appearance, and decidedly figurative in that cameo.
Or there is another possibility, though how that root gets from "stained" to "gold" is a question for the psychologists of lucre! Gold is KETEM repeatedly in Job (28:16, 31:24), and significantly for us in Psalm 45:10. The clue lies in the Arabic, where the same root means "to lay up" or "hide away", and the gold in question in all these references is the lucre placed in the Treasury. So is a MICHTAM simply a poetical "treasure"? Gold in other contexts is always ZAHAV (זהב).
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Shigayon: which the Septuagint ducks by simply calling them "Psalmos", and the Vulgate pretends that it understands the meaning by showing off multivalences with "Psalmus", "Aquila", "Agnonma", "Symmachus and Theodotion", "hyper agnoias", and in Jerome's notes "ignoratio or pro ignoratione" as well, this latter exclusively for Psalm 7. The root means "to wander", and "to reel", and in today's slang anything awesome wonderful or marvellous is Shigayon with an exclamation mark! The overall sense is either a speight of madness (the word is also used today for an obsession or an idée fixe), and/or a Scottish-style jig (they had bagpipes back then so it could be), and/or "a wild dithyrambic ode with a reeling, wandering rhythm", which may actually be a combination of the first two definitions.
For an in situ view of this, and a possible connection with Higayon, see my notes at Psalm 9:17.
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Which if any claim to be authentic history?
Only 13, and all of them Davidic: numbers 7, 18, 34, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59 and 143 belong to the time of David's persecution by Sha'ul, while Psalms 3 and 63 deal with his flight from Av-Shalom, Psalm 51 finds him lamenting his sins, and Psalm 60 records the military campaigns in Mesopotamia and Ashur (Assyria). Illogical order, you might say; but actually it is worse than this, because the nine that tell of the journey into the Underworld do not agree chronologically with the narrative of the Book of Samuel.
And is any of this authentic history? Highly unlikely. The myth of David is the myth of the Earth-god, pursued into the Underworld by the Lord of that realm, She'ol in the Yehudit, or Sha'ul (Saul). I have already pointed out the Orpheus connections, but waited till now to point out the other significant connection: David's full name, Yedid-Yah (which was also Shelomoh's birth-name), means "beloved of the moon-goddess", which translates into Greek, more or less, as Hera-Kles.
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Who wrote the Psalms?
The truth is: we don't know, and Jewish tradition is honest enough to acknowledge this. Significant numbers are attributed, to David, to Asaph, etc, but this is most likely a mis-reading of the Yehudit, and actually they are dedicated to, not written by. The Bava Batra (14 f), composed in Babylon between 450 and 550 CE, states that "David wrote the Book of Psalms, by means of ten elders of previous generations, assembling a collection that included compositions of others along with his own". This is good faith, but lousy science.
Whether he wrote them or not, seventy-three of the Psalms in the Masoretic Text, and rather more in the Septuagint, name David as their author: the whole of Book 1, with four exceptions: the first two, which are introductory, and Psalms 10 and 33. In Book 2 Psalms 51-65 and 68-70, and most odd that 66 and 67 are not, given that this is essentially the whole of Book 2. Psalm 86 alone of Book 3, and Psalm 103 alone of Book 4. Psalms 108-110, 122, 124, 131, 133 and 135-145 of Book 5.
And if he did write them, did he write them in collaboration with the orchestra leader, who is also named as the author of Psalm 19, or in group-creativity sessions (in America today they call them "Shut-Up-And-Write") with the Beney Korach, who are likewise co-credited on several, at least once with the orchestra leader as well? Not wanting to reduce any of this to banality, but my sense of these multiple "authorships" is that they were the equivalent of the CEO sending copies to departments, and having his office assistant mark them by hand, to make sure nobody got missed: copy for the king (le David), copy for the orchestra leader (la Menatse'ach), copy for the choir (livney Korach). Either that or some librarian with a primitive Dewey system for cataloguing them: this one for the Asaph shelf, that one for the Yedutun.
David is said (1 Chronicles 25 has a full and detailed catalogue, and it is the source for the suggestion that Yedutun and Eitan were the same person) to have personally incipited the Levitical cantillation of Psalms in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, which bestows a majestic seal of approval but does nothing to prove or disprove authorship. Note that there are also Psalms attributed to David in 2 Samuel 1:19-27, 2 Samuel 22 (cf Psalm 18) and 2 Samuel 23, as well as 1 Chronicles 17:7-36 and 1 Chronicles 29:9-20.
1 Chronicles 16:8-36 quotes as Davidic a song which is actually made up of Psalm 105:1-13, Psalm 96, and a small portion of Psalm 106.
The Prophet Amos addresses the Shomronim (Samarians): "You that sing to the sound of the psaltery; they have thought themselves to have instruments of music like David" - though I much prefer the translation at the link (Amos 6:5).
Explanation a) posits that the root means "to throw", and that the intention of "a throwing down", was the act of "prostration". Thus, during the antiphonal cantillation of the Psalms, the priests would blow their trumpets to mark the end of a strophe, and, at that signal, the two choirs, or just the congregation, or perhaps both choir and congregation, would "throw themselves down" in prostrate position on the shrine-floor.
The Star of David, which I have taken every available opportunity to include here (astrologically there should only be twelve), is known in Yehudit as the Magen David, which is actually a shield and not a star, and should really be named the Shield of Jonathan (Yehonatan) anyway, as it was his invention: he created a special bodyguard of thirty-six élite paratroops, who worked in sextets, and demonstrated their swordsmanship by bloodlessly and even cutlessly interlocking their swords to form an upright star, while each sextet was grouped sextetually around Yehonatan as a protective fence. It was probably only performed on ceremonial occasions, and taken over by Yedid-Yah (for which read Shelomoh, not David) when he became king.
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The Tanach as we know it was first written down at the time of Ezra, around 430 BCE; that there were significant changes later we also know, though we do not generally know what those changes were, and won't until (if) the archaeologists turn up more carbon-dateable evidence: the only place we can go to find them at the moment is the Dead Sea Scrolls, which do indeed include variations, as noted above, and the Septuagint, though many of the distinctions there are simply the inadequate resolution of difficulties of translation; the evidence from the annals suggests that further Redaction continued right through to the middle of the second century CE, a hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple and the "substitution" of Sadducaic Judaism by Pharisaic "Talmudic Judaism", the one that is still in place today.
One set of significant changes can, nonetheless be assumed. Theological evidence within the Psalms is very clear: the Hasmonean kings who came two centuries after Ezra followed a very different form of religious worship than their predecessors, exclusively patriarchal and Omnideistic, and the texts of the Tanach, including many of the Psalms, have clearly been re-edited to reflect this. Secular European scholars over the past two hundred years have more or less accepted that Books 3-5 of the Psalms are Hasmonean, and that most of the work was undertaken during the reign of John Hyrcanus (135-105 BCE).
We also need to keep in mind the possibility - in the case of Psalm 137 the absolute certainty - that some of these Psalms were written during the exile in Babylonia (585-536 BCE), and that both other Psalms, and re-writes of known Psalms, included in the final anthology, may also be Babylonian rather than Yehudan in their place of writing (look at Psalm 107 for example, where the four compass points include Yam, the sea, for the south, when surely it would be the west if it was written in Kena'an?!).
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And finally, because that is where it belongs, SELAH. The word almost invariably marks the end of a strophe, but its root, and therefore its meaning, are entirely obscure. Two explanations are generally offered, and there is absolutely no forensic evidence for either of them being correct! Either way, Selah is never pronounced.
Explanation a) posits that the root means "to throw", and that the intention of "a throwing down", was the act of "prostration". Thus, during the antiphonal cantillation of the Psalms, the priests would blow their trumpets to mark the end of a strophe, and, at that signal, the two choirs, or just the congregation, or perhaps both choir and congregation, would "throw themselves down" in prostrate position on the shrine-floor.
Explanation b) regards it as
a piece of the musical notation, attached to the text so that the singer would be prepared. It functions similarly to the double bar line used in European music; where a single bar line denotes a transition point between the measures (one-two-three - single bar - one-two-three - single bar), the double bar indicates a change of tempo (one-two-three - double bar - one-two-three-four) or some other musical variation: perhaps a switch from strings to brass or woodwind, from acapella to cantata, perhaps a break between movements, perhaps simply a point at which the cantata or libretto was paused for a musical interlude, a sermon, a dance, a reading, a set of prayers.
But either way, let me say it again because every Jewish prayer service I have ever been in gets this wrong, Selah is never pronounced.
And for a really good place to hear it silently, go to Psalm 9:17.
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Astrologically the Star of David is Vega in Lyra, which - by no coincidence at all actually - is the same star as that of the Greek singer-songwriter Orpheus, and indeed is known in Yehudit as Oreph. Orpheus in western Greek becomes Phoroneus in Ionian Greek (Io for Ionian makes the key link to Chevron), and thence Ephron in Yehudit, from whom Av-Raham purchased the Cave of Machpelah, outside Chevron. Orpheus probably played the lyre, where David played the harp, though the differences between those two are much like the six-stringed guitar and the five-stringed banjo today: not very much.
And speaking of the ten-stringed lyre... click here for my essay on the Music and Musical Intruments of the Tanach.
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