Panel essay · Psalms · Aug 17–23, 2026 · Academic scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a mainstream Hebrew Bible scholar who is not a Latter-day Saint — not a real scholar.
Twenty psalms is an odd unit of study — not a book, not a section, not a genre, but a sampler pulled from the front third of a collection that took several centuries to assemble. The most useful thing an outside reader can bring to Psalms 1–2, 8, 19–33, 40, and 46 is a sense of what kind of object the Psalter actually is. It is not a book written by anyone. It is an anthology of anthologies, and its editors did not bother to hide the joins.
The Hebrew Psalter is divided into five books, marked off by doxologies that read like closing formulas rather than parts of the poems they end: 41:13, 72:18–19, 89:52, and 106:48. This block sits inside Book I (Psalms 1–41) apart from Psalms 40 and 46, and 46 falls in Book II.
Two pieces of internal evidence show the seams especially clearly. Psalm 72:20 announces, "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended" — a colophon closing a collection, even though dozens of psalms attributed to David follow it. And Psalm 40:13–17 reappears almost word for word as Psalm 70 (Psalms 14 and 53 are a second such doublet). An author does not accidentally publish the same poem twice under two numbers. An editor compiling from separate sources does.
The most systematic account of the compiling is Gerald H. Wilson's The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (SBL Dissertation Series 76, Scholars Press, 1985), which argued that the Psalter's shape is the product of deliberate editorial arrangement. Wilson worked partly from the Dead Sea evidence: the Great Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 (11QPsᵃ), published by James A. Sanders as The Psalms Scroll of Qumrân Cave 11 (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert IV, Clarendon, 1965), contains psalms in an order sharply different from the Masoretic sequence, along with compositions absent from the received book; Peter W. Flint's The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms (Brill, 1997) catalogues the whole body of this evidence. Whichever arrangement is earlier, the arrangement was still in motion within living memory of the Second Temple.
Psalm 46 shows another editorial layer. It sits inside Psalms 42–83, the stretch scholars call the Elohistic Psalter, where the generic Elohim ("God") outnumbers the divine name YHWH by a margin too lopsided to be stylistic accident. Joel S. Burnett surveys the problem in "Forty-Two Songs for Elohim: An Ancient Near Eastern Organizing Principle in the Shaping of the Elohistic Psalter" (JSOT 31, 2006).
Most of these psalms carry headings: "To the chief Musician upon Gittith, A Psalm of David" (Psalm 8), "upon Aijeleth Shahar" (Psalm 22), "for the sons of Korah, A Song upon Alamoth" (Psalm 46), "Maschil" (Psalm 32). These are near-universally understood as editorial additions, not authorial signatures — and much of their vocabulary is simply opaque. Nobody knows what Gittith, Alamoth, or Selah meant. The terms were technical, and the technology is lost.
The phrase rendered "of David" is le-David, a preposition plus a name. The lamed can mark authorship, but it can equally mark possession, dedication, subject matter, or membership in a collection — "belonging to the David corpus." Headings that go further and supply a biographical setting are demonstrably interpretive: Elieser Slomovic, "Toward an Understanding of the Formation of Historical Titles in the Book of Psalms" (ZAW 91, 1979, 350–80), showed that these situational notes work like early midrash, matching psalm to narrative episode after the fact. Psalm 30's heading — "at the dedication of the house" — attaches a temple occasion to a poem whose body is a personal thanksgiving for recovery from illness, with no building mentioned anywhere in it. Note also what is missing: in the Masoretic Text, Psalms 1, 2, and 33 carry no superscription at all, unusual for Book I.
Psalms 1 and 2 open the Psalter with a wisdom poem about two ways and a royal poem about an anointed king's enthronement. Psalm 1 begins with ashrei ("Blessed is the man," 1:1); Psalm 2 ends with it (2:12). The bracket is hard to read as coincidence, and ancient readers noticed: a rabbinic tradition in the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 9b–10a) treats the two as one psalm, and Codex Bezae and some Old Latin witnesses cite Psalm 2:7 at Acts 13:33 as "the first psalm." Brevard S. Childs, in Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Fortress, 1979), made this pairing a central example of canonical criticism; Wilson worked it out structurally. The consequence: whoever placed these poems first was instructing readers to take the whole collection as torah to be meditated on (1:2) and as testimony about a king (2:6–7).
The framework still underlying nearly all Psalms scholarship is Hermann Gunkel's, completed after his death by Joachim Begrich as Einleitung in die Psalmen (1933); the English edition is Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel, trans. James D. Nogalski (Mercer University Press, 1998). Gunkel sorted psalms by Gattung — literary type defined by recurring form, vocabulary, and setting — rather than by supposed author or date.
Applied here the sorting is unusually clean. Hymns of praise, with imperative calls and ki ("for") clauses giving grounds: Psalms 8, 29, 33, and the first half of 19. Individual laments — the Psalter's largest category, marked by address, complaint, petition, and a characteristic pivot to confidence: 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 40. Individual thanksgiving, recounting a rescue already granted: 30 and 32. Royal psalms: 2, 20, 21. An entrance liturgy, question and answer at the sanctuary gate: 24, with Psalm 15 as its twin. A Song of Zion: 46. Wisdom poetry: Psalm 1 and the Torah half of 19. Psalms 23 and 27 are usually classed as songs of confidence — the lament's pivot expanded into a whole poem.
Sigmund Mowinckel pushed the framework from literature toward liturgy, arguing in Psalmenstudien (1921–24) and the English The Psalms in Israel's Worship, trans. D. R. Ap-Thomas (Blackwell, 1962), that these were not private lyrics later put to ceremonial use but cultic texts composed for performance. Psalm 24 is his best exhibit here: the questions in verses 3 and 8 with their answers, the verbatim repetition of verse 7 in verse 9, the Selah markers — a script for a procession with two voices, one outside the gate and one within. Mowinckel's larger reconstruction of an annual enthronement festival remains contested; the general claim that the Psalter is a hymnbook rather than a poetry collection does not.
Robert Lowth's De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753), delivered as Oxford lectures and Englished as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, established that Hebrew verse is built not on meter or rhyme but on paired lines — parallelismus membrorum. His taxonomy (synonymous, antithetic, synthetic) held for two centuries.
James L. Kugel's The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (Yale University Press, 1981) dismantled the "synonymous" category. The second half of a line is rarely a restatement; it is a sharpening, an escalation, a specification — Kugel's formula is roughly "A, and what's more, B." Psalm 29:5 does exactly this: "The voice of the LORD breaketh the cedars; yea, the LORD breaketh the cedars of Lebanon." The B-line does not repeat; it names the specific, proverbially unbreakable trees. Psalm 24:2 works the same way: founded on the seas, and further, established on the rivers.
Psalm 29 is the clearest case in the Hebrew Bible of a poem with a Canaanite substrate. The phrase qol YHWH, "the voice of the LORD," occurs seven times (vv. 3–9); the action is thunder rolling in off the Mediterranean, splitting Lebanon's cedars and shaking the wilderness. H. L. Ginsberg proposed in "A Phoenician Hymn in the Psalter" (Atti del XIX Congresso Internazionale degli Orientalisti, Rome, 1935, 472–76) that this was a Baal hymn adapted to YHWH; Frank Moore Cross made the philological case in "Notes on a Canaanite Psalm in the Old Testament" (BASOR 117, 1950, 19–21). The Ugaritic material is edited in Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 1 (Brill, 1994), where Baal's adversaries are Prince Yamm (Sea) and Judge Nahar (River).
The internal signals are concrete. Verse 1's addressees, KJV's "O ye mighty," are in Hebrew bene elim, "sons of gods" — a divine council. Verse 6 names Sirion, which Deuteronomy 3:9 identifies as the Sidonian name for Hermon. Verse 10's "flood" is mabbul, a word otherwise essentially reserved for the Genesis deluge (Genesis 6:17). Nissim Amzallag's Psalm 29: A Canaanite Hymn to YHWH in the Psalter (Peeters, 2021) surveys the debate and argues for a pre-Israelite origin. Not everyone accepts wholesale borrowing, but that the poem speaks the storm-god idiom is not seriously disputed.
Psalm 24:2 and Psalm 46:2–3 draw on the same reservoir — mountains toppling into the sea, waters roaring — mapped by John Day in God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Psalm 46 also supplies a river to a city that has none; Jerusalem had a spring. The river of 46:4 is mythic geography, the ordered stream set against the chaotic sea of 46:3. And 46:10's "Be still" translates harpu, an imperative from a root meaning to let go or desist, addressed to raging nations rather than to a quiet reader.
Psalm 19 falls into two halves that do not obviously belong together. Verses 1–6 are a cosmic hymn culminating in the sun, which has a tent pitched for it and runs its circuit like a bridegroom and a champion; verses 7–14 are a Torah meditation in a wholly different register. The divine designation shifts too: El in verse 1, YHWH throughout the second half. Gunkel and many after him treated the psalm as composite, with verses 1–6 adapted from an older solar hymn — a type well attested in Mesopotamian hymns to Shamash. Hans-Joachim Kraus, in Psalms 1–59: A Continental Commentary, trans. Hilton C. Oswald (Fortress, 1988), defended the poem's unity as a deliberate two-panel movement from general to specific revelation. The debate is live; what is not in question is that the sun here is a subordinated object in YHWH's sky, not a deity — precisely the adjustment an adapting poet would make.
A comparable adjustment sits in Psalm 8:5, where the Hebrew says humanity was made "a little lower than elohim," a plural most naturally meaning "gods" or "divine beings." The Septuagint rendered it angelous, Hebrews 2:7 followed, and the King James "angels" descends from that chain. The Latter-day Saint edition's own footnote concedes the point: "HEB less than the gods."
Psalm 25 is an acrostic — twenty-two verses, each beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Except not quite. The waw line is absent. Where qoph should stand there is a second resh. And verse 22, "Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles," begins with pe, a letter already used, appended after the sequence has closed on taw.
The same deviations appear in Psalm 34, whose final verse likewise opens with a pe form of the verb "redeem." Two independent scribal accidents producing an identical pattern in two psalms is implausible, which is why many treatments read the irregularities as compositional rather than corrupt; Roelie van der Spuy surveys the phenomenon in "Hebrew Alphabetic Acrostics — Significance and Translation" (Old Testament Essays 21/2, 2008, 513–32). Dropping waw yields twenty-one letters, placing lamed at the exact center; the added pe line restores the count to twenty-two. Whatever the intent, 25:22 also does something visible in translation: it breaks the psalm's first-person singular voice to pray for the nation — a private lament given a congregational ending, the sort of thing that happens when a poem enters a liturgy.
The second half of Psalm 22:16 (Hebrew 22:17) is among the most disputed clauses in the Hebrew Bible, and it deserves precision rather than advocacy. The Masoretic Text reads ka'ari yaday ve-raglay — "like a lion, my hands and my feet" — a clause with no verb, which is the actual problem. The Septuagint has ōryxan, "they dug/pierced," presupposing a Hebrew verb. A Psalms fragment from Naḥal Ḥever (5/6ḤevPs), copied in the first century CE, appears to read the consonants with a final waw rather than yod, yielding a verbal form; in the Herodian script these letters are easily confused, and the ink at the decisive point is faint enough that specialists have disagreed about what is there.
The literature is correspondingly cautious. Gregory Vall argued for a verbal reading from a root meaning "to dig" in "Psalm 22:17b: 'The Old Guess'" (JBL 116, 1997, 45–56); Kristin M. Swenson defended a lion-based reading in which the enemies encircle rather than pierce, in "Psalm 22:17: Circling around the Problem Again" (JBL 123, 2004, 637–48). Neither has carried the field. The honest summary is that the text is damaged or the idiom lost, that both readings are ancient, and that the manuscript evidence does not decisively settle it either way.
Two features rarely survive into liturgical use. The first is the imprecatory edge: "Give them according to their deeds… render to them their desert" (28:4); "let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave" (31:17); "let them be desolate for a reward of their shame" (40:15). These are petitions for harm, integral to the lament form rather than lapses from it. The second is the physicality of the distress — bones out of joint and a heart melted like wax (22:14), an eye consumed with grief (31:9), moisture turned to summer drought (32:4). Whatever else the Psalter is, it is unusually willing to specify what suffering feels like.
## On dating
Almost nothing in this block can be dated with confidence. Arguments run from tenth-century monarchic composition to the Persian period or later, turning on linguistic features, presumed cultic settings, and thematic parallels — none decisive for individual poems. Peter C. Craigie's Psalms 1–50 (Word Biblical Commentary 19, 2nd ed. with Marvin Tate, Zondervan, 2004) argues for early dates on Ugaritic linguistic grounds; others put the same texts centuries later. Robert Alter, whose The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (Norton, 2007) is the most useful literary rendering into English, is frank that the dating of most psalms is unrecoverable. Anyone who tells you precisely when Psalm 23 was written is telling you something the evidence does not support.