Panel essay · Psalms · Aug 17–23, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona: a rigorous academic who is a Latter-day Saint, reading the Psalms through current scholarship — not a real scholar.
The Come, Follow Me lesson for this week opens with an unusually candid sentence: "We don't know for certain who wrote the Psalms." That is exactly right, and it is worth pausing over, because the chapter summaries printed above these same psalms in the Latter-day Saint edition say something firmer — "A messianic psalm of David" over Psalms 8, 21, 22, and 40. Those summaries are modern editorial apparatus prepared for the Church's own scripture edition; they are not part of the translated Hebrew text, and they are not the superscriptions. The superscriptions are the italicized lines that follow: To the chief Musician upon Aijeleth Shahar, A Psalm of David. Those are ancient. What they mean is a different question.
Seventy-three psalms in the Masoretic Text carry the Hebrew phrase le-David — the preposition lamed prefixed to the name. Fourteen of the twenty chapters in this week's block carry it. Hebrew lamed is famously elastic: it can mark authorship (the so-called lamed auctoris), possession or membership in a collection ("belonging to the David collection"), dedication ("for David"), or subject matter ("concerning David"). Brevard Childs argued in "Psalm Titles and Midrashic Exegesis" (Journal of Semitic Studies 16 [1971]: 137–150) that the historical notices attached to some titles function as early interpretive commentary rather than archival memory — the superscriptions are themselves a form of exegesis. That does not settle the authorship question; it relocates it.
The manuscript evidence pushes in the same direction. The Septuagint attaches Davidic titles to several psalms that the Hebrew leaves anonymous, and Peter Flint's synopsis of superscriptions across the Qumran Psalms manuscripts documents how fluid the practice remained (The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, Brill, 1997). Psalm 33, sitting right in the middle of this week's reading, has no superscription at all in the Hebrew — it simply begins, Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous. Meanwhile the Great Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 (11Q5) closes with a prose colophon known as "David's Compositions," which credits David with 3,600 psalms plus 450 songs for the liturgical calendar. That number is not a historical claim in any modern sense. It is a statement about David's status — the pious king as the fountainhead of Israel's prayer language, the way Moses became the fountainhead of law. Latter-day Saints, who understand attribution to prophets as a live and layered thing, should find this more legible than most readers do.
Gerald Wilson's The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (SBL Dissertation Series 76; Scholars Press, 1985) demonstrated that the Psalter's arrangement is not accidental. Doxologies at 41:13, 72:18–19, 89:52, and 106:48 divide the collection into five books, and the untitled pair at the front — Psalms 1 and 2 — functions as a deliberate double gate. Psalm 1 sets the terms in the language of Torah piety (his delight is in the law of the Lord); Psalm 2 sets them in the language of kingship (Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion). Read together, they announce that the book to follow is about the righteous life and the anointed king, and that these are one subject.
There is even manuscript residue of that unity. At Acts 13:33, where Paul quotes Psalm 2:7, Codex Bezae and part of the Old Latin tradition read "in the first psalm" — a reading Tertullian also knew. Somebody's scrolls had Psalms 1 and 2 written as a single composition.
Psalm 46 sits in a different editorial neighborhood. It belongs to Book II and falls inside what scholars call the Elohistic Psalter, Psalms 42–83, a stretch where Elohim displaces YHWH with striking regularity. The proof is in the doublets: Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 are the same poem with the divine name swapped — and, more to our point, Psalm 40:13–17 reappears in this collection as Psalm 70, with Elohim where Psalm 40 has YHWH. Two of this week's chapters, 40 and 46, therefore sit on opposite sides of that editorial seam. Joel Burnett has argued that the number forty-two was itself an organizing principle ("Forty-Two Songs for Elohim," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31 [2006]: 81–101). Whatever one makes of the numerology, the plain fact stands: an ancient editor handled the divine name of an inspired text with a free hand, and the result is scripture.
Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee (Psalm 2:7). In its original setting this is coronation language — the decree read at an enthronement, cognate with the dynastic promise of 2 Samuel 7:14, I will be his father, and he shall be my son. By the Herodian period it was already being read eschatologically: 4QFlorilegium (4Q174) quotes Psalm 2:1–2 alongside 2 Samuel 7 and applies it to the last days. The New Testament's messianic use of Psalm 2 (Acts 4:25–26; Acts 13:33; Hebrews 1:5; 5:5) is thus not an invention but the continuation of a reading trajectory already underway in Jewish circles.
The more interesting problem for Latter-day Saints is Psalm 8:5. The KJV reads a little lower than the angels, following the Septuagint and Hebrews 2:7. But the Hebrew says me'elohim — and the footnote in the Church's own edition of the Bible says so plainly: "HEB less than the gods." That footnote is doing real work. It preserves, in an official Latter-day Saint study text, the divine-council reading that the Greek tradition softened. The same vocabulary surfaces in Psalm 29:1, where the KJV's Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty renders bene elim, "sons of gods" — the heavenly assembly, summoned to praise.
This is contested ground, and honesty requires naming the contest. Michael Heiser, an evangelical scholar of the divine council, critiqued the Latter-day Saint appropriation of this material in "You've Seen One Elohim, You've Seen Them All? A Critique of Mormonism's Use of Psalm 82" (FARMS Review 19, no. 1 [2007]: 221–266); David Bokovoy answered him in the same issue with "'Ye Really Are Gods': A Response to Michael Heiser concerning the LDS Use of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John" (pp. 267–313). The exchange is worth reading in full precisely because both parties agree that the council is there in the text and disagree about what species of being populates it.
Verse 16 is the single most litigated line in the Psalter. The Masoretic Text reads ka'ari — "like a lion" — producing something like like a lion, my hands and my feet, which is syntactically strained. The Septuagint reads ōryxan, "they dug/pierced," which is what the KJV follows. In 1997 a fragment from Naḥal Ḥever (variously designated 5/6ḤevPs or XḤev/Se 4), predating the Christian era, was read as ka'aru with a final waw rather than yod — apparently supporting the Greek. Shon D. Hopkin surveyed the evidence for a Latter-day Saint audience in "The Psalm 22:16 Controversy: New Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls" (BYU Studies 44, no. 3).
Two cautions belong here. First, several scholars who have examined the published facsimile hold that the ink is too degraded to distinguish waw from yod with confidence; the waw/yod problem is the perennial curse of Herodian-era Hebrew paleography. Second, even the reading ka'aru is morphologically odd — from the root k-r-h, "dig," one would expect karu. What the fragment does establish is that a reading behind the Septuagint's "pierced" existed in Hebrew before the Jewish-Christian polemics of the second century, which removes the charge that Christians simply invented it. That is a real gain, and it is a more modest gain than apologetic summaries usually claim.
What gets lost in the fight over one letter is the shape of the whole psalm. Psalm 22 does not end in abandonment. It pivots at verse 22 — I will declare thy name unto my brethren — into a vow of public thanksgiving, and closes with the nations turning to the Lord (22:27) and a generation yet unborn told that he hath done this (22:31). Hebrews 2:12 quotes that pivot, not the lament. A first-century Jew who heard Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani from a cross would have known where the poem goes.
Since Gunkel, Psalm 24 has been classified as an "entrance liturgy" or Torah liturgy, paired with Psalm 15: a question posed at the sanctuary gate (Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?), an answer specifying moral qualifications (He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart), and then an antiphonal gate-opening sequence in verses 7–10 that reads as processional. Donald W. Parry examined the psalm's temple setting from a Latter-day Saint vantage in "Temple Worship and a Possible Reference to a Prayer Circle in Psalm 24" (BYU Studies 32, no. 4 [1992]: 57–62). The lesson manual's note that the "hill of the Lord" points to the temple is, for once, exactly what the form critics would say.
What the manual does not mention is that Joseph Smith rewrote these verses, and the revision is in the appendix of the Latter-day Saint Bible. Where the Hebrew addresses architecture — Lift up your heads, O ye gates — the JST addresses people: "Lift up your heads, O ye generations of Jacob; and be ye lifted up." The everlasting doors become "everlasting generations." Whatever one concludes about the JST's relation to any ancient text, the theological move is unmistakable: the thing that opens to receive the King of Glory is a covenant people, not a doorway. A similar move appears at JST Psalm 32:1, where "whose sin is covered" becomes "who have no sins to be covered" — Joseph Smith declining the language of merely imputed righteousness that Paul had built on this verse in Romans 4:7.
Psalm 29 is the clearest case in the Psalter of Israelite poetry built out of Canaanite material. H. L. Ginsberg proposed in 1935 that it was originally a Phoenician hymn ("A Phoenician Hymn in the Psalter," Atti del XIX Congresso Internazionale degli Orientalisti, Rome, 472–476), and Frank Moore Cross developed the case in "Notes on a Canaanite Psalm in the Old Testament" (Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 117 [1950]: 19–21). The evidence is internal: the sevenfold qol YHWH, "the voice of the Lord," is thunder-theophany language belonging to Baal-Hadad; the geography is northern (Lebanon, Kadesh) and the psalm names Sirion, which Deuteronomy 3:9 identifies as the Sidonian name for Hermon; verse 10's mabbul, "flood," is the word used for the deluge of Genesis. Someone took a storm-god hymn and made it a hymn to Yahweh enthroned above the waters.
For a tradition that believes truth exists outside its own borders and is meant to be gathered, this should be a comfortable fact rather than an awkward one. The Psalter did not descend from the sky. It was assembled — from court liturgy, from Canaanite meter, from personal lament — and edited, and re-edited, and its divine names were changed in transit.
That process did not stop. Matthew Nickerson showed in "Nephi's Psalm: 2 Nephi 4:16–35 in the Light of Form-Critical Analysis" (Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6, no. 2 [1997]: 26–42) that Nephi's lament follows Gunkel's individual-lament pattern point for point — invocation, complaint, confession of trust, petition, vow of praise. The Latter-day Saint edition's own cross-references make the dependence concrete: at Psalm 33:20, he is our help and our shield, the footnote sends the reader to 2 Nephi 4:34. Nephi was not imitating a genre he had read about. He had the brass plates and he prayed in their idiom.
Two smaller notes worth carrying into the week. At Psalm 40:6, the Hebrew reads ears hast thou digged for me; the Septuagint generalized the part to the whole and produced "a body hast thou prepared me," which is the form quoted at Hebrews 10:5 and applied to the Incarnation — an entire doctrine of embodiment resting on a translator's interpretive choice. And at Psalm 46:10, the celebrated Be still, and know that I am God renders the Hebrew harpu, the causative imperative of a root meaning to let go, slacken, or desist (so the standard lexicons). Following verse 9, where God breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder, the imperative is less an invitation to contemplative quiet than an order to the nations: drop your weapons. Jon Levenson's treatment of Zion as cosmic mountain in Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Winston Press, 1985) reads Psalm 46 in exactly this key — the city with a river that Jerusalem, fed only by the Gihon spring, conspicuously lacks, because the river is mythic geography, the stream of Eden relocated to the temple mount.
None of this makes the psalms smaller. It makes them older, stranger, and more genuinely used — prayed at gates, sung over thunder, copied by scribes who disagreed about a single letter, and handed to a young farmer in New York who read them and started editing.