Panel essay · Psalms · August 24–30, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
Most weeks of Come, Follow Me hand you a narrative. This week hands you a filing system. Seventeen chapters from Books II and III of the Psalter is not a devotional sampler; it is a cross-section through the editorial machinery of the Hebrew Bible's most heavily edited book. Read the superscriptions and the odd little sentence at Psalm 72:20, and you can watch ancient scribes collecting, renaming, relabeling, and arguing with each other. For Latter-day Saints, who hold a peculiar interest in how scripture is compiled, transmitted, and restored, that is not a distraction from the text. It is one of the most interesting things in it.
Open Psalm 70 and Psalm 40:13–17 side by side. They are the same poem. Now look at the divine names in the Hebrew, which the KJV encodes typographically — "LORD" in small capitals for YHWH, "Lord" in ordinary type for Adonai, "God" for Elohim:
Three swaps toward Elohim — and one swap in the opposite direction. This is the fingerprint of what scholars since the nineteenth century have called the Elohistic Psalter: Psalms 42–83, a block in which Elohim overwhelmingly displaces the covenant name. Counts vary slightly by method, but the ratio runs to roughly 230 occurrences of Elohim against about 44 of YHWH, exactly inverting the pattern in Psalms 1–41 and 84–150. The same substitution is visible in the Psalm 14 // Psalm 53 doublet.
You can verify the boundary inside this very week's reading. Psalms 49 through 78 sit inside the Elohistic block. Psalms 85 and 86 sit outside it — and sure enough, Psalm 85 uses YHWH in verses 1, 7, 8, and 12 with no self-consciousness at all, and Psalm 86 stacks YHWH (vv. 1, 6, 11), Adonai (vv. 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 15), and Elohim (vv. 2, 8, 10, 12, 14) in a single short prayer — including the plural of 86:8, "among the gods there is none like unto thee," the divine-council idiom David Bokovoy has defended as a legitimate Latter-day Saint reading ("'Ye Really Are Gods,'" FARMS Review 19/1 [2007]).
Why someone did this remains genuinely unsettled. Laura Joffe proposed that the collection was assembled to construct a "magic triangle" of the divine name, the number 42, and a blessing, for apotropaic purposes; Joel Burnett argued that the count of forty-two songs reflects an ancient Near Eastern organizing principle rather than accident (Joffe, SJOT 15 (2001); Burnett, JSOT 31 (2006)). The older and simpler theory — reverence-driven avoidance of the divine name — has a demonstrable afterlife: Jonathan Ben-Dov has traced how Qumran scribes handled the tetragrammaton with special orthography, connecting that practice to the Elohistic phenomenon (The Dead Sea Scrolls and Contemporary Culture, STDJ 93 [Brill, 2010], 79–104).
What the theory cannot be is mechanical. Psalm 70:5 has YHWH where its twin has "my God." Whoever did this was reading, not running find-and-replace.
Psalm 72:20: "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended."
That is not a line of the poem. It is a scribal colophon marking the close of a collection — left standing even though it is now flatly false in context. Psalm 86 in this week's reading is titled "A Prayer of David," and more than a dozen further Davidic psalms follow in Books IV and V. The editors who assembled the Psalter into its final five-book shape did not delete the seam. They preserved a fossil of an earlier, smaller Davidic collection and built around it.
Psalm 72 itself is titled lishlomoh — a preposition meaning "of," "for," "belonging to," or "concerning" Solomon, an ambiguity the KJV resolves as "for Solomon" and the LDS heading as David speaking about Solomon. Form-critically it is a royal intercession belonging to a well-documented ancient genre. Martin Arneth argued that Psalm 72's base layer corresponds closely to the Neo-Assyrian coronation hymn for Ashurbanipal — justice, enduring dominion, rain, and fertility as royal gifts — and used that correspondence to argue for a genuinely pre-exilic date ("Sonne der Gerechtigkeit" [Harrassowitz, 2000]). "Dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth" (72:8) is imperial titulary, not sentiment.
Psalm 72 was almost certainly composed to bless a living Judean king. That it also reads as a portrait of the Messiah is not a failure of historical criticism; it is the mechanism by which royal ideology became messianism when the monarchy ended.
Thirteen psalms carry historical superscriptions attaching them to episodes in David's life; two of them fall in this week's reading (51 and 63). Psalm 51's — "when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bath-sheba" — is the most famous.
Brevard Childs's classic study established that these headings are not archival memoranda but early exegesis: an interpretive tradition reading psalms against the Samuel narratives and encoding the result in the title ("Psalm Titles and Midrashic Exegesis," Journal of Semitic Studies 16 [1971]: 137–50). The internal evidence supports him. All thirteen are Davidic, nearly all correspond to something in 1–2 Samuel, and the fit is often loose. In Psalm 51 it is loose in a checkable way: verses 18–19 pray for God to "build thou the walls of Jerusalem" and then anticipate bullocks on the altar. Under David the walls stood and the altar functioned. Most commentators therefore read them as a later liturgical appendix from the exile or after — which, if correct, means the psalm we have was edited into its Davidic frame, not simply filed under it. (Hossfeld and Zenger's Psalms 2 [Hermeneia, 2005] is the standard critical survey of the debate across this whole block.)
Two further details reward attention:
Psalm 51:11's "take not thy holy spirit from me" is one of only three occurrences of the phrase ruach qodesh in the entire Hebrew Bible; the other two are Isaiah 63:10 and 63:11. Latter-day Saints use this verse constantly as a proof-text for losing the companionship of the Holy Ghost, and the LDS footnote sends you to "Holy Ghost, Loss of." Devotionally that is defensible, but the Hebrew evidence is thin: three occurrences, all with possessive suffixes, none obviously personal in the Trinitarian or Latter-day Saint sense. The Restoration supplies the doctrine here; the psalm supplies the vocabulary.
Second, the Church's own "Scripture Helps" for this week asks whether "in sin did my mother conceive me" (51:5) teaches original sin. The Second Article of Faith answers no; the exegetical answer is that the line is hyperbolic self-accusation in a penitential lament. The psalmist is intensifying his guilt, not diagnosing infants.
Three psalms this week belong to the Asaph collection (50, 77, 78), the guild named for a Levitical singer whom Chronicles calls not merely a musician but a seer — "the words of David, and of Asaph the seer" (2 Chronicles 29:30). The collection has a distinct voice: prophetic oracle in the mouth of God (Psalm 50 is a covenant lawsuit, not a hymn), and a preoccupation with national history.
Psalm 78 is the collection's centerpiece and its most tendentious text. Read what it actually does.
It recounts the plagues in verses 44–51 — and gets seven, not ten. Blood, flies, frogs, locusts, hail, pestilence, firstborn. Lice, boils, and darkness are absent, and flies come before frogs, reversing Exodus. Psalm 105 gives yet another selection and sequence. These are not errors; they are evidence that the exodus circulated as living tradition, told differently for different arguments, before it was fixed in the form we read.
It never names Moses. Not once, across seventy-two verses of exodus and wilderness. The preceding Asaph psalm ends "thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron" (77:20) — and then Psalm 78 tells the same story with the human mediator excised. Gili Kugler has argued that this omission is the key to the psalm's politics: with Moses removed, the narrative's endpoint is not law but dynasty — "he chose David also his servant" ("Not Moses, but David: Theology and Politics in Psalm 78," Scottish Journal of Theology 73 [2020]: 126–36).
And it ends in open polemic: God "refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim: but chose the tribe of Judah" (78:67–68). Verse 60's "he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh" is the historical hinge. Israel Finkelstein's excavations at Khirbet Seilun found the Iron I settlement destroyed by fire around the mid-eleventh century BCE, with no domestic architecture but substantial public building — a cultic center that burned, precisely as the psalm implies (Shiloh: The Archaeology of a Biblical Site [Tel Aviv University, 1993]). Verse 12's "field of Zoan" is a subtler tell: Zoan is Tanis, which became an Egyptian royal seat around 1075 BCE under the Twenty-First Dynasty (Britannica, "Tanis"). The psalmist is describing Egypt as he knew it.
Dating remains contested — Antony Campbell argued for the tenth century, Richard Clifford for a Zion-and-David theological program, others for the eighth century after Samaria's fall or later still. But the polemical thrust is not contested. Psalm 78 is a brief for Jerusalem against the northern sanctuary.
Latter-day Saints should sit with the resulting tension. Psalm 77:15 blesses "the sons of Jacob and Joseph" — a verse the LDS footnote sends straight to 2 Nephi 3:4 and the Joseph-of-Egypt prophecies central to Restoration self-understanding. One Asaph psalm elevates Joseph; the very next rejects Ephraim. No harmonizing makes them one argument.
Psalm 71 is the only psalm this week with no superscription at all, and one of only a handful in Books I–II. The Septuagint, uncomfortable with the gap, supplies one: "By David, a Psalm sung by the sons of Jonadab, and the first that were taken captive" (Brenton). The Qumran evidence points elsewhere. In 4QPsa (4Q83), the oldest substantial Psalms manuscript, Psalm 71 follows Psalm 38 directly — suggesting the psalm circulated as a continuation of another poem rather than a freestanding composition. Peter Flint's catalogue of the thirty-nine Psalms manuscripts from the Judean Desert documents dozens of such variations in order and content (The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms [Brill, 1997]).
The most striking datum sits at column XXVII of the Great Psalms Scroll, 11Q5, in a prose paragraph called "David's Compositions": David wrote 3,600 psalms plus 450 liturgical songs plus four for healing — 4,050 in all — "through prophecy which was given him from before the Most High." Whoever wrote that did not think the Psalter was closed or complete. For readers who accept the Ninth Article of Faith's "many great and important things," that is not an embarrassment. It is an ancient Jewish community saying, in its own idiom, that God gave more than we have.
Psalm 71 itself is a mosaic: verses 1–3 rework Psalm 31:1–3, verse 6 reworks Psalm 22:9–10, verse 13 reworks Psalm 35. Psalm 86 does the same, with verse 15 lifting the self-revelation of Exodus 34:6. This is how Israelite prayer worked — by re-collating inherited language. It is also what Nephi does in 2 Nephi 4:16–35, which Matthew Nickerson showed follows the individual-lament form (invocation, complaint, confession of trust, petition, vow of praise) with real fidelity ("Nephi's Psalm," JBMS 6/2 [1997]: 26–42).
Psalm 49:15. "God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave [she'ol]: for he shall receive me." The verb is laqach, "take" — the same verb used of Enoch in Genesis 5:24 and echoed in Psalm 73:24. Jon Levenson makes this the pivot of his argument that resurrection hope has deeper roots in the Hebrew Bible than the standard account allows: some go down to Sheol, but others God takes to Himself (Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel [Yale, 2006]). The LDS footnote cross-references Mosiah 27:24 and D&C 93:38. That reading is more defensible than a minimalist might grant — though the honest position is that the psalm asserts a hope without specifying its mechanism.
Note also who is singing. Psalm 49 belongs to the sons of Korah — the guild descended from the man whom Numbers 16:32–33 describes going down alive into Sheol, and whose sons, Numbers 26:11 pointedly notes, "died not." The descendants of the Bible's most famous Sheol-victim sing the Psalter's boldest claim that God ransoms a soul from Sheol.
Psalm 85:11. The LDS chapter heading reads: "Truth will spring out of the earth (the Book of Mormon)." That gloss is editorial apparatus introduced with the 1979 LDS edition, whose extensive new headings, footnotes, and Topical Guide are documented by Robert J. Matthews ("The New Publications of the Standard Works—1979, 1981," BYU Studies 22/4 [1982]: 387–424). In its own context, Psalm 85:10–13 is covenant-and-harvest imagery: mercy and truth meet, the land yields her increase. "Truth springing from the earth" is agricultural.
But the Latter-day Saint reading is not arbitrary, and its actual source is traceable. Moses 7:62, received by Joseph Smith in December 1830, rewrites the verse and inverts its halves: "righteousness will I send down out of heaven; and truth will I send forth out of the earth, to bear testimony of mine Only Begotten." Same word pair, same Zion horizon, explicit application to a record coming out of the ground. The heading is not exegesis of Psalm 85; it is an application of Moses 7 to Psalm 85. Knowing which is which is the whole discipline.
The same distinction governs Psalm 69, whose heading calls it "a messianic psalm of David." The New Testament quotes it relentlessly — John 2:17 (69:9), Romans 15:3 (69:9), Acts 1:20 (69:25), Romans 11:9–10 (69:22–23), and the gall-and-vinegar of 69:21 across all four Passion narratives. What it never quotes is 69:5: "O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee." A psalm that confesses sin cannot be, in its plain sense, the voice of a sinless Messiah. The evangelists were not misreading it; they were doing what Israelite authors had always done, taking inherited language and putting it to new work — and they left the inconvenient verse alone.
That is the honest picture this week's block gives us: a book assembled by human hands out of older human hands, its seams visible, its collections in tension, its meaning repeatedly extended by later readers who believed God was still speaking. For a church founded on the proposition that revelation did not stop, that ought to be the most familiar story in the world.