Psalms: the book of prayer and praise

About the book

The Psalms are poems for singing. Our name comes from the Greek for songs sung to strings; the Hebrew Bible calls the book Tehillim, ‘praises’, the plural of tehillah (תְּהִלָּה).

Many psalms have headings naming a writer or occasion. In the Hebrew text seventy-three are headed ‘of David’; others are of Asaph or the sons of Korah, two of Solomon, and Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses; some have no heading. Jews and Christians have long received David as the chief psalmist. Scripture calls him "the sweet psalmist of Israel" (2 Samuel 23:1); Jesus said that David spoke Psalm 110 "in the Spirit" (Matthew 22:43); and the first church, at prayer, quoted Psalm 2, which has no heading, as God's words "through the mouth of Your servant, our father David" (Acts 4:25).

Many scholars think the headings were added as the psalms were collected, noting that the Hebrew ‘of David’ can also mean ‘for David’ or ‘belonging to the David collection’, and they date many psalms after his time. Many others, among them evangelicals, who stress the authority of Scripture and the telling of the gospel, take the headings as old and trustworthy. Most agree that the book was gathered in stages.

The map under the Jesus tab sets the Psalms in the united monarchy of David and Solomon (about 1050–930 BC). Yet the book holds the songs of many centuries, from the prayer of Moses to the exiles' lament, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion" (Psalm 137:1), and is usually thought to have taken its present shape after the exile.

How it unfolds

Psalms 1 and 2 open the door: the blessed man who delights in the LORD's law, and God's king. Each book ends in praise (Psalm 41:13), and the last psalm ends them all: "Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Hallelujah!" (Psalm 150:6).

The psalms are of many kinds: praise and thanksgiving, songs of trust, royal psalms, wisdom psalms and psalms of repentance. The most common is lament, which is no failure of faith: Psalm 13 begins, "How long, O LORD?" (Psalm 13:1) and ends trusting in God's loving devotion.

Hebrew poetry rhymes ideas, not sounds. A second line echoes the first, sets something against it or carries it further: this is parallelism.

Bless the LORD, O my soul; all that is within me, bless His holy name.

Psalm 103:1

‘O my soul’ is taken up by ‘all that is within me’, and ‘the LORD’ by ‘His holy name’. Hebrew poetry and parallelism, in the Hebrew course, shows more.

Key passages

The book opens with the blessing of one whose "delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night" (Psalm 1:2). Its best-loved song confesses God as shepherd:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Psalm 23:1

The psalms also teach us to bring our sin to God, not hide it. Psalm 51's heading sets it after the prophet Nathan came to David over Bathsheba:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Psalm 51:10

Grief and repentance lead on to praise: "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and do not forget all His kind deeds" (Psalm 103:2). The psalms are words spoken to God and also God's word to us, and so they give us words to pray.

The book and Christ

The Psalms are often reckoned the Old Testament book the New Testament quotes most. The risen Jesus said, "Everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44). Paul heard God's word to the king, "You are My Son; today I have become Your Father" (Psalm 2:7), fulfilled when God raised Jesus (Acts 13:33). From Psalm 110, "The LORD said to my Lord" (Psalm 110:1), Jesus showed that the Christ is David's Lord (Matthew 22:44), and he took to himself the words "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" (Psalm 118:22, Matthew 21:42).

Jesus prayed the psalms. On the cross he cried out the first line of Psalm 22, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46), and at the last he prayed Psalm 31: "Father, into Your hands I commit My Spirit" (Luke 23:46). John Wesley writes of Psalm 22 that "this was in part verified in David, but much more fully in Christ" Wesley.

The church has sung and prayed the psalms in every age. Paul tells believers to "sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs" (Colossians 3:16), and Augustine, newly turned to God, longed to recite them to the whole world, then remembered that "they are sung through the whole world" Augustine, Confessions 9.4.8.

Reading it

Read a psalm a day, or five a day to finish in a month. The Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican churches, the family of the Church of England, sets the Psalms to be read through monthly Book of Common Prayer. Spread Psalm 119, all 176 verses, over several days. Begin with Psalm 1.

Do not only read the psalms; pray them. Read any heading first, and watch for where lament turns to trust. Learning to pray, in the New Believers course, shows how to make a psalm your own prayer. Then go on to Proverbs.

Practice