It only became a focus of the Christian church in the second and third centuries CE as it struggled with establishing its own criteria as to what constitutes an “inspired text.” Determining just how specific words come to be “enscripturated” is a process that takes place over an extended period of time. What is clear is that the early Christian church understood the Hebrew bible to be sacred scripture by its repeated use of the moniker “it is written.” That the Psalms were used widely throughout early Christian worship is attested by no less than Luke, Peter, Paul and the other evangelists. The Hebrew bible translated into Greek (LXX) was, for the early church, the book of the “law and the prophets.”
That the psalms were considered authoritative witness by the Jews prior to the closing of the canon, is widely attested. The word canon means a reed or rule; a standard to be agreed on; a settled text. An early version of the book of Psalms (second-century BCE) gives every appearance of having been readily received into the Hebrew canon as sacred text of Scripture. It quickly secured the mantle of unparalleled authoritative and faithful witness to the historic acts and words of יהוה in the life of the ancient people of God. This is thoroughly demonstrated and it’s witnessed throughout the Christian scriptures in the church. Indeed, the first scriptures of the early Christians was the Hebrew bible. Its searching use of the Psalms bore witness to Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises to all humanity. The promised Messiah was the subject of their investigations. Without the witness of the Psalms as scripture, this pattern of promise and fulfillment would not be nearly so transparent to the new community of God.
The two major Greek translations of the “Old Testament”, the LXX third-century BCE and the ninth-century CE Theodotion Text, 48 both include additional materials taken from the book of Daniel, and others which were relegated to the Apocrypha. In both the Hebrew and Protestant bibles, the First Testament books consist of 39 entries. Although they are arranged in a differing order, both canons contain exactly the same authorized books. These differ from their Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox counterparts, both of whom admit deutero-canonical books into their canons of Holy Scripture. The Protestant Anglican Communion admits some few apocryphal books for the purpose of reading and edification, but not for the constructing and establishing of any doctrine. This is a position that is theologically unique to the Anglican Communion—and in turn, the Episcopal Church in the United States.
Additionally, manuscript fragments of the prophecy of Daniel were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in three caves at Qumran including apocalyptic texts that employ language reminiscent of Daniel 7 and 12. The earliest date of the Dead Sea Scrolls is placed in the second-century BCE. The inclusion of sacred scriptures into the Hebrew canon occurs later than the LXX, which includes both of these books and is relatively fixed by the time of the council at Jamnia, ca. 90 CE.49 There are substantial differences in the Hebrew biblical canon, and that found in the Greek and Latin and modern Roman Catholic Bibles regarding the status and use of apocryphal books and their inclusion into the Hebrew canon of sacred scripture. These so-called deutero-canonical writings, with only one or two exceptions, are extant only in Greek and do not form part of the Hebrew canon. Further support may be garnered from the Dead Sea Scrolls where one may compare the arrangement of the Psalter to that found in the Masoretic Text (MT), the stabilization of which appear to take place in two distinct stages:
Psalms 1–89 (or thereabouts) prior to the first century BCE, and Psalms 90 onwards toward the end of the first century CE. The scrolls strongly suggest that during the entire Qumran period Psalms 1–89 were virtually finalized as a collection while Psalms 90 and beyond remained much more fluid. 50
For Christians, the value of the Psalter of course, lies chiefly in the relationship between the Hebrew bible and the Christian scriptures. Rather than resorting to analysis alone, the Psalms call for synthesis and constantly challenge the mind and the heart of the serious reader. Discussion of the shape of the book of Psalms cannot afford to overlook what this combination of earlier and later segments into a final form was intended to signify. An intentional and purposeful editorial arrangement and a collection of collections in the final shaping of the Psalter is clearly at work, bringing it to the final form we have today. The Psalms are normally assumed to be the poetic constructions of some of the more famous individuals in Israel’s history. But this is not necessarily accurate because the authorship of the various psalms is now thought to be a largely anonymous enterprise and the actual identity of any of the individual poets is now considered highly speculative.
These particular 150 poetic compositions (there were thousands of psalm compositions produced in ancient Israel) are filled with songs and hymns, prayers and praises, laments and thanksgiving. Whereas prayers of lament or complaint psalms dominate Books I-III, the hymns and songs of praise are more numerous in Books IV-V. Broadly speaking, most of the psalms in Books I-III are thought to be of pre-exilic origin while the latter Books IV and V are usually considered to be mostly postexilic in origin. In this same manner praise becomes the goal of the Psalter in the way that praise is the goal of human life.
Praise is fundamental to any right understanding of the Psalms. A dialogical relationship between God and the people of God reflects the faith experience of the community that cries out in hope for the plenitude of God’s mercy, deliverance and redemption. The Psalms speak directly to the human heart. This dynamic element lies more often than not in an inherent ambiguity which is the subject of the Psalter: יהוה, who in love or anger, forgiveness or punishment, seeks to be the God of Israel, and Israel, which can only exist as the people of this God, in each historic moment, seeks to hear and respond to God’s call to them. It is YHWH who gives this particular people their corporate identity.
The compositions of the Psalms are primarily poetic but certainly not in the way we have come to understand poetry. Biblical prose is highly linear and sequential, moving from one event in time to the next through the ever present and in our English Bible versions. Prose is much more accessible to the contemporary reader, encouraging and inviting a dynamic interaction with the text. But the various poetic forms of the Psalms do not move so smoothly. Hebrew poems don’t typically tell a story so they lack the connective sinew which ties prose together. The short half-verses are bonded together in verbal parallelism and in turn mark the transition from one line to the next -a relatively tenuous exercise. Each line in Hebrew poetry functions more like a brick in a wall than it does a length of rope or a cable. However, very few languages are better suited to the form of noble poetry than is biblical Hebrew. In part, this is due to its very great strength of accent which normally falls on the last syllable, thus bearing the weight of sound and meaning carried by the word. The result is such that even Hebrew prose has a very strongly marked cadence or rhythm. Although our efforts to reproduce the sounds of the sung psalms it in its ancient and original state are completely futile, its sung sound must have been melodious–even ethereal–and exceedingly pleasant to the human ear. Because of this style of composition, and combined with the fact that Hebrew is a terse, pithy language all make the poetry of the psalms more difficult to access than the “friendlier” prose to which we are accustomed in the Bible.
When it comes to the translation of the Hebrew text into English the terseness of the original is almost always lost. Translation is more art than science and translators typically elongate and smooth out features of Hebrew poetry making it more challenging to access the original meaning of the text.
Nevertheless, we are not without a relatively high degree of confidence that—with some very few exceptions—the text of the Psalter is fundamentally reliable. In conveying accurately, the essence of these poetic compositions, they are affirmed as a whole and contribute to some of the most deeply intimate, moving and affective language in the entire Bible. The Psalms are the product of a community of faithful and observant worshipers. Together they sang and prayed what would gradually become, over a very long period of time, these unparalleled poems, songs,