Psalms: The Last Thing We Did Was Sing

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Many singers over many centuries. Seventy-three psalms are headed of David, but the headings were added later, and some psalms come from the exile, long after him.

When: Roughly from the time of the kings, around 1000 BC at the earliest, to after the exile, in the 500s BC and later. The collection was still settling in my lifetime.

Where it fits: The songs come from all of Israel’s history, from David’s kingdom (1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2) to the exile after Jerusalem fell in 586 BC (2 Kings 25) and beyond. The book gathers them into one song book.

Where I quote it: More than almost any other book. Psalm 118 against the chief priests (Mark 12:10–11). Psalm 110 as a riddle (Mark 12:35–37). Psalm 82 (John 10:34). Psalm 37 on the humble (Matthew 5:5). Psalm 8 (Matthew 21:16). Psalm 6 (Matthew 7:23). From the cross, Psalm 22 (Mark 15:34) and Psalm 31 (Luke 23:46).

If you only read three chapters: Psalms 22, 72 and 137.

Words to Know

Psalm — from a Greek word for a song sung to a plucked instrument. The Hebrew name of the book is Tehillim, which means “praises.”

Lament — a prayer of complaint, grief or protest, spoken directly to God. More psalms are laments than any other kind.

Hallel — Psalms 113 to 118, sung together at the great festivals, including the Passover meal. The word means “praise,” as in hallelujah, “praise the LORD.”

Selah — a word that appears seventy-one times in the Psalms. It is probably an instruction to the musicians. Nobody knows for certain what it means.¹

Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, made in the centuries before I was born. Most of the writers of the New Testament quoted from it.

The Book in Brief

The book of Psalms is a collection of 150 songs and prayers, written by many people over many centuries. Nearly all are poems meant to be sung. The editors divided them into five books, and the first four each end with a short blessing of God. Psalm 150 closes the whole collection with praise.

Two psalms stand at the door. Psalm 1 sets two roads side by side. The person who loves God’s teaching is like a tree planted by a stream, and the wicked are like chaff the wind blows away. Psalm 2 is about a king. The nations plot against him, and God says that he is God’s son.

Book One, Psalms 3 to 41, is mostly headed of David. Much of it is people in trouble crying for help, with a few songs of thanks for rescue. Psalm 8 wonders at the stars and at the place of human beings. Psalm 22 begins in abandonment and ends in praise. Psalm 23 is the shepherd psalm.

Book Two, Psalms 42 to 72, opens with songs of the sons of Korah. Psalm 51 is headed as David’s prayer for mercy after the prophet Nathan confronted him over Bathsheba. The book closes with Psalm 72, a prayer for the king.

Book Three, Psalms 73 to 89, begins with the songs of Asaph. Psalm 73 asks why the wicked do so well. Psalm 74 mourns a sanctuary burned to the ground. The book ends with Psalm 89, which recalls God’s promise to David and then says that God has thrown his king aside.

Book Four, Psalms 90 to 106, opens with the only psalm headed of Moses. Several of its songs declare that the LORD reigns. It ends by retelling Israel’s history, failures included, and asking to be gathered from the nations.

Book Five, Psalms 107 to 150, opens by thanking God for gathering people from every direction. It holds the Hallel (113 to 118), Psalm 119, a poem of 176 verses in praise of God’s teaching, and fifteen songs for pilgrims going up to Jerusalem (120 to 134). Psalm 137 mourns by the rivers of Babylon. The last five psalms, 146 to 150, are all songs of praise.

Across the five books a few kinds of psalm keep turning up. Laments, the most common, complain to God. Songs of thanks tell of a rescue. Hymns praise God as creator and king. Royal psalms pray for the king and celebrate his crowning. Wisdom psalms teach how to live. Songs of Zion honor Jerusalem and the Temple.

The last thing my friends and I did together, before we walked out to the garden where I was arrested, was sing.

When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives (Mark 14:26).

It was the Passover meal. At that meal, my people sang the Hallel, Psalms 113 to 118. It was most likely the hymn we sang that night.²

So think about what was in our mouths. Psalm 118 says, The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (Psalm 118:22). It also says, Blessed is he who comes in the LORD’s name (Psalm 118:26).

Both of those lines had been heard in Jerusalem that same week. The crowd had shouted the second one at me on the road into the city (Mark 11:9), and I gave it back to the city a few days later (Matthew 23:39). I had thrown the first one at the chief priests in the Temple, and they knew exactly who I meant (Mark 12:10–12).

Then we sang them together, and went out into the dark.

That is the book I want to tell you about. It was not a book I read. It was a book I sang.

Whose songs these are

The book has 150 psalms. Seventy-three of them carry a heading in Hebrew that says of David.³

You were probably taught that David wrote the Psalms. Here is what the book itself tells you.

The little Hebrew word in those headings can mean by David, for David, about David or belonging to David’s collection. The headings were added by the people who gathered the songs, not by the singers.

Other psalms are headed with other names: Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, even Moses (Psalm 90). Many have no name at all.

Some cannot be David’s. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion (Psalm 137:1). That song was written after Babylon burned Jerusalem and marched my people into exile, about four hundred years after David died.

And in the middle of the book there is a line that gives the game away. At the end of Psalm 72 an editor wrote: This ends the prayers by David, the son of Jesse (Psalm 72:20). Then the book keeps going, and more psalms marked of David turn up later. Somebody stitched collections together and left the seam showing.

The book is in five parts, and each part closes with a short blessing: at the end of Psalms 41, 72, 89 and 106, and then the whole book ends with Psalm 150.⁴

In my lifetime the collection was still not fixed everywhere. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, hidden in caves near my own country, there are more copies of the Psalms than of any other book. One of the largest scrolls puts the later psalms in a different order and includes songs your Bible does not have. It even claims that David wrote 4,050 songs.⁵

One practical note, because it confuses people. The Greek translation counts the psalms a little differently. It joins Psalms 9 and 10 into one, and later splits others. So in many older Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, most psalm numbers are one lower. If your grandmother’s Bible calls the shepherd psalm Psalm 22, that is why.⁶

Go deeperHow the five books were put together

Nobody sat down and planned the five books in one afternoon. The editors left their fingerprints all over them.

Songs that appear twice. Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 are almost the same song, and the plainest difference is the name of God: Psalm 14 says the LORD, Psalm 53 says God. The last five verses of Psalm 40 come back as Psalm 70, with small changes. Psalm 108 is two older pieces joined together: its first five verses are Psalm 57:7–11, and the rest is Psalm 60:5–12. Psalm 18 is the same song David sings in 2 Samuel 22.⁷

One name for God. In Psalms 42 to 83 the singers prefer the plain word Elohim, “God,” to God’s own name, which is far more common in the rest of the book. Scholars call this stretch the Elohistic Psalter. It explains the Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 difference, since Psalm 53 falls inside it and Psalm 14 does not, and it explains Psalm 70 and Psalm 40 in the same way.⁷

The seams. In 1985 Gerald Wilson argued that the order of the book is deliberate. Royal psalms mark its turning points: Psalm 2 near the start, Psalm 72 at the end of Book Two, Psalm 89 at the end of Book Three. Psalm 89 ends with the king’s fall: You have defiled his crown in the dust (Psalm 89:39). Book Four, which follows, turns to the LORD as the true king. Wilson thought the editors arranged the book this way after Jerusalem fell, to say what the loss of the kingdom meant. Many scholars accept that the order is deliberate, though they disagree about the details.⁸

What it was for

The Psalms were not written to be read silently in a chair. They were sung.

The Levites sang them in the Temple. An old Jewish tradition, written down about two hundred years after me, lists a psalm for each day of the week. The Sabbath psalm is Psalm 92, and the Bible itself gives it that heading: A song for the Sabbath day.⁹

Every year my family went up to Jerusalem for Passover (Luke 2:41). Fifteen psalms, 120 to 134, carry the heading A Song of Ascents. They are most likely songs for that road: I will lift up my eyes to the hills (Psalm 121:1). I was glad when they said to me, “Let’s go to the LORD’s house!” (Psalm 122:1).¹⁰

The Hebrew name of the book means praises, but more of the psalms are complaints than any other kind. People in trouble shout at God in them. They ask where he has gone. They ask how long. They say they are sick, betrayed, surrounded and about to die.

One of them never turns around at all. Psalm 88 begins in darkness and ends there: You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness (Psalm 88:18). It is in the book anyway. Somebody decided that a prayer with no happy ending was still a prayer.

That is what this book taught my people. You are allowed to bring the worst thing you feel straight to God, and you are allowed to do it out loud, together.

Go deeperHow Hebrew poetry works

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme at the ends of its lines. It rhymes in meaning. A line is followed by a second line that echoes it, sharpens it or turns it around.

Sometimes the second line repeats the thought in new words: The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork (Psalm 19:1). Sometimes it turns the first line upside down: For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish (Psalm 1:6).

In 1753 an English scholar, Robert Lowth, published in Latin the lectures on Hebrew poetry that he had given at Oxford, and he gave this pairing of lines a name: parallelism. In 1981 James Kugel argued that the second line seldom just repeats the first. It usually carries the thought one step further, adding a detail or making it stronger.¹¹

The psalmists also played with the alphabet. Several psalms are acrostics, in which each line or each stanza begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet: Psalms 9–10 (read together), 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145. Psalm 119 is the grandest. It has twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter, and all eight verses of a stanza begin with that stanza’s letter. That is why it has 176 verses. Psalm 145 holds a puzzle. The standard Hebrew text has no line for the letter nun. The Great Psalms Scroll from the Dead Sea has one, and so does the Greek translation, so many English Bibles put it back.¹²

Most of this is lost in translation, but it shows how the psalms were built. They were made to be remembered.

How I used it

I quoted the Psalms more than almost any other book. Here are some of the places the gospels remember.

When I blessed the gentle. Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). That is Psalm 37: The humble shall inherit the land (Psalm 37:11). Read the whole psalm and you will see what the land is doing there. Psalm 37 is about powerful men who take the land and squeeze the poor, and it promises five times that the land will come back to the humble (Psalm 37:9, 11, 22, 29, 34). It says the wicked borrow, and don’t pay back (Psalm 37:21). Everyone listening to me knew that song. When I said inherit the earth, they heard inherit the land.

When I faced the chief priests. After I told the story of the tenants who kill the owner’s son, I quoted Psalm 118: the stone the builders threw away became the cornerstone. Mark says they wanted to arrest me on the spot, because they realized I had told that story against them (Mark 12:10–12). The builders were the men running the Temple.

When I set a riddle in the Temple. Psalm 110 begins, The LORD says to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool for your feet.” I asked the crowd how the Messiah could be David’s son if David calls him “my Lord” (Mark 12:35–37). I was making them think about what kind of king they were waiting for. Mark says the crowd listened with delight. Psalm 110 is quoted in the New Testament more often than any other psalm.

When they accused me of making myself God. In John’s gospel I answer with Psalm 82: I said, you are gods (John 10:34; Psalm 82:6). Now read Psalm 82. God stands up in the council of the gods and puts them on trial, and the charge is this: Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy (Psalm 82:3–4). They did not, so they will die like anyone else (Psalm 82:7). In that psalm, the test of anything that calls itself divine is what it does for the poor. It was also the Temple song for one of the days of the week.⁹

When the children shouted in the Temple. The priests were offended, and I answered with Psalm 8: Out of the mouth of babes and nursing babies you have perfected praise (Matthew 21:16). Matthew quotes it in the Greek wording. The Hebrew says strength, not praise.¹³

When I described the people I would not know at the end. Depart from me, you who work iniquity (Matthew 7:23) is Psalm 6:8.

And one more, which I did not quote.

In the desert, the devil quoted a psalm to me. He will command his angels concerning you … On their hands they will bear you up (Psalm 91:11–12; Matthew 4:6). He wanted me to throw myself off the top of the Temple and let the verse catch me.

I answered him with Deuteronomy: do not put the LORD your God to the test (Matthew 4:7).

Remember that the next time someone uses a psalm as a promise that nothing bad can happen to you. In the gospels, the one person who reads Psalm 91 that way is the devil.

What the Psalms say a king is for

My people called their king God’s son. On the day a king was crowned, they sang Psalm 2: You are my son. Today I have become your father (Psalm 2:7). It was a title that came with a job.

Psalm 72 is a prayer for the king, and it spells out the job:

He will judge the poor of the people. He will save the children of the needy, and will break the oppressor in pieces (Psalm 72:4).

He will deliver the needy when he cries; the poor, who has no helper. He will have pity on the poor and needy. He will save the souls of the needy. He will redeem their soul from oppression and violence. Their blood will be precious in his sight (Psalm 72:12–14).

That is what a king was for. Not glory or wars or palaces. The poor.

And because kings mostly failed at it, Psalm 146 says this: Don’t put your trust in princes (Psalm 146:3). Then it lists what God does instead: he executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, frees the prisoners, opens the eyes of the blind, raises up those who are bowed down, preserves the foreigners and upholds the fatherless and widow (Psalm 146:7–9).

Put that list beside what I told John the Baptist’s messengers when they asked who I was: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them (Matthew 11:4–5).

Most of my list echoes Isaiah (Isaiah 35:5–6; 61:1), but Psalm 146 sings the same song. Lay them side by side and read them.

The shepherd

Psalm 23 is one of the passages most often read at funerals. The LORD is my shepherd: I shall lack nothing.

It is beautiful, and it is also political.

In the world I grew up in, shepherd was a word for a king. Kings in Babylon called themselves shepherds of their people centuries before David.¹⁴ My own prophets used the word the same way. Ezekiel attacked the rulers of Israel as shepherds who fed themselves and let the flock scatter (Ezekiel 34:2–6).

So when the psalm says the LORD is my shepherd, it is also saying who is not. The man on the throne is not. The one who leads you to water, who keeps you alive in the valley, who sets a table for you in front of the people who hate you, is God.

John remembers me calling myself the good shepherd, the one who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11). Notice what kind of shepherd that is. A shepherd who dies for the flock is the opposite of a ruler who feeds on it.

Go deeperPsalms that sound like their neighbors’ songs

The people who wrote the psalms did not live in a bubble. Their neighbors had hymns too, and in two places the likeness is hard to miss.

Psalm 29 is a thunderstorm. The LORD’s voice sounds seven times in it, over the waters, over the cedars of Lebanon, over the wilderness (Psalm 29:3–9). Its first verse calls on the sons of the mighty, which in Hebrew is literally “sons of gods.” At Ugarit, a city on the Syrian coast whose clay tablets came to light from 1929 on, the Canaanite poems show the storm god Baal speaking in thunder while mountains shake. Many scholars, Frank Moore Cross among them, think Psalm 29 began as an older Canaanite hymn to the storm, which Israel took over with one decisive change: it is the LORD who owns the thunder.¹⁵

Psalm 104 praises the LORD as creator. Set it beside the Great Hymn to the Aten, a hymn to the sun-disk carved in tombs at Amarna in Egypt in the reign of Akhenaten, about 1350 BC. Both describe night, when the wild animals prowl, and morning, when they slip away to their dens and people go out to work (Psalm 104:20–23). Both marvel at how many creatures there are and how each is fed.¹⁶

Scholars do not agree on how the likeness came about. Some think a form of the Egyptian hymn traveled to Canaan, which Egypt ruled in those years. Others think both poets drew on a shared stock of ideas about the sun and the order of the world. The difference is plain either way. In the Egyptian hymn the sun-disk is the god. In the psalm, The sun knows when to set (Psalm 104:19). It is only a servant.

The prayers I would not pray

I will be honest about the hard ones, because the book is honest about them.

Psalm 137, the song of the exiles by the rivers of Babylon, ends like this: Happy shall he be, who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock (Psalm 137:9).

Psalm 109 asks God to make an enemy’s children fatherless and his wife a widow, and to let his children wander and beg (Psalm 109:9–10).

These are in the book. Nobody cut them out.

I never quoted them. I taught something else: You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies … and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Matthew 5:43–44).

But I will not pretend those psalms are not there, and I will not pretend I do not understand them. Psalm 137 is what people sound like after their city has been burned and their children killed in front of them. The book does not tell them to hide that. It lets them say it to God instead of doing it with their own hands. Then the book keeps going, and a few pages later it ends with Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! (Psalm 150:6).

The Psalms hold all of it: rage, grief, doubt, joy. That is why people still open them when nothing else will do.

Go deeperThe exiles in Babylon, from Babylon’s own records

Psalm 137 mourns the exile. The clay tablets of Babylon tell part of the same story from the other side.

Babylon first took Jerusalem in 597 BC. The book of 2 Kings says Nebuchadnezzar carried off the king, Jehoiachin, and thousands of others, and put Zedekiah on the throne (2 Kings 24:10–17). A Babylonian chronicle records the same event. On the second day of the month of Adar, which is 16 March 597 BC in our calendar, the king of Babylon captured the city of Judah, seized its king and appointed a king of his own choice.¹⁷

Jehoiachin himself turns up in Babylon. German archaeologists digging there between 1899 and 1917 found tablets listing monthly rations of oil and barley for royal prisoners and craftsmen. One names Yaukin, king of the land of Yahud, and his sons.¹⁸ The Bible says that years later a new Babylonian king freed him from prison and gave him a daily allowance (2 Kings 25:27–30).

Jerusalem itself was burned in 586 BC (2 Kings 25:8–10), and more exiles followed. How did they live? Jeremiah wrote to them, Build houses and dwell in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit (Jeremiah 29:5). Ezekiel found some of them in a settlement called Tel Aviv, by the river Chebar (Ezekiel 3:15). More than a hundred tablets published in 2014 come from a town they call Al-Yahudu, “Judah-town,” and date between 572 and 477 BC. They show Judeans farming dates and barley, digging and keeping up canals, borrowing and lending silver, and giving their children names that end in Yahu, a short form of God’s name.¹⁹

They were not free to go home, but they were not prisoners behind walls either. The picture is of people who built houses and planted gardens in a strange land, and still sat down and wept when they remembered Zion.

The first line of a song

And so I come to the cross.

Near the end, Mark and Matthew remember me crying out in my own language: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46).

That is the first line of Psalm 22.

People have argued for centuries about what that cry means. Some hear only abandonment. Others point out that everyone standing there knew the song, and that Psalm 22 does not stop at its first line. It moves from I am a worm, and no man (Psalm 22:6) to neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried to him, he heard (Psalm 22:24), and it ends with generations not yet born hearing what God has done (Psalm 22:30–31).

Here is what I can tell you. It was a song. It was the first line of a song a whole people knew by heart, and that song does not end where I stopped.

The men who wrote my death down did not agree on my last words. Luke remembers a different line: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:46). That one is from the Psalms too. It is Psalm 31:5.²⁰

Three of the four witnesses remember me, at the very end, praying from the same book.

When there was nothing left for me to say in my own words, I had these.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Psalm 22, all of it, then Mark 15:34.

You will find: that the cry from the cross is the first line of a song that ends in hope.

Then read Psalm 72:1–4 and Psalm 146:5–9. Ask yourself what those songs say a ruler is for, and whether you have ever heard them preached that way.

The Short Version

• The Psalms were my people’s song book. I most likely sang the Hallel, Psalms 113 to 118, with my friends on the night I was arrested.
• David did not write all of them. The headings were added later, and some psalms come from the exile, centuries after him.
• More psalms are complaints than any other kind, and the book keeps even the angriest and darkest prayers.
• The Psalms say a king exists to defend the poor, and they tell you not to trust princes.
• My cry from the cross is the first line of Psalm 22, a song that ends in hope. Luke’s last words for me come from Psalm 31.