What Is a Psalm? Poems Written to Be Sung and Still Being Sung

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme and does not use regular metre in the way classical European verse does, and its organising principle is parallelism, meaning that a line is followed by a second restating, extending or contrasting with it. That structure is the reason these poems survive translation so well, since a rhyme or a metre is destroyed by translation while a parallel structure of ideas moves intact into any language. The types of parallelism are distinguishable, with synonymous pairs restating the same thought in different words, antithetical pairs setting a statement against its opposite, and synthetic pairs where the second line advances the first. Other devices include acrostics, where successive lines or stanzas begin with successive letters of the alphabet, which is invisible in translation and which structures several of the longest examples. Recurring imagery draws on shepherding, agriculture, water, mountains and kingship, which locates the poems in a specific landscape and economy.

Scholars group them by function and the categories reflect what each was for:

• •Laments, individual and communal, which are the largest group and which complain, plead and frequently accuse, in language considerably more direct than later devotional writing allows
• •Hymns of praise, addressed to God and describing creation and deliverance
• •Thanksgiving poems, responding to a specific rescue
• •Royal poems concerning the king, which were later read as referring to a future figure
• •Wisdom poems, closer to instruction than to address
• •Songs of ascent, a sequence associated with pilgrimage, which are short and were probably sung while travelling

The collection has an unusually continuous performance history. It was central to temple worship and to synagogue practice, and it was adopted wholesale by Christianity, where it became the backbone of monastic daily prayer, with religious communities reciting the entire collection weekly under several monastic rules, which means that generations of monks knew all hundred and fifty by heart. Metrical psalters in the Reformation set them to singable verse in vernacular languages, and for Calvinist traditions they were the only permitted content of congregational song for centuries, which produced a substantial body of tunes. Anglican chant developed a method of singing the prose translation to a flexible formula. They appear in Islamic tradition as a scripture given to David. They supply a very large share of the phrases in English literature and political rhetoric, having entered the language through the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. And they are set to music constantly, across every period from plainchant to contemporary popular worship.

Because the collection has been sung rather than only read, its translations have been shaped by the requirement to be singable, which is unusual among scriptural texts. Jerome produced more than one Latin version and the one that entered liturgical use was not his most accurate but the one already familiar to congregations, which is an early instance of usage defeating scholarship. Metrical versions in the Reformation compressed the text into regular stanzas so that it could be sung to tunes, which required paraphrase and produced versions valued for their singing quality rather than their fidelity, with the Scottish psalter of 1650 still in use. Coverdale's English translation was retained in the Book of Common Prayer long after better translations existed, again because congregations knew it. Modern versions face the same tension between accuracy, inclusive language and the cadence that makes a text speakable in unison. The pattern throughout is that a text performed collectively resists revision far more strongly than one read privately.

The collection includes material that religious communities handle awkwardly, and its presence is instructive. Several poems curse enemies in violent terms, including passages calling for the destruction of opponents and their children, and these imprecatory psalms are omitted from many lectionaries, edited in some hymnals and read complete in others, with the decision itself constituting a theological position. Others accuse God directly of abandonment, and one concludes without any resolution at all, which is unusual in devotional literature and is frequently cited by people who find sanitised religious language unhelpful. That range is part of why the collection has lasted, since it includes registers that later devotional writing excluded, and communities that use it encounter anger, despair and vengefulness presented as legitimate things to bring to prayer rather than as failures to be concealed. How a tradition handles those texts is a reasonably good indicator of how it handles difficulty generally.

Parallelism, where a line restates or extends the one before, is the organising principle rather than rhyme or metre, which is exactly why these poems survive translation into any language intact. Monastic rules had communities reciting all hundred and fifty weekly. Calvinist congregations sang nothing else for centuries. The collection includes cursing and unresolved despair, and how a tradition handles those is revealing.