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 PSALMS

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PSALMS

the latter the great alphabetic praise of the law". A like minor psalter of the Greek period was the "Pilgrifti Psalter" (Pss. exx-cxxxiv), a collection of "Songs of Pilgrimage", the "Songs of Ascents", or "Gradual Psalms", which the pilgrims chanted while going up to Jerusalem for the three great feasts.

(2) The Catholic View: — So extensive an applica- tion of divisive criticism to the Psalter does not meet the approval of Catholic exegetes. Successive redac- tion of the Psalms they readily admit, pro\'ided the doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Writ be not impugned. The doctrine of inspiration has regard to the Psalms as they now stand in the canon, and does not impede a Catholic from admitting various redactions of the Psalter previous to our present redaction; in fact, even uninspired liturgical redac- tion of the inspired Psalms would not be contrary to what the Church teaches in the matter of in,spiration, so long as the redactor had preserved intact and ab- solutely unaltered the inspired meaning of the Sacred Text. The Biblical Commission (1 May, 1910) will not allow that our present redaction con- tains many Machabean psalms; nor will Driver, Delitzsch, Perowne, Renan, and many other critical scholars. "Had so many psalms dated from this age, it is difficult not to think that they would have borne more prominent marks of it in their diction and style" (Driver, "Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament", New York, 1892, 36.5). P.ss. xliv, Ixxiv, Ixxix, and Ixxxiii, which Delitzsch and Perowne on historical grounds admit to be Machabean. oc- casion to Da^^son (Hastings, "Diet, of the Bible", IV, 152) "unquestionable difficulties arising from their place in the second and third books". There are no certain proofs that these or any psalms are Machabean. The Biblical Commission does not, on this account, deny any of the psalms are Machabean; it leaves that question still open. In the matter of redaction, it allows that "for liturgical or musical or other unknown reasons, psalms may have been split up or joined together" in course of time; and that "there are other psalms, like the Miserere mei, Dens [Ps. li], which, in order that they might be better fitted to the historical circumstances and the solemnities of the Jewish people, were slightly re-edited and changed by the omission or addition of a verse or two, so long as the inspiration of the entire text remains intact". That is the im- portant thing; the doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Writ must not suffer in the least. How, then, is the doctrine of the inspiration of the entire text kept intact? Were the previous redactors inspired? Nothing has been determined by any authority of the Church in these matters. We incline to the opin- ion that God inspired the meanings of the Psalms as originally written, and in like manner inspired every redactor who gathered and edited these songs of Israel until the last inspired redactor set them to- gether in their present form.

V. Text. — The Psalms were originally written in Hebrew letters, such as we see only on coins and in a few lapidary inscriptions; the text has come down to us in square Aramaic letters. Only the versions give us any idea of the pre-Massoretic text. Thus far no pre-Massoretic MS. of the Psalms has been discovered. The Massoretic text has been preserved in more than 3400 MSS., of which none is earlier than the ninth century and only nine or ten are earlier than the twelfth (.see M.xxrsrmpTs of the Bible). These Mas.soretic MSS. rei)resent two slightly variant families of one tradition — the texts of Ben .A.sher and of Ben Naftali. Their variations are of little moment in the interpretation of the Psalms. The study of the rhythmic structure of tlie Psalms, together with the variations between Massorah and the versions, have made it clear that our Hebrew text is far from perfect, and that its points are often wrong. The

efforts of critics to perfect the text are at times due to no more than a shrewd surmise. The metrical mould is chosen; then the psalm is forcibly adapted to it. It were better to leave the text in its imperfect condition than to render it worse by guess-work. The decree of the Biblical Commission is aimed at those to whom the imperfections in the Massoretic Text are an occasion, though no excuse, for countless conjectural emendation.s, at times wild and fanciful, which nowadays pass current as critical exegesis of the Psalms.

VI. Versions. — A. Greek- — The chief version of the Psalms is the Septuagint. It is preserved to us in Cod. U, Brit. Mus. Pap. 37, seventh centurj', con- taining Pss. x-xxxiii; Leipzig Pap., fourth century, containing Pss. xxix-hv; X, Cod. Sinaiticus, fourth century, complete; B, Cod. Vaticanus, fourth cen- tury, complete, except Pss. cv, 27-exxx^di, 6; A, Cod. Alexandrinus, fifth centurj', complete except Pss. xhx, 19-lxx\n, 10; I, Cod. Bodleianus, ninth century, complete; and in many other later MSS. The Septuagint Version is of great value in the exegesis of the Psalms. It provides pre-Massoretic readings which are clearly preferable to those of the Massoretes. It brings us back to a text at least of the second century b. c. In spite of a seeming servility to words and to Hebrew constructions, a servility that probably existed in the Alexandrian Greek of the Jews of the period, the Septuagint translator of psalms shows an excellent knowledge of Hebrew, and fears not to depart from the letter and to give the meaning of his original. The second-centurj* a. d. Greek ver- sions of Aquila. Symmachus,andTheodotion are extant in only a few fragments; these fragments are ^-itnessea to a text pretty much the same as our Massoretic.

B. Latin. — .A.bout the middle of the second century the Septuagint Psalter was translated into Latin. Of this Old Latin, or Itala, Version we have only a few MSS. and the citations by the early Latin Fathers. At the request of Pope St. Damasus I, A. D. 383, St. Jerome revised the Itala and brought it back closer to the Septuagint. His revision was soon so distorted that he complained, "plus antiquum errorem quam novam emendationem valere" (P. L., XXIX, 117). This is St. Jerome's "Roman Psalter"; it is used in the recitation of the Office in St. Peter's, Rome, and in the Missal. The corruption of his first translation led St. Jerome to undertake an entirely new transla- tion of the Hexapla edition of the Septuagint. He worked with great care, in Bethlehem, some time be- fore A. D. 392. He indicated by asterisks the parts of the Hebrew text which had been omitted by the Septua- gint and were borrowed by him from Theodotion ; he marked with the obelus (-;-) the parts of the Sep- tuagint which were not in the Hebrew. These crit^ ical marks came in course of time to be utterly ne- glected. This translation is the "Galilean Psalter"; it is part of the \'ulgate. A third Latin translation of the Psalms, made from the Hebrew Text, with Origen's Hexapla and the other ancient versions in vievf, was completed by St. Jerome about the end of the fourth centurj- at Bethlehem. This version is of great worth in the study of the Psalter. Dr. Briggs says: "Where it differs from H. and G., its e\adence is especially valuable as giving the opinion of the best Biblical scholar of ancient times as to the original text, based on the use of a wealth of critical material vastly greater than that in the possession of any other critic, earlier or later" (p. xxxii).

C. — For other translations, see Versions of the Bible; Rhymed Bibles.

VII. Poetic Form. — A. Parallelism (q. v.) is the principle of balance which is admitted by all to be the most characteristic and essential feature of the poetic form of the Psalms. By synonymous, synthetic, antithetic, emblematic, stair-like, or introverted parallelism, thought is balanced with thought, hne