Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/43

Rh PSALMS 31 slaves of Persia ; there has been a national rising and armies have gone forth to battle. Yet God has not gone forth with them : the heathen have been victorious, blood has flowed like water round Jerusalem, the temple has been defiled, and these disasters assume the character of a reli- gious persecution. These details would fit the time of re- ligious persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes, to which indeed Ps. Ixxiv. is referred (as a prophecy) in 1 Mac. vii. 16. But against this reference there is the objection that these psalms are written in a time of the deepest de- jection and yet are psalms of the temple choirs. Now when the temple was reopened for worship after its pro- fanation by Antiochus the Jews were victorious and a much more joyous tone was appropriate. Besides, if the psalms are of the Maccabee period, they can have been no original part of the Elohistic psalm-book, which certainly was not collected so late. But there is one and only one time in the Persian period to which they can be referred, viz., that of the great civil wars under Artaxerxes III. Ochus (middle of 4th century B.C.). See PERSIA, vol. xviii. p. 580, and PHCENICIA, ib. p. 809. The Jews were involved in these and were severely chastised, and we know from Josephus that the temple was defiled by the Persians and humiliating conditions attached to the worship there. It would appear that to the Jews the struggle took a theo- cratic aspect, and it is not impossible that the hopeful beginnings of a national movement, which proved in the issue so disastrous, are reflected in some of the other pieces of the collection. 1 All this carries the collection of the Elohistic psalm-book down to quite the last years of the Persian period at the earliest, and with this it agrees to name but one other point that the view of Israel's past history taken in Ps. Ixxviii., where the final rejection of the house of Joseph is co-ordinated with the fall of Shiloh and the rise of Zion and the Davidic kingdom, indi- cates a standpoint very near to that of Chronicles. The fusion of the separate Korahite and Asaphic psalm-books in a single collection along with the second group of Davidic psalms may very probably be connected with the remodelling of the singers in three choirs which Chronicles presupposes. Now books iv. and v. are, as we have seen, later than the Elohistic redaction of books ii. and iii., so that the collection of the last part of the Psalter must, if our argu- ment up to this point is sound, be thrown into the Greek period, and probably not the earliest part thereof. And this conclusion is borne out by a variety of indications. First of all, the language of some of these psalms clearly points to a very late date indeed. 2 The Jews had even in the time of Nehemiah (Neh. xiii. 24) been in danger of forgetting their own tongue and adopting a jargon com- pounded with neighbouring idioms ; but the restorers of the law fought against this tendency with vigour and with so much success that very tolerable Hebrew was written for at least a century longer. But in such a psalm as cxxxix. the language is a real jargon, a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, which, in a hymn accepted for use in the temple, shows the Hebrew speech to have reached the last 1 Ps. Ixxxiii. , in which Judah is threatened by the neighbouring states acting with the support rather than under the guidance of Asshur (the satrap of Syria?) is also much more easily understood under the loose rule of Persia than under the Greeks, and the associa- tion of Tyre with Philistia (as in Ixxxvii. 4) agrees with Pseudo-Scylax (see vol. xviii. p. 809). If this psalm has a definite historical back- ground, which many critics doubt, it must be later than the destruc- tion of Sidon by Ochus. That it is not of the Assyrian age is obvious from the mention of Arab tribes. 2 For details as to the linguistic phenomena of the Psalms, see especially Giesebrecht in Stade's Zeitschr., 1881, p. 276 sq. The objec- tions of Driver (Journ. of Phil., xi. 233) do not touch the argument that such psalms as cxxxix. belong to the very latest stage of Biblical Hebrew. stage of decay. Again, though no part of the Psalter shows clearer marks of a liturgical purpose, we find that in books iv. and v. the musical titles have entirely disap- peared. The technical terms, that is, of the temple music which are still recognized by the Chronicler have gone out of use, presumably because they were already become un- intelligible, as they were when the Septuagint version was made. This implies a revolution in the national music which we can hardly explain in any other way than by the influence of that Hellenic culture which, from the time of the Macedonian conquest, began to work such changes on the whole civilization and art of the East. Once more the general tone of large parts of this collection is much more cheerful than that of the Elohistic psalm-book. It begins with a psalm (xc.) ascribed in the title to Moses, and seemingly designed to express feelings appropriate to a situation analogous to that of the Israelites when, after the weary march through the wilderness, they stood on the borders of the promised land. It looks back on a time of great trouble and forward to a brighter future. In some of the following psalms there are still references to deeds of oppression and violence, but more generally Israel ap- pears as happy under the law with such a happiness as it did enjoy under the Ptolemies during the 3d century B.C. The problems of divine justice are no longer burning ques- tions; the righteousness of God is seen in the peaceful felicity of the pious (xci., xcii., &c.). Israel, indeed, is still scattered and not triumphant over the heathen, but even in the dispersion the Jews are under a mild rule (cvi. 46), and the commercial activity of the nation has begun to develop beyond the seas (cvii. 26 sq.). The whole situation and vein of piety here are strikingly parallel to those shown in Ecclesiasticus, which dates from the close of the Ptolemaic sovereignty in Palestine. But some of the psalms carry us beyond this peaceful period to a time of struggle and victory. In Ps. cxviii. Israel, led by the house of Aaron this is a notable point has emerged triumphant from a desperate conflict and celebrates at the temple a great day of rejoicing for the unhoped-for victory ; in Ps. cxlix. the saints are pictured with the praises of God in their throat and a sharp sword in their hands to take vengeance on the heathen, to bind their kings and nobles, and exercise against them the judgment written in prophecy. Such an enthusiasm of militant piety, plainly based on actual successes of Israel and the house of Aaron, can only be referred to the first victories of the Maccabees, culminating in the purification of the temple in 165 B.C. This restora- tion of the worship of the national sanctuary under cir- cumstances that inspired religious feelings very different from those of any other generation since the return from Babylon might most naturally be followed by an extension of the temple psalmody ; it certainly was followed by some liturgical innovations, for the solemn service of dedication on the twenty-fifth day of Chisleu was made the pattern of a new annual feast (that mentioned in John x. 22). Now in 1 Mac. iv. 54 we learn that the dedication was celebrated with hymns and music. In later times the psalms for the encaenia or feast of dedication embraced Ps. xxx. and the hallel Pss. cxiii.- cxviii. There is no reason to doubt that these were the very psalms sung in 165 B.C., for in the title of Ps. xxx. the words " the song for the dedication of the house," which are a somewhat awkward insertion in the original title, are found also in the LXX., and therefore are probable evidence of the liturgical use of the psalm in the very first years of the feast. But no collection of old psalms could fully suffice for such an occasion, and there is every reason to think that the hallel, which especially in its closing part contains allusions that fit no other time so well, was first arranged for the same ceremony. The course of the subsequent history makes