Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/45

Rh PSALMS 33 definite notes as to the historical occasion on which the poems are supposed to have been written. To refer Ps. liii. to Doeg, Ps. liv. to the Ziphites, Ps. lix. to David when watched in his house by Saul, implies an absolute lack of the very elements of historical judgment. Even the bare names of the old history were no longer correctly known when Abimelech (the Philistine king in the stories of Abraham and Isaac) could be substituted in the title of Ps. xxxiv. for Achish, king of Gath. In a word, the ascrip- tion of these two collections to David has none of the characters of a genuine historical tradition. At the same time it is clear that the two collections do not stand on quite the same footing. The Elohistic redac- tion the change in the names of God extends only to the second. Now the formation of the Elohistic Psalter must have been an official act directed to the consolidation of the liturgical material of the temple, and if it left one of the so-called Davidic collections untouched the reason must have been that this collection had already a fixed liturgical position. In other words, book i. is the oldest extant liturgy of the second temple, while there is no evidence that the Davidic psalms of book ii. had a fixed liturgical place till at least the close of the Persian period. And now the question arises : May we suppose that the oldest liturgy of the second temple was also the liturgy of the temple of Solomon 1 We have it in evidence that music and song accompanied the worship of the great sanctuaries of northern Israel in the 8th century B.C. (Amos v. 23), but from the context it appears probable that the musicians were not officers of the temple but rather the worshippers at large (compare Amos vi. 5). So it cer- tainly was in the days of David (2 Sam. vi. 5) and even of Isaiah (xxx. 29); the same thing is implied in the song of Hezekiah (Isa. xxxviii. 20), and in Lam. ii. 7 the noise within the sanctuary on a feast-day which affords a simile for the shouts of the victorious Chaldseans suggests rather the untrained efforts of the congregation than the disci- plined music of a temple choir. The allusion to "chambers of singers " in Ezek. xl. 44 is not found in the Septuagint text, which is justified by the context, and the first certain allusion to a class of singers belonging to the sacred min- isters is at the return from Babylon (Ezra ii. 41). The way in which these singers, the sons of Asaph, are spoken of may be taken as evidence that there was a guild of temple singers before the exile ; but they cannot have been very conspicuous or we should have heard more of them. The historical books, as edited in the captivity, are fond of varying the narrative by the insertion of lyrical pieces, and one or two of these the " passover song " (Exod. xv.) and perhaps the song from the book of Jashar ascribed to Solomon (see vol. xi. p. 598) look as if they were sung in the first temple ; but they are not found in the Psalter, and, conversely, no piece from the Psalter is used to illustrate the life of David except Ps. xviii., and it occurs in a section which can be shown to be an interpolation in the original form of 2 Samuel. These facts seem to indicate that even book i. of the Psalter did not exist when the editing of the historical books was completed, and that in music as in other matters the ritual of the second' temple was com- pletely reconstructed. Indeed the radical change in the religious life of the nation caused by the captivity could not fail to influence the psalmody of the sanctuary more than any other part of the worship ; the book of Lamenta- tions marks an era of profound importance in the religious poetry of Israel, and no collection formed before these dirges were first sung could have been an adequate hymn- book for the second temple. In point of fact the notes struck in the Lamentations and in Isa. xl.-lxvi. meet our ears again in not a few psalms of book i., e.g., Pss. xxii., xxv., where the closing prayer for the redemption of Israel in a verse additional to the acrostic perhaps gives, as Lagarde suggests, the characteristic post -exile name Pedaiah as that of the author ; Ps. xxxi., with many points of resem- blance to Jeremiah ; Pss. xxxiv., xxxv., where the " servant of Jehovah" is the same collective idea as in Deutero- Isaiah ; and Pss. xxxviii., xli. The key to many of these psalms is that the singer is not an individual but, as in Lam. iii., the true people of God represented as one per- son ; and only in this way can we do justice to expressions which have always been a stumbling-block to those who regard David as the author. But, at the same time, other psalms of the collection treat the problems of individual religion in the line of thought first opened by Jeremiah. Such a psalm is xxxix., and above all Ps. xvi. Other pieces, indeed, may well be earlier. When we compare Ps. viii. with Job vii. 17, 18, we can hardly doubt that the psalm lay before the writer who gave its expressions so bitter a turn in the anguish of his soul, and Pss. xx., xxi. plainly belong to the old kingdom. But on the whole it is not the pre-exilic pieces that give the tone to the collection ; whatever the date of this or that indivi- dual poem, the collection as a whole whether by selec- tion or authorship is adapted to express a religious life of which the exile is the presupposition. Only in this way can we understand the conflict and triumph of spirit- ual faith, habitually represented as the faith of a poor and struggling band living in the midst of oppressors and with no strength or help save the consciousness of loyalty to Jehovah, which is the fundamental note of the whole book. Whether any of the older poems really are David's is a question more curious than important, as, at least, there is none which we can fit with certainty into any part of his life. If we were sure that 2 Sam. xxii. was in any sense part of the old tradition of David's life, there would be every reason to answer the question in the affirmative, as has been done by Ewald (see DAVID) ; but the grave doubts that exist on this point throw the whole question into the region of mere conjecture. The contents of book i. make it little probable that it was originally collected by the temple ministers, whose hymn-book it ultimately became. The singers and Levites were ill provided for, and consequently irregular in their attendance at the temple, till the time of Nehemiah, who made it his business to settle the revenues of the clergy in such a way as to make regular service possible. With regular service a regular liturgy would be required, and in the absence of direct evidence it may be conjectured that the adoption of the first part of the Psalter for this purpose took place in connexion with the other far-reaching reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah, which first gave a stable character to the community of the second temple. In any case these psalms, full as they are of spiritual elements which can never cease to be the model of true worship, are the necessary complement of the law as published by Ezra, and must be always taken along with it by those who would understand what Judaism in its early days really was, and how it prepared the way for the gospel. The second Davidic collection, which begins with a psalm of the exile (Ps. Ii. ; see the last two verses), contains some pieces which carry us down to a date decidedly later than that of Nehemiah. Thus Ps. Ixviii. 27 represents the wor- shipping congregation as drawn partly from the neighbour- hood of Jerusalem and partly from the colony of Galilee. In several psalms of this collection, as in the Levitical psalms with which it is coupled, we see that the Jews have again begun to feel themselves a nation and not a mere municipality, though they are still passing through bitter struggles ; and side by side with this there is a de- velopment of Messianic hope, which in Ps. Ixxii. takes a XX. s