invitation to
Psa lm s
The book of Psalms is a collection of poems that were originally set
to music. In other words, the psalms are song lyrics. Many of them
contain musical notations. Their introductions sometimes include
musical instructions and the names of their tunes. Like the songs
we know today, they were originally written in response to specific
occasions in the lives of the songwriters. (Some of their introductions
indicate what these occasions were.) But they were then used in
worship at various times by the whole community of believers. After
the people of Israel returned from exile in Babylon and rebuilt the
temple in Jerusalem, many of the songs that had been written and
sung over the centuries were collected and used in worship in this
second temple. That collection forms the basis of the book of Psalms
as we know it today.
This book contains the words to 147 different songs. (They’ve
traditionally been numbered from 1 to 150, but two of them have
been split in half, 9–10 and 42–43, while another has been included
twice and numbered both 14 and 53.) Because each of the songs
is an independent composition, they’re all meaningful when read
individually. The different psalms describe the broad range of
experiences the people of Israel had in their covenant journey with
God. They provide a way for us to enter into the story, by reading or
singing them, as we live the script of the biblical drama today.
At the same time, the book as a whole has been deliberately
structured. This adds a further level of meaning. The collection is
divided into five parts by four variations on the formula, Praise be
to the Lord . . . Amen and Amen! This creates five “books” within the
collection. This seems intended to remind the reader of the five
“books” that the law of Moses was divided into. The implication
is that even though these poems were originally sung in worship,
they can also be read and studied for instruction in God’s ways. The
psalm that comes first in the collection (#1) emphasizes the value
of reading them this way. It appears to have been placed there
deliberately to make this point. This theme is also stressed at the
beginning of book three (in #73) and near the end of the whole
collection (in #145).
These five “books,” in their general outlines, also tell a three-part