O shout to the Lord in triumph all the earth:
serve the Lord with gladness
and come before his face with songs of joy.
(Ps. 100:1)
Music is part of worship. And before today's choruses, before "Hymns Ancient and Modern" (1861), before even the time of Jesus, people sang in praise of God.
The Bible contains a number of songs - look at Moses' song of triumph (Ex. 15:1), Hannah's prayer of thanksgiving at the birth of Samuel (Sam. 2:1), and in the New Testament, the songs recorded by Luke - Mary's song, which we know as the Magnificat (Lk. 1:46), Zechariah's song, the Benedictus (Lk.1:68), and Simeon's song, the Nunc Dimittis (Lk. 2:29). But the biggest collection is the Book of Psalms.
Book, or books. For traditionally, there were five "books of psalms", each ending with a doxology - a hymn of praise (The books ended with Ps. 41, 72, 89, 106 and 150.) And 150 psalms, although the Hebrew and the Greek versions of the original text number them differently between Ps. 9 and Ps. 147. So while The Lord is my shepherd is the 23rd psalm for us, for other Christians, in the Roman Catholic church for example, it is the twenty-second.
The name "psalm" means a song accompanied on a plucked instrument - a harp or lyre. Many psalms have a note at the beginning which may refer to the tune or musical instrument to be used - but the tunes are all lost. We do not know how the worshippers in the temple used the psalms. Some of them are very personal - Ps. 23 is the best known example, or Ps. 51. Others (Ps. 24 and Ps. 48, for example) seem to be designed to be sung in procession. Psalms 120-134 are entitled "Psalms of Ascent" - they may have been sung at great festivals in the temple, on the temple steps.
Some of the psalms - not all by any means - are headed "Of David" (or "for" or "about" David), and it is quite possible that some of them were written in the early days of the kings, a thousand years before Christ.
There are all styles of poetry. The earliest psalms are rich in what is called parallelism - where two halves of one verse echo or complement each other. "Lift up your heads O you gates, and be lifted up you everlasting doors." In the Venite, which we sing at Morning Prayer ("O come let us sing out to the Lord: let us shout in triumph to the rock of our salvation") each of the seven verses we use has this form. Other psalms are more "academic" - the marathon Psalm 119 has 176 verses in groups of eight, each set of eight beginning with a fresh letter of the (Hebrew) alphabet, and there are several other "alphabetical" psalms.
The psalms cover all circumstances - joy, misery, penitence, praise (so many of the psalms begin with the word "Hallelujah" - praise the Lord!). So it is not surprising that Christians took them over into their own worship. At the Reformation, the puritanical wing of the church took steps to translate the psalms as poetry, and many of these "metrical psalms" are used today ("The Lord's my shepherd" (Ps. 23) and "All people that on earth do dwell" (Ps. 100) spring to mind.) The Anglican church continued to sing them - even if fitting the words to the music (the "pointing") is not easy for people nowadays!
The new service book shortly to be released will rehabilitate the psalms. A fresh translation will try to make them less obscure (for the most commonly used version goes back to a translation by Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, in 1535). Not before time, for they were, and are, and will remain, a treasure house for worship.
O praise God in his sanctuary:
Praise him in the firmament of his power.
(Ps. 150:1)
HD