Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/44

PSALMS it very intelligible that the Psalter was finally closed, as we have seen from the date of the Greek version that it must have been, within a few years at most after this great event. 1 From the time of Hyrcanus downwards the ideal of the princely high priests became more and more diver- gent from the ideal of the pious in Israel, and in the Psalter of Solomon we see religious poetry turned against the lords of the temple and its worship. (See MESSIAH. ) Ail this does not, of course, imply that there are not in books iv. and v. any pieces older than the completion of books ii. and iii., for the composition of a poem and its acceptance as part of the Levitical liturgy are not neces- sarily coincident in date, except in psalms written with a direct liturgical purpose. In the fifteen "songs of degrees" (Pss. cxx.-cxxxiv.) we have a case in point. According to the Mishna (Middoth, ii. 5) and other Jewish traditions, these psalms were sung by the Levites at the Feast of Tabernacles on the fifteen steps or degrees that led from the women's to the men's court. But when we look at the psalms themselves we see that they must originally have been a hymn-book, not for the Levites, but for the laity who came up to Jerusalem at the great pilgrimage feasts ; and the title of this hymn-book (which can be restored from the titles derived from it that were prefixed to each song when they were taken into the Levitical connexion) was simply "Pilgrimage Songs." 2 All these songs are plainly later than the exile ; but some of them cannot well be so late as the formation of the Elohistic psalm-book, and the simple reason why they are not included in it is that they were hymns of the laity, describing with much beauty and depth of feeling the emotions of the pilgrim when his feet stood within the gates of Jerusalem, when he looked forth on the encircling hills, when he felt how good it was to be camping side by side with his brethren on the slopes of Zion (cxxxiii.), when a sense of Jehovah's forgiving grace and the certainty of the redemption of Israel triumphed over all the evils of the present and filled his soul with humble and patient hope. The titles which ascribe four of the pilgrimage songs to David and one to Solomon are lacking in the true LXX., and inconsistent with the contents of the psalms. Better attested, because found in the LXX. as well as in the Hebrew, and therefore probably as old as the collection itself, are the name of Moses in Ps. xc. and that of David in Pss. ci., cii., cviii.-cx., cxxxviii.-cxlv. But where did the last collectors of the Psalms find such very ancient pieces which had been passed by by all previous collectors, and what criterion was there to establish their genuineness ? No canon of literary criticism can treat as valuable external evidence an attestation which first appears so many centuries after the supposed date of the poems, especially when it is confronted by facts so conclusive as that Ps. cviii. is made up of extracts from Pss. Ivii. and Ix. and that Ps. cxxxix. is marked by its language as one of the latest pieces in the book. The only possible question for the critic is whether the ascription of these psalms to David was due to the idea that he was the psalmist par excellence, to whom any poem of unknown origin was naturally ascribed, or whether we have in some at least of these titles an example of the habit so common in later Jewish literature of writing in the name of ancient worthies. In the case of Ps. xc. it can hardly be doubted that this is the real explanation, and the same account must be given of the title in Ps. cxlv., if, as seems probable, it is meant to cover the whole of the great kallel or tehilla, (Ps. cxlv.-cl.), which must, from 1 Possibly under Simon; compare the other Judld (Ps. cxlv.-cl.) with 1 Mac. xiii. 50 sq. 2 TTlPyon "VB> (r6jJD as in Ezra vii. 9 seems to be properly a plural like ITDNn JV3). the allusions in Ps. cxlix., as well as from its place, be almost if not quite the latest thing in the Psalter. Davidic Psalms. For the later stages of the history of the Psalter we have, as has been seen, a fair amount of circumstantial evidence pointing to conclusions of a pretty definite kind. The approximate dates which their con- tents suggest for the collection of the Elohistic psalm- book and of books iv. and v. confirm one another and are in harmony with such indications as we obtain from external sources. But, in order to advance from the con- clusions already reached to a view of the history of the Psalter as a whole, we have still to consider the two great groups of psalms ascribed to David in books i. and ii. Both these groups appear once to have formed separate collections and in their separate form to have been ascribed to David; for in book i. every psalm, except the introduc- tory poems i. and ii. and the late Ps. xxxiii., which may have been added as a liturgical sequel to Ps. xxxii., bears the title "of David," and in like manner the group Pss. li.-lxxii., though it contains a few anonymous pieces and one psalm which is either "of" or rather according to the oldest tradition "for Solomon," is essentially a Davidic hymn-book, which has been taken over as a whole into the Elohistic Psalter, even the subscription Ixxii. 20 not being omitted. Moreover, the collectors of books i.-iii. knew of no Davidic psalms outside of these two collec- tions, for Ps. Ixxxvi. in the appendix to the Elohistic collection is merely a cento of quotations from Davidic pieces with a verse or two from Exodus and Jeremiah. These two groups, therefore, represented to the collectors the oldest tradition of Hebrew psalmody ; they are either really Davidic or they passed as such. This fact is im- portant ; but its weight may readily be over-estimated, for the Levitical psalms comprise poems of the last half-cen- tury of the Persian empire, and the final collection of books ii. and iii. may fall a good deal later. Thus the tradition that David is the author of these two collections comes to us, not exactly from the time of the Chronicler, but certainly from the time when the view of Hebrew history which he expresses was in the course of forma- tion. And it is not too much to say that that view which to some extent appears in the historical psalms of the Elohistic Psalter implies absolute incapacity to inder- stand the difference between old Israel and later Juda- ism and makes almost anything possible in the way of the ascription of comparatively modern pieces to ancient authors. Nor will it avail to say that this uncritical age did not ascribe the Psalms to David but accepted them on the ground of older titles, for it is hardly likely that each psalm in the Davidic collections had a title before it was transferred to the larger Psalter ; and in any case the titles are manifestly the product of the same uncritical spirit as we have just been speaking of, for not only are many of the titles certainly wrong but they are wrong in such a way as to prove that they date from an age to which David was merely the abstract psalmist, and which had no idea what- ever of the historical conditions of his age. For example, Pss. xx., xxi. are not spoken by a king but addressed to a king by his people ; Pss. v., xxvii. allude to the temple (which did not exist in David's time), and the author of the latter psalm desires to live there continually. Even in the older Davidic psalm-book there is a whole series of hymns in which the writer identifies himself with the poor and needy, the righteous people of God suffering in silence at the hands of the wicked, without other hope than patiently to wait for the interposition of Jehovah (Pss. xii., xxv., xxxvii., xxxviii., &c.). Nothing can be farther removed than this from any possible situation in the life of the David of the books of Samuel, and the case is still worse in the second Davidic collection, especially where we have in the titles