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XIV.

THE BOOK OF PSALMS.

LUKE XX. 42: "The Book of Psalms."

THE Book of Psalms, and not the Psalms of David, is the most appropriate title. David is the author of a good many of the pieces; but he is only one of ten or perhaps twelve authors, who have a share in the entire collection. The particular process by which the book came to assume its present form has passed out of all memory and history. It is probable, that long ago there were at least five collections of Psalms, and that they were finally all brought together, and cast into one, very much as our collections of Hymns for the church service are made now. The Masorah, school of criticism among the Jews, — one object of which was to keep a jealous eye on the outward letter of their Bible, to count the books, words, and even letters of which it is com

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posed, has preserved the division lines of those minor books of Psalms. The same thing has been done in the Syriac Version, a very old translation from the Hebrew. It is also probable, that the editor had the trouble such men have now. St. Athanasius has preserved the tradition, that the present selection of one hundred and fifty was made out of three thousand Psalms, that were at that time getting themselves said and sung on the hills and in the valleys of old Jewry; from which we may infer, that bad verse and pretended inspiration is by no means the result of modern degeneracy. Who this devoted man was, is not at all certain: some say Hezekiah; some, Ezrah. Others say that it must have been an unknown man of a later time, as some of the Psalms bear marks of having been written as late as the age of the Maccabees, or about one hundred and fifty years before Christ, and two hundred and fifty after the last of the Prophets. The Jews themselves assert that the 92d Psalm was written by Adam; the 89th, by Abraham; the 110th by Melchizedek; the 90th and ten following, by Moses. Seventy-one are given to David, (some manuscripts give him eighty-two); the

72d and 127th, to Solomon; and the rest, to writers whose names you will not care to know.

This classification, however, will not bear criticism: the text itself, in some of the Psalms, makes it impossible. For instance, the Psalm attributed to Abraham makes frequent mention of David. Other and better systems, in later times, keep these elder men out of the book entirely, and make Moses the oldest writer whose poems are admitted. This is probably true, or as near as we shall ever be to the truth on this matter. Moses, David, Solomon, and seven obscurer men, answer to our call, when we say who are the authors of the Book of Psalms.

Then to come to the inner structure of the book, we may perceive that this editor has only been moderately careful in the performance of his task. There is, to be sure, a rough sort of harmony in which David has a section to himself. Then David has a share of a section with Asaph; then Asaph and others join at a third; and the fourth and fifth are by authors whose names are not known. But, by some strange oversight, the Psalms 14th and 53d are almost exactly alike: with the exception of a few

words in one verse, they are the same Psalms. The last five verses of Psalm 40th are precisely the same as the five verses that compose Psalm 70th. Psalm 18th is the same as the 22d chapter of the second book of Samuel; while the 144th Psalm is made up out of a mosaic of verses, selected from the 8th, 18th, 39th, 102d, and some other Psalms, the 8th and 11th verses of this Psalm being also the same verse repeated, and the whole composition standing without any perceptible harmony of verse to verse, or any relation of ideas each to the other.

Then, again, a number of the Psalms are written as you would write an acrostic: each verse begins with a particular letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from the first to the last. The long Psalm 119th is one of those, except that, in the the monkish division of the Bible, the alphabetic section is subdivided into eight verses. The 145th Psalm is another in which the acrostic form has been broken up by one verse being lost,

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that is, the one set to the fifteenth letter, but restored from some old manuscript since our common version got to be canonized Finally, one or two other Psalms are the substantial re

petition of the one thing, that any two versions of a poem from the French or German would be, when it was rendered into our own tongue. This is the outward frame-work of the book, as it stands, subjected to the honest eye-sight we give to any other book, a selection of sacred poems, from a great mass, written during a range of years that would include the reign of Alfred the Great and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, containing marks of carelessness that would ruin the reputation of any editor in our own time; with no particular certainty about the authorship, or when the book was collected, or who did it, or when men pronounced it of such divine authority, or who authorized them to do so, and whether some of the best among the two thousand eight hundred and fifty rejected Psalms ought not to have been retained, at any rate in preference to those that are twice printed.

Now, then, here is a most interesting study: all nations have grown into poetry as soon as they began to grow into any thing above the commonest life of the moment. But this book of poems has taken its place easily and beautifully before and over the home-poems of the foremost nations

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