The Psalter, Prayer of Israel

The book of Psalms is the great prayer book of Israel: a hundred and fifty poems the people of God sang for a thousand years, and which the Church prays still every day. It contains no story, but all the voices of the soul before God, praise and cry, trust and repentance. Before running through its genres, one must understand how this book is made, and why it has nourished the prayer of so many centuries.

A Prayer Book in Five Books

The Psalter is divided into five books, after the image of the five books of Moses, as if the prayer of Israel answered, part for part, the Law of God. Each of these books closes on a blessing, "Blessed be the Lord… Amen! Amen!", and the whole ends in an explosion of pure praise, five psalms of Hallelujah whose very last verse seals the collection. "Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Hallelujah!" Psalms 150:6 The whole movement goes from complaint toward praise, and the Hebrew name of the book is in fact Tehillim, "the praises," while the Greek word Psalmoi means songs accompanied by stringed instruments, for the psalms were sung in the Temple, with harp and lyre. Many bear a title attributing them to David, the singer-king, or to the choirmasters of the Temple, the sons of Korah and Asaph, a few to Moses or to Solomon; some add a musical direction, "for the choirmaster." David is to the Psalter what Moses is to the Law and Solomon to wisdom: the patron of the collection, even if the psalms were composed and gathered over the centuries, from the time of the kings until after the exile. So the prayer book of Israel took shape little by little, like the prayer of a whole people.

Parallelism, the Form of Hebrew Poetry

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme sounds, it rhymes ideas. Each verse is most often made of two parts, sometimes three, where the second answers the first. "The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament reveals the work of his hands." Psalms 19:2 The second line says the first again in other words: this is what is called parallelism, the very heartbeat of the psalms. It takes three main forms: sometimes the second line repeats the first differently, as here; sometimes it opposes it, the way of the just and the way of the wicked; sometimes it prolongs it and raises it a degree higher. This form has a happy consequence: since the beauty lies in the thought and not in the sound, it passes into every language without being lost, and this is why the Church could pray the psalms in Greek, in Latin, and in every tongue, without betraying them. To this are added concrete images, the shepherd, the rock, the tree, the thirsting deer, and sometimes poems built on the alphabet, each stanza beginning with a new letter. Always, the meaning is in the movement of the thought, offered to whoever meditates slowly.

All the Voices of the Soul before God

The psalms give words to every state of the soul before God: joy and grief, thanksgiving and complaint, trust and fear, guilt and forgiveness, and even anger and desolation. Saint Athanasius said that in the other books Scripture speaks to the reader, but that in the psalms the reader recognizes himself and finds his own movements as in a mirror. They are grouped by genres, hymns of praise, supplications, thanksgivings, psalms of trust, royal psalms, pilgrimage songs, wisdom psalms, not to file them away coldly, but because each genre answers a real movement of the heart. This is why they never grow old: whatever a person passes through, there is a psalm that has already prayed it. The Church has made them her own prayer, on the lips of Christ who prayed them: in saying the psalms, the Christian lends his voice to Israel, to the Church, and to Christ himself. The articles that follow run through these great families, from praise to the cry, from the king to the pilgrim, until the whole Psalter is taken up on the lips of Christ.