PREFACE

"The Lord is my strength and my song..."

There is no book in the Hebrew Holy Scriptures more Christianized than the Psalter. And by the number of references to it at all levels – from the fathers and teachers of the Church, theologians of all times and confessions to the modest sermon of a simple parish priest. And in the number of interpretations, explanations, and paraphrases, which never dried up, even in those times when acquaintance with the Scriptures — a direct encounter of the laity and ordinary clergy with the sources of their faith and religion — was by no means encouraged. And according to the place that the Psalms have taken in the divine services; suffice it to recall that in the Russian Orthodox Church they are part of any, even the briefest, rite of the service, that the "Psalter" is read in its entirety every week of the church year. And in terms of its significance in the ancient system of education: in old Russia (so as not to go far for examples) it was the main "textbook", people learned to read from it, and having learned, they often did not part with it under any circumstances, until the end of their days. And, finally, by its contribution to the culture and civilization of all Christian peoples. Again, let us not look far for examples, nor multiply them beyond measure and unnecessarily. A considerable number of Russian winged words and expressions fluttered out of the book attributed to King David, and flew so far that the birthmark was completely forgotten. Who remembers today that the "white lie" goes back to the misunderstood verse 17 of Psalm 32[1] in the Church Slavonic translation: "A lie is a horse for salvation, but in the multitude of its strength it shall not be saved"? (In the well-known and generally accepted Russian translation, in the so-called Synodal Bible, this verse reads as follows: "A horse is unreliable for salvation, it will not deliver with its great power.") And the arrangements of the Psalms, the free variations in verse — all Russian poetry of the eighteenth century (with a date back to the nineteenth, at least up to Mey) not only sparkles with them, but breathes them. This news of Russian poetic culture is renewed and further carried on by the work of Naum Grebnev.

All this is said in order to emphasize that the Psalms can be judged from the most diverse points of view, strict choice and self-restraint are inevitable. In this article, we will deal mainly with two things: what the psalms were and (to a lesser extent) remain in the original language, among the people who created them; Psalms as a phenomenon of poetry (the word "monument" is decidedly not suitable!).

Let's start with the name.

The Russian (and included in the international lexicon) "psalm" comes from the Greek psalmos - "song" performed to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument; the Greek term is apparently a translation of the Hebrew mystics, which is repeated in the headings of more than a third of all the psalms that make up the Psalms. The title of the collection in Russian is a more or less accurate phonetic transposition of the Greek (in medieval pronunciation) psalter - the name of the musical instrument to the accompaniment of which the psalm was sung; this title came into use no later than the fifth century of the Christian era. By that time, however, the Jews had already developed and fixed another title - "The Book of Praises" (Sefer Tehilum). It will be easier for the Russian reader to "feel" what this means if he learns that mehilum is of the same root as the well-known "hallelujah" (halely-ya — "praise God"); This exclamation, apparently addressed to the worshippers, is found only in the Psalms among all biblical texts. But immediately we encounter the first perplexities, the first difficulties.

Anyone who has looked into the Psalter remembers that praise to the Almighty is not its only content. Perhaps the most famous, or rather, the least contested, attempt to classify the Psalms by content belongs to the German biblical theologian Johann Friedrich-Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932). He outlined five main categories:

1. Hymns, i.e. songs of praise in the proper sense of the word, glorifying and calling to glorify God in all his manifestations and creations; the group of hymns dedicated to the holy city (Jerusalem) and the holy mountain (Zion), which God chose as his place of residence (the Temple), stands out. This category is numerically the most significant, which justifies the traditional Jewish title of the collection.

2. Collective lamentations: lamentations caused by the crisis situation of a community or nation, and cries to God for help.

3. Individual lamentations: complaints of suffering, very often assurances of innocence, very often hope and even confidence that the complaint will be heard and justice restored. There are much more individual cries than collective ones.

4. Thanksgiving songs, overwhelmingly individual, but there are also a few collective; combining the description of the calamity with praises to God for the happy deliverance, they seem to synthesize lamentation and hymn.

5. Royal psalms depicting a particular situation from the life of the earthly king, the king of the Jews: enthronement, wedding, etc.