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.

(An attentive reader will easily be convinced of the imperfection of this classification, because any scheme is imperfect.)

Gunkel believed that all the categories of psalms he outlined were of cult origin and were used in temple worship. But when? how? In what capacity? How did ancient texts adapt to new circumstances (for example, the royal psalms in the period when there was no monarchy)? There are no exact answers, there are only assumptions based on the testimonies of various books of the Bible (partly relatively late, for example, the Chronicle or the Chronicles, in the Russian tradition the two Books of Chronicles, dated by modern biblical criticism to the fourth or even third century BC) and on archaeological finds, especially on the deciphering of cuneiform "libraries". Let's try to somehow generalize these assumptions.

The custom of solemn hymns in honor of the deity and his sanctuary, as well as lamentations, penitential and thanksgiving prayers, existed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and ancient Canaan in the second millennium BC; Consequently, it is hardly possible to attribute to the Jews the "discovery" of the psalm as a poetic and religious genre. But even in the most ancient, according to biblical scholars, parts of Scripture there are, so to speak, psalm-like inclusions ("The Song of Moses and the Children of Israel" after crossing the Red Sea — "Exodus", 15, 1-21; "Song of Deborah and Barak" — "Book of Judges", 5). And, also according to the judgment of biblical scholars, one can generally trust the information scattered throughout the Chronicles that the regular service of singers and musicians at the Ark of the Covenant was established by King David in the first third of the tenth century BC. Throughout the existence of the First Temple, from its construction under David's son, Solomon (965-928 B.C.), to its destruction by the Babylonians (586 B.C.), sacred rites were accompanied by singing and string accompaniment; temple musicians and singers were united in a kind of corporation, established, perhaps, by David himself; all of them were Levites, i.e. they belonged to the tribe (tribe) of Levi, which performed the lower priestly functions at the Temple. Their descendants, who returned from the Babylonian captivity, continued the activity of their ancestors in the Second Temple (516 BCE-70 AD). In other words, psalmody was in principle the exclusive right and duty of the Levites. However, even before the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, a synagogue form of worship appeared both in the Land of Israel itself and in the Diaspora, and the Psalms became a common prayer property, forming a necessary and integral part of everyday and festive services. In the future, their role and specific weight constantly increased in all varieties of ritual (nys) adopted by one or another community in the diaspora. And not only in the synagogue liturgy, but also in any non-synagogue rite: prayer before going to bed, before a long journey, burial, consecration of a gravestone, etc. Psalms are invariably included in newly emerging prayer rites, for example, on the occasion of the Independence Day of the Jewish state. Perhaps the whole life of traditional Jewry is permeated with the texts of the Psalter. Let's move on to the texts.

There is no doubt that the canonical corpus of the Psalms did not come entirely from the pen of King David, unless, of course, we are talking about a pious reader who religiously believes in the Holy Tradition enshrined in the Talmud. However, the Talmud also reflects another tradition, attributing the authorship of part of the Psalms to the righteous living before and after David. The latter is based on the Scriptures themselves, on the text, where the destruction of the Temple and the captivity and expulsion of the people are spoken of quite often and quite unequivocally; on the other hand, the Psalms are provided with a kind of headings (in the arrangement of Nahum Grebnev they are omitted), and about half of them - 73 Psalms - mention David, but there are also headings with other names: Moses, Solomon, several temple singers in the reign of both David himself and his successors. Modern biblical studies agree that David did indeed play a great, perhaps decisive, role in the history of Jewish religious lyrics, that some psalms may indeed belong to him, but this does not go further. As for dating, opinions differ: some scholars believe that, with very few exceptions, the Psalms were composed in ancient times (and then David acts more as a collector, "editor"), others believe that they reflect the entire history of Israel, up to and including the period after the Babylonian captivity. The time of canonization of the collection is considered to be the IV or even V century BC. The preservation of the canonical text is recognized today as sufficiently satisfactory (and, consequently, the corrections and conjectures proposed in abundance by scholars of the last century are superfluous). The high level of preservation is confirmed, in particular and especially, by the finds of the 1940s and 1960s in the Judean Desert, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, among which were about thirty manuscripts of the Psalter.

The canonical text consists of 150 psalms and is divided by tradition into five sections ("books"). The numbering of the Psalms among the Jews (and Protestants following the Jewish tradition) differs from that adopted by the Orthodox and Catholics, dating back to the translation of the Bible into Greek, the oldest among all translations of the Scriptures in general (no later than the second century B.C.). The Greek version, the Septuagint, i.e., the Translation of the Seventy Interpreters. As already mentioned, this article adopts the Orthodox-Catholic numbering followed by Naum Grebnev; in addition, it will be more convenient and easier for the Russian reader who wishes to compare Grebnev's transcriptions with the common Russian translation in the Synodal Bible. probably. that in antiquity there was no strictly fixed division of the collection into "chapters", which, by the way, is confirmed by manuscripts; not all the Psalms are provided with headings. Hence the possibility of errors. Such a mistake should be considered the fragmentation of numbers 9-10 in the original: together they make up an alphabetical acrostic.

 The Books I to IV (1-10, 41-71, 72-88, 89-105) conclude with special formulas of blessing that mark the boundary between the "books." There is ample evidence to suggest that the "books" originally existed as separate collections and were later brought together. Among the arguments is that the Psalms may be repeated in their entirety or in conglomerates of verse (e.g., Psalm 13 of Book I = Psalm 52 of Book II: or Ps. 56. v. 8-12 + Ps. 59.v. 7-14, both from Book II, = Ps. 107 from Book V; or that the final verse of the last psalm of Book II reads: "The prayers of David the son of Jesse are finished." It is also assumed that the last two "books", Vols. IV and V., form a single collection and that their separation is artificial; it can be explained by the desire to present the Psalter as a kind of parallel to the Teaching ('Torah), i.e. the Pentateuch; in any case, at the beginning of the ancient "Commentary on the Psalms" (Midrash tehulum) it is said: "Moses gave Israel five books of the Teachings, David gave Israel five books of Psalms."

In order to understand, at least approximately, how the Psalms are "made", let us analyze one of them, No 22 (23 according to the numbering of the original). Let's start with the sound of the original in the pronunciation of today's Israelis (how the Hebrew speech sounded two and a half, or even three thousand years ago, the question is too complicated):