The Psalms were songs first, and their headings still carry the choirmaster's notes
Open the Book of Psalms and many poems begin with odd little instructions: for the choirmaster, with stringed instruments, according to lilies. They are traces of performance. The English name itself comes from a Greek word for instrumental music, while the Hebrew title, Tehillim, simply means praises.
The Psalter is an anthology of Hebrew religious hymns and opens the Writings, the third section of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish and Western Christian tradition count 150 psalms, divided into five books that each close with a doxology, a short burst of praise. That five-part layout was probably imposed by the final editors to echo the five books of the Torah.
Of the 150, 116 carry a superscription, anything from a single word to a long note. More than a third look like musical directions, and others name a genre or an occasion, such as the dedication of the temple. The most common attribution is to David, found on 73 psalms, with Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon and Moses among the rest. Modern scholars do not treat Davidic authorship as history; linking texts to famous names was a way of lending them weight. Dating is notoriously difficult, with some psalms thought to predate the Babylonian exile and others to follow it.
The collection was not fixed early. Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests the order and contents of Psalms 90 to 150 were still fluid in the mid-1st century CE. Eastern Orthodox Bibles include a Psalm 151, and a Hebrew version turned up among the scrolls; some Syriac Bibles add four more. Numbering differs, usually by one, between Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, partly because copyists and liturgy split or joined poems: Psalms 9 and 10 were probably once a single acrostic.
Hermann Gunkel changed how the book is read by sorting psalms by genre rather than position. His types include hymns of praise, communal and individual laments, royal psalms and thanksgivings. Laments often switch between a lone voice and a collective one, though a single speaker could stand for the whole community.
Source: Psalms
