Bible - Book of psalms

The Reina Valera Bible.

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Salmodic style poems are very abundant in Sumerian, Assyria and Babylonian literary traditions from the most remote seniority. These cultures employed mostly psalms in the form of hymns or regrets.

Many Egyptian religious hymns (especially the "anthem to Aton"), directly inspired different psalms, whose most obvious example is Psalm 104 (see references).

During the period of Persian domination the psalms are in full apogee and are diversified in many different styles and genres: hymns, messianic images, individual or group regrets, eschatology, pleasant to God trusting in receiving an answer, didactic texts that remember important historical episodes, chains of thanksgiving of individual persons or of the whole nation, etc.

CONTENTS

Apparently it was an official collection of songs used in the liturgy and that were used in Jerusalem in the period of the second temple. There are 150 psalms in total.8 Now, there are differences in division. All versions comprise exactly 150 psalms. The problem arises when comparing the Hebrew versions with the septuagint and the vulgate. Thus you can see discrepancies in the numbering and division of some psalms. While these divergences always refer to specific and particular cases, inevitably have an impact on the general numbering.

The numbering granted by the Hebrew text only corresponds to the LXX and the Vulgata in the first 8 Psalms and in the last 3. The Greek Bible fuses psalms 9 and 10 in one, and does the same with 113 and 114. Inversely, divide by two 116, calling the resulting parts 114 and 115 and the division of 147 makes psalms 146 and 147.

As a mnemonic rule, it can be said that between Psalms 10 and 148, the numbering of the Septuagint and the Vulgate is equal to the Hebrew numbering less 1. Usually, however, when talking about psalm N, without giving greater explanations, it is referring to the original Hebrew numbering.

The Psalms appear in the original Hebrew grouped into five books or collections, separated by doxologies that appear at the end of psalms 41, 72, 89, 106 and 150. The latter consists of all of him in a doxology. . The first mention of the collection that somehow allows us to date it is found in the prologue to a translation of the ecclesiastical that was written towards 117 a. C. where it is indicated that the book of the Psalms was already part of the Hebrew Bible at the beginning of the second century BC. C.

The text

The original text of the Psalms was in Hebrew. The oldest manuscripts that are counted and that are in this language are at the end of the 10th century although the fragments that were found in Qumram are from the middle of the 1st century. Since it was a widely used text for liturgical purposes, it suffered various transformations and changes that make it very difficult to discover the Hebrew text that was the source of the oldest translations that are available. This can be verified if duplicate texts such as Psalm 18 are compared with 2samuel 33 or Psalm 14 with 53. If this is added the fact that the composition period of all of them goes from six to eight centuries.

Even when various texts were found in Qumram and even, in some cases, variants of the same psalm, the most important is the 11QPS leather label with 41 psalms: 7 apocryphal (with the anthem mentioned in Sab 51, 13-20 and Psalm 151 that also appears in the Septuagint) and the last 33 psalms of the canonical psalter.