The Psalter as the Church’s Prayerbook

The Book of Psalms is the prayerbook the Church inherited from Israel and made her own. From David and the Temple choirs, through the psalmody of the synagogue and of Christ himself, to the daily prayer of the apostolic Church, the psalms have been the words the people of God are given to say back to God — the single scriptural book that is at once revelation and response.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Book the Church Prays

Of all the books of Scripture, the Psalter occupies a place unlike any other in Orthodox worship. It is not merely read in the services as the prophets and Gospels are read; it is prayed — chanted, whole and continuously, as the ground bass of every service of the daily cycle. The 150 psalms are the Church’s inherited voice: the words she puts into the mouth of every worshipper, so that “we sing them as though they were our own words,” in the phrase of St. Athanasius (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 11 [PG 27:11–46]; trans. Gregg, CWS, 1980). Where the rest of Scripture is God’s word to the Church, the Psalter is, uniquely, God’s own word given back to God — revelation that is also response, the one book of the Bible that is itself a book of prayers. This double character is why the Fathers could call it an epitome of all Scripture and why the Church built the whole architecture of her daily office upon it (see The Fathers in Praise of the Psalms).

David and the Temple

The Psalter’s superscriptions and the memory of Israel ascribe its core to David, the shepherd-king anointed by Samuel (1 Kingdoms/1 Samuel 16), who “was skilful in playing” (1 Kingdoms 16:18) and to whom the tradition credits the organization of the Temple’s sung worship. The books of Chronicles describe David appointing the Levitical singers and instruments for the house of the Lord (1 Chronicles 15:16–22; 16:4–7; 25:1–7), and the liturgical psalms preserve the memory of a Temple choir singing at the hours of sacrifice. Modern scholarship distinguishes the historical David from the “David” of the titles — of the 150 psalms, seventy-three carry a Davidic superscription in the Hebrew and a somewhat larger number in the Greek, while others are ascribed to Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Moses, and others, and many are anonymous [Disputed: the authorship and dating of individual psalms is a standard question of critical scholarship; the superscriptions are ancient but their historical value is debated, and the Psalter as a collection reached its present form over a long period, plausibly reaching closure in the Second Temple era (see, e.g., the discussion in Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Oxford, 2014)]. The Church, without prejudice to these questions, receives the whole book under the name of the “Prophet-King David” and reads it as prophecy, above all of Christ (see The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ).

What matters for worship is that the Psalter was born as a book of and for the assembly’s sung prayer. The psalms bear within them the marks of their liturgical origin: the summons “O come, let us worship” (Ps 94/95), the antiphonal refrain “for his mercy endureth for ever” (Ps 135/136), the processional “Songs of Ascents” (Pss 119–133 LXX), and the great doxological finale of the Hallelujah psalms (Pss 148–150) that still crown Orthodox Matins. The book was already a service-book before the Church received it.

The Synagogue and the Psalmody of Christ

By the time of the New Testament the psalms saturated Jewish prayer — in the Temple, whose choirs sang a proper psalm for each day of the week, and in the synagogue and the home. Christ himself prayed the psalms. He sang the Hallel (Pss 112–117 LXX) with his disciples at the Last Supper — “when they had sung a hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives” (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26) — and from the Cross he prayed the opening of Psalm 21 (22), “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34), and died with the words of Psalm 30 (31):6 on his lips, “Into thy hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). The Gospels present Jesus as the great interpreter of the psalms, asking how David in the Spirit could call the Messiah “Lord” (Ps 109/110:1; Matthew 22:41–46), and after the Resurrection opening the disciples’ minds to understand “the things concerning himself” written “in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms” (Luke 24:44). The psalms are thus not only prayed by Christ but claimed by him as testimony to himself — the seed of the whole christological reading the Fathers would develop.

The Apostolic Church at Prayer

The apostolic Church prayed the psalms as naturally as the synagogue had. The Acts of the Apostles shows the earliest community “continuing daily with one accord in the temple” (Acts 2:46) and applying the psalms to the events of salvation: Peter reads Psalms 68 (69) and 108 (109) of Judas (Acts 1:16–20), and Psalms 15 (16) and 109 (110) of Christ’s resurrection and enthronement (Acts 2:25–35); the gathered Church prays Psalm 2 against the rulers who conspired against the Lord’s Anointed (Acts 4:24–26). St. Paul instructs the Christians of Ephesus and Colossae to speak to one another and to God “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16), and Psalms are named among the elements a Corinthian believer might bring to the assembly (1 Corinthians 14:26). The Letter to the Hebrews is, in large part, an extended meditation on the psalms as the voice of the Son (Hebrews 1:5–13; 2:6–12; 5:5–6; 10:5–7).

From the earliest post-apostolic centuries the psalms are the backbone of Christian prayer. Tertullian describes the psalms interwoven with the prayers of the faithful (Tertullian, On Prayer 27), and the fourth-century sources — the Apostolic Constitutions, the pilgrim Egeria’s account of the services at Jerusalem, the monastic rules of Egypt and Cappadocia — show the psalms sung at fixed hours of morning and evening and, in the monastic settlements, recited continuously through day and night (Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 2nd ed., 1993, chs. 2–5, on the psalmody of the early Church and the emergence of fixed-hour prayer; see Cathedral and Monastic Office). The Church did not compose a prayerbook; she received one, and organized her whole life of prayer around it.

Revelation That Is Response

The theological point beneath this history is that in the Psalter God has given his people the very words with which to answer him. St. Athanasius makes this the heart of his praise of the book: whereas in the other Scriptures we hear what the saints and prophets said, in the Psalms “he who takes up this book… recognizes them as being his own words,” so that the psalms become “a mirror” in which each person perceives the movements of his own soul (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus 11–12; trans. Gregg, CWS, 1980). To pray the psalms is therefore to be schooled by God in how to pray — to have one’s grief, penitence, hope, anger, and joy taken up, purified, and given back as offering. This is why the Church has never treated the Psalter as an anthology to be sampled but as a single rule of prayer to be prayed through, whole and in order, again and again (see Reading the Whole Psalter and the Cell Rule).

The Psalter is thus the hinge between Israel’s worship and the Church’s, and between Scripture and prayer. Everything that follows in this collection — the peculiar shape of the Orthodox Psalter, the psalms that anchor each service, the daily cursus, and the ways the tradition has learned to pray even the hardest psalms — rests on this foundation: that the Book of Psalms is the prayerbook of the Church.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. Letter to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms [PG 27:11–46]. Trans. Robert C. Gregg, Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
  • Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • Taft, Robert F. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. 2nd rev. ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993.
  • Tertullian. On Prayer (De oratione). In ANF, vol. 3.
  • Scripture cited by Septuagint (LXX) numbering, with Hebrew/Masoretic numbers noted where they differ.