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The Poetry and the Religion of the Psalms
The Poetry and the Religion of the Psalms Author:James Robertson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE PROBLEMS OF THE PSALMS. The foregoing review of the past course of Psalm criticism brings into prominence the leading problems that call f... more »or solution, and suggests an inquiry into the method that ought to be employed in the discussion. It is evident, first of all, that we cannot accept the inscriptions as authoritative or reliable indications of the authorship and occasions of composition of the psalms to which they are attached. These headings have a historical value of a certain kind, and furnish important evidence as to the Psalter as a whole—an evidence at which we shall have to look in the sequel. In the present connection we speak of them merely in so far as they profess to give information as to the authorship and occasion of the particular psalms to which they are prefixed. There is nothing to lead us to suppose that they were written by the authors of the respective compositions. On the contrary, everything tends to prove that they were appended at a later time— how late we cannot precisely tell—either on some traditional grounds or as a crudely critical inference from the contents of the psalms in question. That they must belong to a period antecedent to the time of the LXX. translation appears from the fact that the translators evidently had the Hebrew headings before them. But it is equally evident that the translators either possessed them in a- varying form or considered them of so little historical value that they permitted themselves to alter or add to them,—a course they would scarcely have followed had they regarded these headings as an integral part of the text.1 Another inference we may safely draw from the attempts of critics to determine the dates and authorship of the Psalms is : that it is impossible to start with a limited numb...« less