THE EVOLUTION OF PSALMS

• The Evolution of the Psalms
• “The Living Psalms”
• C. Westermann, The Living Psalms (W.B.Eerdmans, 1989), pp.4-8.
• The Psalms emerged from Israel’s public worship.
• They were not first written then sung: rather, it was the other way round. Most of the Psalms were sung and prayed long before being written down.
• They were first committed to writing in the process of the growth of the whole collection. The collection of Psalms presupposes an already long, rich and varied life for them in oral tradition and in the context of worship.
• When we say that the Psalms were formed in Israel’s worship, we mean a worship that at the time was the heartbeat of the whole community and the center of Israel’s common life.
• In relation to the Psalms, what is the implication to this fact that worship was the center of Israel’s common life?
• If worship was the heart of the people’s common life, then the nation’s history must be reflected in the history of its worship, that is, the worship must contain elements that reveal the historical development of Israel as a people and in turn to some degree must be reflected in the Psalms.
• Now the most significant division in the Book of Psalms in general is between community Psalms and individual Psalms.
• The reason for this is that the history of the nation Israel was preceded by a history of families, whose traditions are preserved in the patriarchal narratives.
• The characteristic features of the patriarchal worship is that of the invocation of God in the Psalms, lament, praise, petition, expression of trust, making a vow. 
• These are all taken up and developed in the Book of Psalms in the form of individual Psalms, that is, Psalms from the area of personal and family life.
• The emergence of the nation brings with it the communal Psalms and from then on both types continue to exist side by side.
• In both, and in the relationship between them, developments occur, caused by historical developments  in Israel’s worship.
• The most important development after the settlement was the establishment of the monarchy. With it arrived the royal Psalms.
• After the end of the monarchy, a further development occurred: now the praise of God as king moved into the foreground (Psalms 47; 93-99) and the old royal Psalms were interpreted messianically.
• The Psalter also frequently reflects the profound change brought about the collapse of the monarchy and the Temple.
• Changes in the worship of the post-exilic community led to far-reaching changes in the Psalms.
• It is particularly noteworthy that communal psalms of narrative praise, like the victory songs, disappear almost entirely.
• The contrast now is no longer between Israel and her political enemies but between the pious and the godless.
• Thus, it is only in recognizing that worship is the unifying center of Israel’s common life that we can describe and understand the Psalms as originating from Israel’s public worship.
• It is not always possible to utter one’s plea to God in the sanctuary.
• It can happen outside the sanctuary, when the individual or community is confronted with an occasion of joy or of distress: the sick may pray on his bed, the prisoner prays in his cell, the man threatened by a storm prays on the ship (Ps 107), while the victory song rises from the battlefield and a thanksgiving to God is uttered when a child is born.
• Prayer in public worship would lose its force without these experiences outside the sanctuary: such prayer is only given life by the movements inwards from outside and back again into daily life.
• Within this movement, prayer in worship functions to bring together those many experiences of the need to invoke God and to give verbal expression to them in a way in which all the members of the community can join.
• The secret of the language of the Psalms lies in the fact that many people and many succeeding generations can recognize and utter it as their own prayer.
• That the Psalms are to be understood in the light of this movement to and from worship is indicated by the titles that were later added to the Psalms by those who collected them together, titles which ascribe the occasion of their composition to real-life situations, for example Psalm 3:1, ‘A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son’ or Psalm 102:1, ‘A Prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the Lord.’
• It is important then bear in mind that every particular Psalm must be read as the product of an evolutionary development, of which the final stage is its fixation in writing as part of the entire collection of the Psalter.
• In its earlier stages, the Psalm was the prayer of many different persons in diverse situations and its present form represents the collecting together in worship of these different voices.
• It received its liturgical shape only after many generations, during which it was transmitted in the worshipping center from parents to children for centuries.
• A vivid example of this process is Psalm 107, where various experiences of delivery from mortal dangers are brought together in a single Psalm, which thereby became a Psalm of the worshipping community.