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Bible Dictionaries
Hymns
Fausset's Bible Dictionary
or Hebrew tehillim; in direct praise to God (Acts 16:25; James 5:13). Not restricted to church worship; but used to exhilarate Christians in social parties. "Psalms," mizmor , were accompanied with an instrument, carefully arranged. "Songs," Greek oodai , Hebrew shir , were joyous lyric pieces on sacred subjects; contrast the reveling, licentious songs of pagan feasts (Amos 8:10). The accompaniment is the "melody of the heart," not the lyre. Tertullian (Apology, 39) records that at the love feasts (agapae ), after the water was furnished for the hands and the lights lit, according as any remembered Scripture or could compose (compare 1 Corinthians 14:26, "improvised psalms"), he was invited to sing praises to God for the general good. The heart is the seat of true psalmody, "singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Colossians 3:16; Ephesians 5:19).
Some generally accepted confession, in the form of a hymn, appears in 1 Timothy 3:16; the short unconnected sentences, with words similarly arranged, almost in the same number of syllables, the clauses in parallelism (the principle of Hebrew versification) antithetically arranged, each two forming a pair which contrasts heaven and earth, the order reversed in each new pair, flesh and spirit, angels and Gentiles, world and glory; the first and the last clauses correspond, "manifested in the flesh . . . received up into glory." So Pliny, 1:10, ep. 97: "the Christians are wont on a fixed day, before dawn, to meet and sing a hymn in alternate responses to Christ as God." Christ and His disciples sang a hymn after the Passover and the Lord's supper (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26). Probably it was the Great Hallel or paschal hymn, usually sung after the Passover by the Jews, namely, Psalm 113-118.
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Fausset, Andrew R. Entry for 'Hymns'. Fausset's Bible Dictionary. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/fbd/h/hymns.html. 1949.
