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Bible Dictionaries
Psalms of Solomon
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or These Psalms are eighteen in number, and were probably written in the 1st cent. b.c. It is doubted whether they are even indirectly cited in the NT; but both the language and the thought in them are of importance for a complete study of the Apostolic Age.
1. MSS_ and VSS_.-It is generally admitted and is practically certain that these Psalms were originally written in Hebrew; but not even a fragment of any Hebrew MS_ of them, nor any Hebrew quotation from them, exists. The MSS_ in which the Psalms have survived are (1) Greek, and (2) Syriac. The Syriac is a secondary version, made from the Greek; but the Greek is probably a direct version from the lost Hebrew original.
Eight Greek MSS_ are now known. Of these the earliest (H) was written in the 10th or 11th cent., the latest in 1419, the rest in the 11th to the 14th centuries. The first edition of the Greek text was published in 1626 by John Louis de la Cerda; it was printed from a faulty copy of a MS_ which is now in Vienna (V) and which is derived from H. Later editions of the Psalms, down to and including that of Ryle and James in 1891, also rested entirely on H, or MSS_ derived from it. A more accurate text became possible when use could be made of other MSS_, especially R (reproduced in vol. iii. of Swete’s Old Testament in Greek) and J, which, though written later, were independent of H and in many respects superior to it. A critical text based on the eight known MSS_ was published in 1895 by Oscar von Gebhardt.
The Syriac Version first became known in 1909, when Rendel Harris published the Syriac text from a nearly complete MS_ which came into his possession ‘from the neighbourhood of the Tigris.’ This MS_ is probably no older than the 16th or 17th century. Subsequently a fragment of another MS_ of the Syriac text was found in the Cambridge University Library, and yet another and much earlier (incomplete) MS_ in the British Museum.
The Syriac MS_ edited by Rendel Harris is defective both at the beginning and at the end, and title and colophon are consequently missing; the separate psalms are numbered, but are without titles. The same is true of the more ancient British Museum MS_ described by Burkitt (see Literature). A general title to the whole collection occurs only in the Greek MSS_ L, H which represent a late stage in the textual history. On the other hand, in most of the Greek MSS_, including R and J, nearly every individual psalm is entitled ‘of Solomon,’ τῷ Ζαλωμών, with which we may compare the τῷ Δαυείδ in the LXX_ version of the canonical Psalter. (For details, von Gebhardt’s textual apparatus and his remarks on p. 47 f. should be consulted; see also E. A. Abbott, Light on the Gospel from an Ancient Pcet, 1912, pp. 1-7.)
But for the connexion of Solomon’s name with these Psalms we can pass behind the MSS_. They originally stood in the Codex Alexandrinus (5th cent. a.d.) of the Bible; and, though the part which contained them has perished, the entry in the table of contents or catalogue at the beginning of the Codex survives and reads: ‘Psalms of Solomon 18.’ This entry constitutes the earliest direct external evidence not merely of the association of Solomon’s name with the Psalms, but of the existence of the Psalms themselves.
Rather earlier indirect external evidence of the existence of the Psalms has sometimes been sought elsewhere; but it is at least doubtful whether the fifty-ninth canon of the Council of Laodicea (c._ a.d. 360), when it directs that ‘private psalms (ἰδιωτικοὺς ψαλμούς) are not to be read in the church,’ and a similarly vague reference in Ambrose, refer to the Psalms of Solomon; and it is now certain that the Odes of Solomon mentioned in the Pistis Sophia (c._ a.d. 250) and by Lactantius (4th cent.) are not these Psalms, but a different set of pcems, which actually precede the 18 Psalms in Harris’s Syriac MS_.
The inclusion of these Psalms originally in the Codex Alexandrinus, and perhaps, too, in the Codex Sinaiticus, the association of them in most of the eight Greek MSS_ in which they now survive with other Solomonic works, canonical and apocryphal-the Psalms commonly standing between Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus-indicate the position which they occupied in the early history of the Church; but the paucity of references to them and quotations from them shows at the same time that they proved neither very attractive nor very influential: they probably owed their preservation to the fact that they bore the name of Solomon.
2. Contents.-The chief contents of the Psalms may be briefly indicated as follows:
Psalms 1.-Suddenly, in the midst of prosperity, threatened with war and assault, Sion, confident in her righteousness, had appealed to God; but closer examination had convinced her that secret sins, surpassing those of the heathen, had been committed, and the sanctuary of God polluted.
Psalms 2.-Foreigners have shattered the walls of Jerusalem with a battering-ram, and treated God’s altar profanely. This and the captivity of many Jews that followed seem to the writer to be the punishment meted out by God for the previous profanation of the sacrifices by some of the Jews, ‘the sons of Jerusalem,’ themselves. Nevertheless, the foreign executant of God’s anger had outgone his commission: he too is punished; he is slain in Egypt, and his body exposed to dishonour.
Psalms 3.-The character, conduct, and faith of the righteous and unrighteous are contrasted.
Psalms 4.-The ‘men-pleasers’ are described as hypocrites-outwardly, even extravagantly respectable and severe in their condemnation of sinners; but actually consumed with lust, in their gratification of which they destroy the peace of family after family. May God reward them with dishonour in life and death, with penury and lonely old age.
Psalms 5.-The goodness of God towards animals and men alike is without stint: man’s is a grudging goodness.
Psalms 6.-Happy is the man who prays.
Psalms 7.-Let God, if needs be, chasten Israel, but not by giving them up to the nations.
Psalms 8.-A more elaborate treatment of the theme of the first Psalm: the wickedness of a party of the Jews had consisted in immorality and the profanation of the sacred precincts and the sacrifices by disregard of the laws of ritual cleanness. In vv. 15-24 a specific account is given of the progress of the invader and of his reception.
Psalms 9.-Righteousness in God and man: man’s free-will, and God’s goodness to the penitent. Through God’s goodness Israel hopes not to be rejected for ever.
Psalms 10.-Happy is the man whom God chastiseth: Israel shall praise Him for His goodness.
Psalms 11.-The return of the Diaspora to Jerusalem.
Psalms 12.-May God curse the slanderers, and preserve the quiet and peace-loving.
Psalms 13.-God has preserved the righteous at a time when the ‘sinners’ perished miserably. If God chastens the righteous, it is as a father his first-born. The life of the righteous and the destruction of the sinners are for ever.
Psalms 14.-Eternal life and joy await the pious; but Sheol, darkness, and destruction are the lot of sinners, whose delight is in ‘fleeting corruption.’
Psalms 15.-Similar to 13 and 14.
Psalms 16.-But for God’s mercy and strength, even the righteous would slip down to the fate of the wicked. A prayer for preservation from sin, from beautiful but beguiling women, and for strength to bear affliction with cheerfulness.
Psalms 17.-Sinners who had set up a non-Davidic monarchy have been removed: a man of alien race has laid waste the land of Judah and carried men captive to the West. The psalm closes (vv. 23-51) with a long description of the Messianic king, for whose advent the author prays.
Psalms 18.-‘Again of the anointed of the Lord.’
3. Date.-Two things in particular stand out clearly in these Psalms: (1) the Jewish nation is divided sharply into two sects or parties, the ‘righteous,’ to whom the writer belongs, and the ‘sinners,’ or the party of his opponents; (2) the nation has suffered severely from the invasion of unnamed foreigners. More than one period in Jewish history would satisfy these conditions, and certainly the period of the Maccabaean revolt (167 b.c. and following years); and in the profanation of the altar to which Psalms 2 refers it is tempting at first to see an allusion to Antiochus Epiphanes’ act in setting up on the altar the ‘abomination of desolation’ (1 Maccabees 1:54). To this period, then, some scholars have assigned the Psalms. But the whole of the more specific allusions taken together, and most of them even taken separately, are far better satisfied by the circumstances of the middle of the 1st cent. b.c.-a period of bitter feud between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and of the invasion of Judah by the Romans under Pompey. It is to this period, therefore, that most recent scholars refer the Psalms. The (alien) nations (2:2, 6, 20, 24, 7:3, 6, 8:16) who attack Jerusalem, and by whom the Jewish captives are led away, and against whom the writer prays for deliverance, are the Romans. Their commander, ‘who is from the end of the earth, who smiteth mightily’ (8:16), who is met by the Jewish princes and at first invited by them to Jerusalem, but ultimately has to capture the fortresses and the walls of Jerusalem by force (8:18-21), by bringing battering-rams to play upon them (2:1), who allows his soldiers profanely to trample upon the altar (2:2), who carries his captives to the West (17:14), and whose end was a dishonoured death ‘on the mountains of Egypt’ (2:30, 31) is Pompey. For he, as a Roman, came from the West, and thither he led back to grace his triumph in Rome the Jewish prince Aristobulus; he availed himself of the quarrels between the Jewish princes Hyrcanus and Aristobulus and their supporters to secure the Roman power in Judah; he was at first approached and welcomed by both these princes, but in the end he was resolutely resisted by Aristobulus in Jerusalem, so that he was compelled to bring up battering-rams from Tyre where-with to break down the fortified wall of Jerusalem; he shocked Jewish feeling by intruding into the Holy of Holies, and fifteen years after he had captured Jerusalem and profaned the Temple, he was slain beside Mons Cassius near Pelusium, his body being at first left unburied on the Egyptian shore, and then hastily and unceremoniously burned
A considerable similarity of tone and temper and the possibility of satisfying all the specific allusions, more or less completely, by what is known independently of the condition of the Jews between about 80 and 40 b.c. and of the circumstances of Pompey’s treatment of them, and of his death, favour the commonly accepted view that these Psalms (possibly with the exception of Psalms 18) were written in Palestine (and probably indeed in Jerusalem) within a single generation, and not improbably by a single writer; absolute proof, however, of single authorship is not forthcoming, and some of the more colourless of the Psalms might then belong to another age. The second Psalm, which refers to the death of the foreign invader, must have been written after, but probably soon after, Pompey’s death in 48 b.c.; the rest of the Psalms (except 18) were probably written rather earlier, most of them soon after Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63 b.c., but one or two (4 and 12) perhaps earlier still, before the Jews in general had suffered at Pompey’s hands and the party of the ‘sinners’ had received that severer treatment which Pompey measured out to Aristobulus and his party.
4. Main ideas
(1) Pharisees and Sadducees.-The chief interest of these Psalms is that they reveal the temper and ideals of those two parties which in the period of the formation of the NT played so conspicuous a part in Jewish life: the author is a Pharisee, and the opponents whom he denounces are Sadducees. The Psalms indeed run back two or three generations before the separation of the Christian Church from the Jewish religion, but we can trace in them much that was still characteristic of the two parties later
The Sadducees are to the writer ‘the unrighteous’ (ἄδικοι), ‘sinners’ (ἁμαρτωλοί), ‘transgressors’ (παράνομοι), ‘the profane’ (βέβηλοι), the ‘men-pleasers’ (ἀνθρωπάρεσκοι). The use of these terms and the charges brought against the Sadducees of insolence, self-reliance, disregard of God, and gross sensual sins may largely represent the generalizations, exaggerations, or inventions of a political or religious opponent. But in charging them with profanation of the sanctuary and its sacrifices he implies that somewhat intimate association of the priesthood with the Sadducees which is conspicuous later. So again in charging them with setting up a non-Davidic monarchy (17:7, 8), i.e. with recognizing the royal dignity which the Hasmonaeans had claimed since Aristobulus I. (104 b.c.), he implies a readiness in that party to acquiesce in an existing polity, even though it was inconsistent with the Messianic promises, which seems natural enough in the ancestors of the Sadducees of the 1st cent. a.d.
Over against these ‘sinners’ the writer sees in his own party, i.e. the Pharisees, ‘the righteous’ (δίκαιοι), ‘the pious’ (ὅσιοι, representing the Hebrew ḥasîdim), ‘those that fear the Lord’ ([οἱ] φοβούμενοι τὸν κύριον), ‘the guileless’ (ἄκακοι); occasionally too this party appears as ‘the poor’ (πτωχοί, πένητες). They were devoted to the Law (14:1), troubled about sins done in ignorance yet convinced that the punishment of the righteous for sins done in ignorance was something very unlike that which awaited the ‘sinners’ (13:4, 5). As a matter of fact, though ‘righteous’ and ‘sinners’ alike must have suffered greatly from the necessary results of Pompey’s attack on and capture of Jerusalem, it was the party of the Sadducees, the adherents of Aristobulus, who with his children were taken captive, that suffered most. But in their view of a future life these Pharisees of the 1st cent. b.c. already found further ground for differentiating the lot of the sinners and the righteous. ‘They that fear the Lord shall rise to life eternal, and their life shall be in the light of the Lord, and shall come to an end no more’ (3:12). When the wicked depart into ‘Sheol and darkness and destruction,’ the righteous will obtain mercy and ‘the pious of the Lord shall inherit life in gladness’ (14:6, 7; cf. also 13:9-11, 14:2, 3, 13:5, 16:1-5). On the other hand, the end of the wicked, if not actual annihilation, is but the miserable life of Sheol indefinitely prolonged: whereas the righteous ‘rise to life eternal,’ the sinner ‘falls and rises no more’ and his destruction is for ever (3:11-12; cf. 9:9, 12:6, 13:10, 14:6, 15:11). With this hope the righteous pray that they may, and the writer claims that they already do, accept with patience the present passing chastisement of God.
(2) Free-will.-In their view of man’s free-will the author of the Psalms and his party are at one with the Pharisees of the 1st cent. a.d. as described by Josephus (Ant. II. viii. 14): i.e. like the Sadducees they assert man’s freedom, but at the same time they differ from the Sadducees by asserting and indeed emphasizing the Divine knowledge and control of human action: ‘Man and his portion lie before Thee in the balance: he cannot add to, so as to enlarge, what has been prescribed by Thee’ (5:6). ‘Our works are subject to our own choice and power to do right or wrong in the work of our hands.’
(3) The Messianic hope.-Lastly, we may note the very important light cast by Psalms 17, 18 on the Messianic hope as cherished in this circle. The Messiah is to be, unlike the actual king whom the sinners had presumptuously set up (17:7, 8), a descendant of David (v. 23). He will enjoy the old title of the Hebrew kings-the anointed of Jahweh (or the Lord); for the phrase ‘Christ (the) Lord’ (cf. Luke 2:11) which occurs in the MSS_ at 17:36 is probably, even if it be the original Greek reading, nothing but a mistranslation (as in Lamentations 4:20) of the ordinary Hebrew genitival phrase ‘the anointed of the Lord.’ This Messiah is also called ‘the king of Israel’ (17:42) and ‘the son of David’ (v. 23). He will appear at a time determined by God (18:6), being raised up, or brought forward again (though the idea of a pre-existing Messiah detected by some in this phrase is very doubtful) by God Himself. He will purge Jerusalem alike from heathen enemies who profane it, and from native unrighteous rulers. He will then restore the true kingdom to Israel-a kingdom righteous, holy, glorious, worldwide-and rule as the vicegerent of God, who Himself remains over and above this human ruler, the king of Israel, ‘for ever and ever’ (17:21).
Literature.-(1) Greek Text.-O. von Gebhardt, Die Psalmen Salomo’s (TU_ xiii. 2 [1895]); H. B. Swete, The Old Testament in Greek, 1894-96, iii. 765-787 (text of MS_ R with the variants of H and three MSS_ dependent on H).
(2) Syriac Text.-J. Rendel Harris, The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, 1909 (21911, where the variants of a Cambridge University MS_ discovered by Barnes [Harris, p. 46] and containing part of Psalms 16 are given); F. C. Burkitt, in JThSt_ xiii. [1911-12] 372-385 (a description of a British Museum MS_ containing in immediate continuation of the Odes of Solomon and with continuous enumeration Pss.-Sol. 1:1-3:5 and 10:4-18:5).
(3) Commentaries, etc.-H. E. Ryle and M. R. James, Psalms of the Pharisees, 1891 (the Greek text here printed is antiquated; but on account of the fullness and excellence of the introduction and commentary this work remains of the first importance); J. Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer, 1874 (contains a German translation); J. Viteau, Les Psaumes de Salomon, 1911 (text, translation, and full introduction and commentary); G. B. Gray, ‘The Psalms of Solomon’ (brief introduction and notes to an English translation arranged in parallel lines in Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 1913, ii. 625-652). For a full bibliography, see Viteau, op. cit. pp. 240-251.
G. Buchanan Gray.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Psalms of Solomon'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/psalms-of-solomon.html. 1906-1918.
