THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY THE RELIGION OF THE PSALMS By J. M. POWIS SMITH Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS COPYRIGHT 1922 By THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO All Rights Reserved Published March 1922 Composed and Printed By PREFACE Books about the Psalms come and go; the Psalms go on forever. They belong to the permanent literature of the race. They express felicitously and adequately the great emotions of mankind. They display a faith that passes knowledge, an invincible confidence in the goodness of God that survived successive shocks testing it to the uttermost. The genuine, heartfelt religion of the Psalter has never failed to kindle the spirit of the faithful. The aim of this book is to bring out the significance of the Psalms as indicative of the religious and moral standards of later Judaism. There is no attempt here to find in the Psalms spiritual nourishment for the life of today. The effort is rather to present the meaning of the Psalms as it lay in the minds of their authors and earliest readers. Probably no book has suffered more from a conventionalized interpretation than the Psalter. We need |