100 Fun Facts About Psalms

In the King James Version of Psalm 23, what "runneth over"?

My cup: the verse seats the singer at a table laid in front of his enemies, head anointed with oil, and the overflowing cup went on to become an English saying in its own right.

Like the Psalms, which part of the Bible has five books?

The Torah: an old rabbinic saying has Moses giving Israel five books of law and the Psalter answering them with five books of its own.

Which famous line opens Psalm 23 in the King James Version?

The Lord is my shepherd: the old Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, translated from Latin, has no shepherd in the line at all and opens "The Lord ruleth me".

Which psalm, at 176 verses, is the longest chapter in the entire Bible?

119: it is an alphabet poem, giving each of the 22 Hebrew letters a stanza whose every verse begins with that letter, which is how it stretches to 176 verses.

Which two-verse psalm is the shortest chapter in the Bible?

117: St Benedict's Rule found it too brief to fill a slot at Vespers, so monks sing it joined on to the psalm before it.

What does Tehillim, the Hebrew title of the Book of Psalms, mean?

Praises: the English name took a different road, from the Greek psalmos, a song performed to plucked strings.

Which figure is named in the superscriptions of the most psalms, 73 in all?

David: some of those headings pin a psalm to a scene from his life, such as fleeing his own son Absalom or hiding from Saul in a cave.

Which psalm is the only one attributed to Moses in its heading?

90: Isaac Watts turned its opening verses, where a thousand years pass like yesterday, into the hymn "O God, Our Help in Ages Past".

Psalm 51, headed as a confession after the Bathsheba affair, is known by which Latin name?

Miserere: its first verse was England's "neck verse", because a defendant who could read it aloud might claim benefit of clergy and escape the hangman.

What mysterious Hebrew word appears 71 times in the Psalms, possibly marking a pause?

Selah: nobody knows what it means, and even the ancient Greek translators were guessing, swapping in "diapsalma", a word just as obscure.

Which psalm opens with the cry "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me"?

22: Matthew and Mark have Jesus cry out its first line from the cross, and a later verse about parting garments and casting lots is quoted in the same crucifixion scene.

In the King James Version of Psalm 137, the weeping exiles hang which instruments on the willows?

Harps: their captors demand one of the songs of Zion, the exiles refuse to sing in a strange land, and the psalm ends on a notoriously violent curse.

Which psalm does the devil quote to Jesus during the temptation in the wilderness?

91: he cites its promise that angels will bear you up lest you dash your foot against a stone, daring Jesus to throw himself from the top of the Temple.

Martin Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" is based on which psalm?

46: it opens "God is our refuge and strength", and Luther's hymn is often called the battle hymn of the Reformation; Bach built a cantata on it and Mendelssohn a symphony finale.

How does the final psalm in the Book of Psalms urge the congregation to praise God?

With music and dancing: it calls for trumpet blasts, tambourines and strings, then closes by ordering everything that has breath to join in.

Which psalm begins "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands"?

100: William Kethe's rhymed version, "All People That on Earth Do Dwell", became so standard that the melody it is sung to is still called the Old 100th.

Psalm 1 opens with which words in the King James Version?

Blessed is the man: in Latin that is Beatus vir, and medieval scribes turned its opening B into a painted initial that could fill a whole page of a psalter.

Psalm 104 says God made which sea monster simply to play in the ocean?

Leviathan: another psalm has God smashing the monster's heads in battle, but here it is just one more creature, made to frolic in the sea while ships sail past.

Which British politician's diary records him reciting the Bible's longest psalm on a walk through London?

William Wilberforce: in 1819, in the middle of a political crisis, the anti-slavery campaigner noted that he walked from Hyde Park Corner repeating the psalm "in great comfort".

The sons of which rebel, swallowed by the earth in the Book of Numbers, are credited with eleven psalms?

Korah: he led a revolt against Moses and the ground opened under him, yet Numbers adds that his children did not die, and their descendants became Temple singers.

Whose setting of Psalm 51 is a teenage Mozart said to have written out from memory?

Allegri: legend says the Vatican guarded the score, but copies had already left Rome, and the tale of the boy's feat rests on one letter from his father.

Which group had a 1978 hit with "Rivers of Babylon", adapted from Psalm 137?

Boney M.: their disco smash began as a Rastafarian anthem by Jamaica's Melodians, for whom Babylon meant the Western society that held Africa's exiles.

Psalm 137 inspired "Va, pensiero", the slaves' chorus from which Verdi opera?

Nabucco: a month after Verdi died, a young Toscanini led a choir of 820 in the chorus as the composer was reburied in Milan.

Why do Catholic and Protestant Bibles often number the same psalm one apart?

Greek and Hebrew texts split psalms differently: the Septuagint, followed by the Latin Vulgate, runs Hebrew Psalms 9 and 10 together as one poem, so most later numbers sit one behind.

Which extra psalm from the Septuagint also turned up in Hebrew among the Dead Sea Scrolls?

151: its heading in the Septuagint calls it 'outside the number' and sets it after the fight with Goliath; scholars assumed it began life in Greek until a Hebrew version surfaced at Qumran.

Which German scholar's form criticism sorted the psalms into types such as hymns and royal psalms?

Hermann Gunkel: he ignored where a psalm sat in the book and asked what occasion in Israel's worship each type was sung at, its 'setting in life'.

Scholars who sort the psalms by type find which kind to be by far the most common?

Individual laments: each calls on God and pours out one person's complaint, yet most turn around and end on a note of confidence.

Psalms 120 to 134 form a group of fifteen known by what name?

Songs of Ascents: one tradition has Levites singing one on each of the fifteen steps up to the Temple's inner court; another has pilgrims singing them on the climb to Jerusalem.

Psalm 130, "Out of the depths", is one of seven psalms given which label?

Penitential: as he lay dying, Augustine had penitential psalms copied out and hung on the wall by his bed, and his biographer says he read them weeping.

Which psalm begins "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills"?

121: after two verses of 'my help' the voice switches to 'thy keeper', which is why it is read as a dialogue, the traveller's question answered perhaps by a priest.

Which psalm opens "The heavens declare the glory of God"?

19: Haydn turned its opening into the chorus 'The heavens are telling' in The Creation, and Bach had already used the same verse to open a cantata.

Which psalm, opening "O Lord, thou hast searched me", affirms God's omnipresence?

139: verse 16 holds the Bible's only use of the Hebrew word behind 'golem', there meaning the psalmist's own unformed body.

In Psalm 118, the stone the builders rejected becomes what, in a line Jesus quotes about himself?

The cornerstone: the same psalm supplies 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord', the shout that greets Jesus as he rides into Jerusalem.

Psalms 113 to 118, recited on Jewish festivals, are known collectively as what?

The Hallel: Matthew and Mark say Jesus and the disciples sang a hymn after the Last Supper, and at a Passover meal that may well have been these psalms.

Psalm 110, "The Lord said unto my Lord", is best known in music by which Latin title?

Dixit Dominus: as a fixture of Vespers it drew constant settings, among them Monteverdi's and Mozart's, three by Vivaldi, and a 1707 showpiece Handel wrote in Italy.

Psalm 8 is headed 'upon Gittith', a word that may refer to what?

An instrument or a song of Gath: Gath was Goliath's Philistine hometown, though the ancient Greek translators read the word as 'for the winepresses', a vintage tune.

Which psalm, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks", opens Book Two of the Psalter?

42: the thirsting deer leads into a run of psalms nicknamed the Elohistic Psalter, because they mostly say 'Elohim' and avoid the divine name.

What is the main poetic device of the Psalms?

Parallelism: a verse's second half echoes, sharpens or reverses the first, which is why chanted psalm verses fall into two answering halves.

The Orthodox Church divides the Psalter into 20 sections whose Greek name means 'sittings', called what?

Kathismata: each is split into three 'stases', and the cycle runs through the whole Psalter every week, doubling to twice a week in Great Lent.

What distinction does the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 hold?

First book printed in British North America: Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made their own metrical translations and ran them off in Cambridge on the colonies' only press.

In Islam, which scripture was revealed to Dawud and corresponds to the Psalms?

Zabur: the Quran even quotes from it, saying it is written there that the righteous shall inherit the earth, a line that matches Psalm 37.

Which composer's 1965 Chichester Psalms set the psalms in Hebrew?

Leonard Bernstein: the Dean of Chichester who commissioned it hoped for 'a hint of West Side Story', and got one, since a passage reuses music cut from that show.

Igor Stravinsky's 1930 Symphony of Psalms sets verses from the Vulgate's Psalms 38, 39 and which final psalm?

150: its 'Laudate Dominum' ends a work commissioned for the Boston Symphony's fiftieth anniversary, yet Brussels heard the premiere first, days before Boston did.

Early Church candidates for which office had to recite the whole Psalter by heart?

Bishop: most candidates had learned it during years as monks, while people who could not read said an Our Father in place of each psalm, counting on a cord of beads.

Psalm 145, read three times daily in Jewish prayer, is commonly known by what name?

Ashrei: the name is not in Psalm 145 at all, but is the first word of two verses borrowed from other psalms and recited before it begins.

In 1 Chronicles, Asaph, named in twelve psalm headings, leads the music before the Ark playing what?

Cymbals: the other Levites played strings while Asaph 'made a sound with cymbals', and centuries later his descendants clashed them as the Second Temple's foundation was laid.

Which church's 1662 burial service left out Psalm 23, now a funeral staple?

Anglican: its prayer book read Psalms 39 and 90 over the dead instead, both about how short life is, and the American edition took in Psalm 23 only in 1928.

The heading term 'maskil', attached to thirteen psalms, is usually linked to a Hebrew root meaning what?

Wise: the root suggests insight, and the same word later named the maskilim, the 'enlightened' champions of the Jewish Enlightenment.

Which two near-identical psalms give Paul his line in Romans that 'there is none that doeth good, no, not one'?

14 and 53: the two differ mainly in the name they use for God, 53 preferring 'Elohim', as if one poem had been filed in two collections.

Which Hebrew word opens and closes each of the final psalms of the Psalter, 146 onward?

Hallelujah: the five closing psalms each begin and end with the shout, building to a last line that tells everything that has breath to join in.

Which Christmas carol began life as Isaac Watts's paraphrase of Psalm 98?

Joy to the World is usually sung to a tune arranged by the American composer Lowell Mason, who credited the melody to Handel. Watts published the words in 1719.

A long-running theory claims which writer hid his mark in the King James text of Psalm 46?

William Shakespeare, say the theorists: count 46 words into the psalm and you reach 'shake', and 46 back from its end, past the closing pause word, is 'spear'. Many scholars doubt it.

Which astronaut recited verses of Psalm 8 during the voyage home from the first Moon landing?

Buzz Aldrin read the lines asking what man is that God should be mindful of him. The same psalm reached the lunar surface in Pope Paul VI's message on a goodwill disc.

The Faddan More Psalter, an early medieval book of Psalms, was found preserved in what Irish setting?

A peat bog preserved it: low oxygen and an antibiotic substance made by sphagnum moss held off decay, and the book lay open at a psalm when it was found in 2006.

Which mythical beast appears in the King James Psalms where modern Bibles translate re'em as wild ox?

The unicorn appears in three King James psalms because its translators followed the Septuagint and the Vulgate, which had turned the horned animal into a one-horned one.

Which writer's prison letter was published as De Profundis, the Latin opening words of Psalm 130?

Oscar Wilde never chose that name: his friend Robert Ross added it when he published the letter in 1905, five years after the writer's death.

Which singer opened a Bible at Psalm 40 to find words for the last song on the 1983 album War?

Bono wrote the words in the last few hours of the recording sessions, and U2 simply called the song 40. It went on to close the band's concerts for years.

Which British city's Latin motto, Nisi Dominus Frustra, abbreviates the first verse of Psalm 127?

Edinburgh has carried the motto on its coat of arms since 1647. It means roughly 'without the Lord, in vain', boiling down the psalm's warning to builders and watchmen.

Psalm 104 is often compared with a great Egyptian hymn to the sun disc, attributed to which pharaoh?

Akhenaten, who forbade the worship of Egypt's other gods, ruled in the 14th century BC. Scholars still argue over whether his sun hymn shaped the psalm.

Which Handel oratorio sets verses from Psalm 2, among them a bass aria on why the nations rage?

Messiah turns to the psalm in Part II, where the bass's furious question leads on to a forceful tenor air promising that the plotting kings will be broken with a rod of iron.

Dominus illuminatio mea, the Latin opening words of Psalm 27, is the motto of which British university?

Oxford has used the words, which mean 'The Lord is my light', since at least the second half of the sixteenth century, and they appear in the university's coat of arms.

Psalm 68, a key text for Rastafari, says which African land shall soon stretch out her hands to God?

Ethiopia put the verse on Emperor Haile Selassie's coat of arms and once used it as a national motto. One early Rastafari leader read his crowning as the prophecy coming true.

Which phrase for being baffled appears in the King James Psalm 107, as storm-tossed sailors reel like drunkards?

At their wit's end is where the psalm leaves the sailors until they cry out for help; then the storm is made a calm and the waves fall still.

Psalm 37 promises that which group shall inherit the earth, a line Jesus cites in the Beatitudes?

The meek are given the promise in a psalm that tells its hearers not to fret over evildoers, who will soon be cut down like grass and wither like a green herb.

Psalm 103 says God fills the mouth with good things so that youth is renewed like which bird's?

The eagle also carries Isaiah's promise that those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength and mount up on wings.

In Psalm 51 the psalmist begs to be purged with which plant so that he shall be clean?

Hyssop was the plant used to smear blood on the lintels at the first Passover, so the plea borrows the language of ritual cleansing. The verse goes on to ask to be washed whiter than snow.

Psalm 133 likens brothers living in unity to precious oil running down the beard of which high priest?

Aaron's beard went on to become the folk name of several wild plants, and the psalm's first verse is sung as the Hebrew folk tune Hine Ma Tov.

Psalm 127 likens the children of one's youth to what in the hand of a mighty man?

Arrows fill a quiver in the next verse, which calls the man who has his full happy. The image gave the Quiverfull movement, which favours very large families, its name.

In the King James Version, every verse of Psalm 136 ends by saying that what endures for ever?

His mercy forms the second half of every verse, a refrain that gave the psalm its Eastern Orthodox name, Polyeleos, or 'many mercies'.

Which novelist and lay theologian wrote Reflections on the Psalms, with a chapter on their cursings?

C. S. Lewis wrote as an amateur and said so, warning readers in the introduction that he was no Hebraist, no higher critic and no ancient historian.

The headings of Psalms 72 and 127 name which king, also credited with Proverbs and the Song of Songs?

Solomon's name in the heading of Psalm 72 can also be read as 'for' him, so some commentators take it as a father's prayer for the heir about to be crowned.

Which Gospel gives the last words of Jesus on the cross as a line from Psalm 31 about committing his spirit?

Luke has Jesus die with the psalm's words of trust, and the same verse later became the dying prayer of Saint Bernard, Jerome of Prague and Martin Luther.

Which apostle, preaching at Pentecost in Acts, quotes Psalm 16 as a prophecy of the resurrection?

Peter argues that the psalm's promise of a body that would not see decay could not be about its author, whose tomb was still there for the crowd to visit.

In Acts, lines from Psalms 69 and 109 are cited to justify replacing which of the twelve apostles?

Judas Iscariot's place went to Matthias after the line about another taking his office was read as an instruction. Psalm 109 has traditionally been called the Iscariot Psalm.

Psalm 110 names its king a priest for ever after the order of which mysterious figure from Genesis?

Melchizedek, king of Salem, greets Abraham after a battle in Genesis and then vanishes from the story. The Letter to the Hebrews builds its case for Christ's priesthood on this one verse.

Which composer set Psalm 84's praise of God's lovely dwellings at the centre of A German Requiem?

Brahms assembled the Requiem's words himself from the Luther Bible instead of the Latin Mass, and the finished work is symmetrical around this fourth movement.

Whose setting of Psalm 122, I Was Glad, was written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902?

Hubert Parry's anthem was nearly wasted on its first outing: the conductor misjudged the timing, finished before the King had arrived and had to repeat it.

The hymn tune Old Hundredth, named for a psalm it later carried, first appeared in a psalter from which Swiss city?

Geneva's psalter paired the tune with a French version of Psalm 134, and it is usually attributed to the French composer Louis Bourgeois. Its familiar name came with a later English text.

Which Reformer's commentary calls the Psalms an anatomy of all the parts of the soul?

John Calvin reasoned that every emotion a person can be conscious of is shown in the Psalms as in a mirror: griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes and cares.

Psalms 25, 34 and 111 begin each line with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a form called what?

An acrostic may have helped worshippers learn a psalm by heart, though several of the Bible's alphabet psalms are imperfect, with letters skipped or repeated.

Each of the five books that make up the Psalms closes with which kind of short passage?

A doxology closes each section, and the divisions themselves were probably introduced by the book's final editors, long after the poems were first composed.

In the Hebrew Bible the Psalms open the third division, Ketuvim, a name that translates as what?

The Writings gather poetry and later books such as Job, Proverbs, Daniel and Chronicles, with the Psalms standing at their head.

Psalm 104 thanks God for bread to strengthen the heart, oil to make the face shine, and what to gladden it?

Wine sits in a list of gifts in a psalm that tours creation, from springs in the valleys and the cedars of Lebanon to wild goats on the high hills.

Psalm 18, a song of thanks for rescue from King Saul, appears again almost word for word in which book?

2 Samuel carries the poem as its chapter 22; the main difference is that the psalm opens with an extra line declaring love for God.

The headings of Psalms 57 and 142 place their author, on the run from King Saul, in what hiding place?

A cave fits two episodes from the fugitive's years on the run: the hideout at Adullam, and En-gedi on the shore of the Dead Sea.

The heading of Psalm 51 names which prophet, who confronted Israel's king over his affair with Bathsheba?

Nathan trapped the king with a story about a rich man who stole a poor neighbour's only lamb, then told him he was that man.

In Psalm 22 the sufferer is hemmed in by strong bulls from which region east of the Jordan?

Bashan's bulls stand for frightening power in the psalm, while the prophet Amos turns the same herds into an insult, calling the pampered rich its cows.

In Psalm 114's picture of the Exodus, the sea flees and the mountains skip like which animals?

Rams skip and the little hills leap like lambs as the Jordan is driven back. Dante quotes the psalm near the start of his Purgatorio.

Psalms such as 69 and 109, which call down curses on the psalmist's enemies, are given which label?

Imprecatory psalms pray for a foe to suffer harm, and readers have long struggled with them: they have been explained as catharsis, as prophecy and even as quotations of the enemy.

The Great Psalms Scroll, best preserved of dozens of ancient Psalms manuscripts, was found at which Dead Sea site?

Qumran yielded thirty-seven Psalms manuscripts, and this one startled scholars by arranging its poems in a radically different order with extra compositions mixed in.

Whose monastic Rule calls monks who chant less than the whole Psalter each week too lax in their devotion?

Benedict of Nursia let anyone who disliked his timetable rearrange it, so long as every psalm was still sung within the week. The holy forefathers, he noted, had managed the lot in a single day.

The singer of Psalm 84 would rather hold which humble post in God's house than dwell in the tents of wickedness?

A doorkeeper's lot follows the verse's famous sum: a single day in God's courts is better than a thousand spent anywhere else.

The Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer keep whose 1530s translation in place of the King James text?

Myles Coverdale's Psalms came from the first complete printed English Bible, passed into the Great Bible he edited, and stayed in American prayer books until 1979.

The Cathach, an Irish book of Psalms once carried into battle for protection, is traditionally the work of which saint?

Columba is the scribe tradition gives the Cathach, whose name means 'the Battler'. The O'Donnells had it carried three times around their army before a fight as a talisman of victory.

Vaughan Williams built a famous string Fantasia on a tune which Tudor composer wrote for Archbishop Parker's Psalter?

Thomas Tallis wrote nine tunes for the 1567 psalter. The one Vaughan Williams came across while editing the English Hymnal was the setting of Psalm 2.

Which American minimalist composed Tehillim, a setting of psalm verses in Hebrew for four women's voices and ensemble?

Steve Reich took the work's rhythms directly from the rhythm of the Hebrew words, in the first of his pieces to reflect his Jewish heritage.

Which Elizabethan poet began a verse translation of the Psalms that his sister Mary completed after his death?

Philip Sidney had written only the first 43 psalms when he died on campaign in 1586. His sister wrote the rest, and John Donne praised the finished work in a poem.

Scholars link Psalm 29, where God's voice thunders over the waters, to the myths of which Canaanite storm god?

Baal's myth cycle left such clear marks on the psalm that one scholar used them to date its present form to no later than the tenth century BC.

Which pastor of Germany's anti-Nazi Confessing Church wrote Prayerbook of the Bible, a short meditation on the Psalms?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote it to show why the Psalms matter for Christian prayer. He was hanged in April 1945, as the Nazi regime collapsed.

Psalm 45, sometimes called the only secular poem among the Psalms, was written for what kind of occasion?

A royal wedding is the setting: the poet salutes the king, then tells his foreign bride to forget her own people and her father's house. Who the couple were is still debated.