Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from the beginning: "The Book of Psalms is no longer to be regarded by Old Testament scholars as an isolated phenomenon. Similar religious poetry is found not only in the narrative and prophetic portions of the Old Testament, in the Apocrypha, and the New Testament, but also in the literatures of Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, India, and Greece. Indeed, wherever religion really develops beyond the primitive stage, it expresses itself in poetry and we get something comparable to the Hebrew psalms. One primary fact, then, to be considered in the study of the Old Testament psalms is that they are only the surviving fragments of the religious poetry of a race; and that they have been preserved partly by reason of the literary merit that made it difficult for them to be forgotten, and partly by reason of the fact that they happened to be included in the song books of the sanctuaries. One must accordingly bear constantly in mind the larger literature of which they were a part, and employ to a legitimate degree the imagination, in order to rightly comprehend the life out of which the psalms have come, and to see in any true perspective the significance of the surviving psalms."
