How to read the Psalms

The Psalms are not a book to read straight through like a story. They are 150 poems, gathered over centuries, written to be prayed and sung by a whole people. Jesus prayed them, the early Church sang them (Colossians 3:16), and Jews and Christians still pray them every day. Knowing a little about how they work makes them far easier to read, and to pray.

A book in five books

The Psalter is divided into five collections, which the reader on this site marks as Book 1 to Book 5: Psalms 1–41, 42–72, 73–89, 90–106 and 107–150. Each collection closes with a short blessing of God (Psalm 41:13, Psalm 72:18–19, Psalm 89:52, Psalm 106:48), and Psalm 150 closes the whole book with “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!” An old Jewish comparison likens the five books of psalms to the five books of Moses.

The book also has a front door. Psalm 1 sets out two ways of life and blesses the one who delights in God’s law; Psalm 2 speaks of God’s anointed king. Read together, they introduce the two great themes that run through the Psalter: life under God’s word, and hope in God’s reign.

Kinds of psalms

In the early twentieth century, scholars began sorting the psalms by type, and their categories remain a useful guide. Many psalms mix types, so treat these as lenses, not boxes.

• Praise (hymns). A call to praise, followed by reasons: who God is and what He has done. “Praise the LORD, my soul!” (Psalm 103:1–2). Psalms 145–150 form a closing crescendo of praise.
• Lament. The largest group: prayers from trouble, usually moving through complaint, request and trust. Some are personal, such as Psalm 13; others speak for the community after disaster, such as Psalm 74: “God, why have You rejected us forever?” The guide to the Psalms of lament looks at them closely.
• Thanksgiving. Songs of someone who has been rescued and returns to give thanks in public: “You have turned my mourning into dancing for me” (Psalm 30:11–12).
• Royal psalms. Prayers for or about Israel’s king, such as Psalms 2, 45, 72 and 110. The New Testament applies several of them to Jesus, and Christians have read them as pointing to Christ; Jewish tradition reads them of the anointed king of David’s line and of the hoped-for Messiah.
• Wisdom psalms. Reflections on the two ways of life and the meaning of God’s law, such as Psalms 1, 37, 49 and 119.

Some smaller groups are worth knowing. The Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120–134) are short songs associated with pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Hallel (Psalms 113–118) is sung at Passover, and many readers think it is the hymn Jesus and His disciples sang after the Last Supper (Matthew 26:30). Christian tradition also groups seven penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143) as prayers of repentance.

How Hebrew poetry works

Hebrew poetry does not depend on rhyme. Its basic feature is parallelism, a term made popular by the English scholar Robert Lowth in the eighteenth century: a line is followed by a second line that echoes it, contrasts with it or carries it further.

• Echoing: “Day after day they pour out speech, and night after night they display knowledge” (Psalm 19:2).
• Contrasting: “the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish” (Psalm 1:6).
• Building: “Ascribe to the LORD” repeats and grows over two verses (Psalm 29:1–2).

A practical tip: when the second half of a line seems to repeat the first, look for what it adds. It often sharpens, intensifies or makes concrete what the first half said.

Some psalms are acrostics, with lines or stanzas beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, has 22 stanzas of eight verses each, one for every letter; the reader on this site shows the letter names, such as Mem and Nun, above each stanza. Psalms 25, 34, 111, 112 and 145 are also acrostics.

The titles (superscriptions)

Most psalms have a short title above the first verse. Some name a person: David, Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, and once Moses (Psalm 90:1). Some give a setting: Psalm 3 is “A Psalm by David, when he fled from Absalom his son,” and Psalm 51 is linked to Nathan’s confrontation of David. Others are musical directions, such as “For the Chief Musician,” or name a tune, such as “The Doe of the Morning” (Psalm 22). The word Selah, which appears inside many psalms (Psalm 3:2), is probably a musical or liturgical marker; its exact meaning is unknown.

The titles are very old, but most scholars think they were added by the editors who collected the psalms. The Hebrew phrase usually translated “by David” can also mean “for David” or “belonging to David,” so a title does not always settle authorship. Jewish and Christian tradition has long associated the Psalter with David, and many readers take the titles as historical; others read them as early guidance on how a psalm was understood and prayed.

In Hebrew Bibles and in the Latin Vulgate, a title is counted as verse 1, so verse numbers in those texts are often one or two higher than in English. English Bibles, including the one on this site, print the title above verse 1 without a number of its own.

Why the numbering differs

The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) divides a few psalms differently from the Hebrew, and the Latin Vulgate follows the Greek. As a result, most psalms carry a number one lower in the Greek and Latin than in the Hebrew:

Protestant Bibles and most modern Catholic Bibles use the Hebrew numbering. Older Catholic Bibles such as the Douay-Rheims, the Latin liturgy, and the Eastern Orthodox churches use the Greek. That is why Psalm 23 is Dominus regit me, Psalm 22 in the Vulgate; why Psalm 51 is known in Latin as the Miserere (Psalm 50); and why Psalm 130 is the De profundis (Psalm 129). Orthodox Bibles also include a short Psalm 151.

On this site, the English text and all references use the Hebrew numbering. Where the Clementine Vulgate is shown beside the English, it carries its own reference: Psalm 46:1, for example, is labeled Vulgate Psalm 45:2, because the Latin counts the title as verse 1. Latin is paired with English only where the verses are verified to correspond.

Praying the Psalms

The Psalms were Jesus’ own prayers. On the cross He prayed the opening of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46), and His last words in Luke echo Psalm 31: “Into Your hand I commend my spirit” (Psalm 31:5).

The Liturgy of the Hours. The Church’s daily prayer, also called the Divine Office, is built on the psalms. It marks the hours of the day, above all morning and evening prayer, echoing the psalmist’s “Seven times a day, I praise You” (Psalm 119:164). The first prayer of the day traditionally begins with “Lord, open my lips” (Psalm 51:15). The Rule of St Benedict spread all 150 psalms across a single week; the Roman Liturgy of the Hours today spreads them over four weeks. Priests and religious pray it daily, and many laypeople pray parts of it, from books or apps.

Other traditions pray the psalms just as faithfully. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer divides the Psalter across a month of morning and evening prayer. Orthodox monasteries read the whole Psalter every week. Many Reformed churches sing metrical psalms, a tradition that goes back to the Genevan Psalter of Calvin’s day, and some sing only psalms in worship.

Starting on your own. Read one psalm a day, aloud if you can. Notice its type and its turns. When a psalm does not match your mood, pray it anyway, on behalf of someone whose mood it does match: a lament for a friend who is suffering, a song of thanks for someone who has been rescued. That is how the psalms have always been prayed: as the prayer of a whole people, not only of one person.

The hard psalms

Some psalms contain prayers that shock modern readers: that enemies’ teeth be broken (Psalm 58:6), that an enemy’s children be left fatherless (Psalm 109:6–9), and, most painfully, the end of Psalm 137, a lament of exiles “by the rivers of Babylon”:

These are sometimes called the imprecatory or cursing psalms. There is no honest way to make them comfortable, and they should not be explained away. Christians have read them in several ways, often together:

• They are honest prayers of people who suffered. Psalm 137 is the cry of exiles who had seen Jerusalem razed and their own people killed. The psalms let rage be spoken to God instead of buried or acted on.
• They hand vengeance to God. The psalmists ask God to act; they do not take revenge themselves. Paul tells Christians never to avenge themselves but to leave room for God’s justice (Romans 12:19–21).
• Scripture records them; it does not command them. Jesus taught His followers to “love your enemies” and to “pray for those who mistreat you” (Matthew 5:44). Christians read the cursing psalms in the light of that teaching, not against it.
• They can turn back on the one praying. Psalm 139 moves from “I hate them with perfect hatred” straight to “Search me, God, and know my heart” (Psalm 139:21–24).
• They have been read spiritually. From the early Church onward, many Christian writers read the enemies as sin and evil itself. The Rule of St Benedict, for example, reads the “little ones” of Psalm 137 as evil thoughts, to be dashed against Christ, the rock, while they are still small.

Practice differs. Since the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Liturgy of the Hours omits Psalms 58, 83 and 109 and some verses of other psalms, including the end of Psalm 137, for pastoral reasons; many Orthodox and Protestant communities, especially psalm-singing Reformed churches, still pray the full text. Both approaches take the psalms seriously.

If these psalms speak to you because someone is harming you now, you can bring that to God, and you also deserve help from people. Please tell someone you trust; if you are in danger, contact emergency services. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any time.

For a printable way to pray a psalm, see the Psalm 23 verse sheet or the prayer reflection worksheet.