Recent Trends in the Study of the Psalter

Abstract

"WHEN I was a student the chief interests in the study of the psalms were the determination of the date of their composition, and the fixing of their original poetic form. In the hands of some scholars the latter led to much arbitrary treatment of the text to make it conform to the editor's ideas of the structure of the psalm, while so far as the date was concerned, many crowded large numbers of the psalms into the Maccabean age, and others assigned most of them to the Persian age. There was a general agreement that few, if any, of the psalms came from the pre-exilic period"