Excerpt from Commentary on Psalms These religious poems represent many different forms. There are hymns of praise and worship of God; many take the form of prayers for help, protection, and salvation; and others are pleas for forgiveness. They may be songs of thanksgiving for God's blessing or petitions for the punishment of enemies. The prayers are both personal and national. They portray the most intimate feelings of one individual or are the expression of many. Some of the Psalms represent the needs and feelings of all the people of God. The Psalms were quoted by Jesus, cited by the writers of the New Testament, and became the treasured book of worship of the early Christian church, from its very beginning. The Hebrew name for Psalms was The Book of Praises. The present name derives from the Latin Vulgate, which followed the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). It is the second of three Old Testament books considered poetical: Job, Psalms, and Proverbs. These three were also called books of truth. Some scholars feel the final editing probably took place in the time of Ezra. Thus the dates when the individual Psalms were written must range through many centuries. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.