Book of Psalms

The Book of Psalms is a collection of songs, hymns, poems and prayers used in the worship of Yahweh. Psalms represents the primary canon of worship of the Hebrew people for some time in Israel. Individual Psalms were composed by a variety of authors under various occasions and then collected together into various groups and compiled into its present form by an editor(s). Most prolific of all authors of the psalms is David who wrote or had written about him, the majority of the Psalms.

Authorship
There have been many authors that have contributed to the Book of Psalms as they were put together during Biblical times from the time of Moses to the Babylonian Exile. Known authors are King David, Asaph and his family, The sons of Korah, King Solomon, Moses, and Heman and Ethan the Ezrahites.

Genre
The literary style of the Psalms is poetry, in a literary form called Parallelism, by which the thoughts of the lines are restated in successive lines. Often this Synonymous Parallelism, in which the first half of a verse will make a statement, and the second half will echo the same thing in different words. The statements are “parallel” in that they are juxtaposed, or side by side, and they often share similar syntax.

Other forms of parallelism (more often found in Proverbs) are antithetical parallelism, in which the second line presents the opposite thought ; synthetic parallelism, in which the second line builds upon the first and emblematic parallelism in which the first line illustrates the second.