Week 2 Psalm 4
I see the pre-psalm subtitle first: “For the choir director; on stringed instruments”. I already knew that some psalms were lyrics put to music. But today I wonder how many psalms are Musical Psalms.
I paged through all 150 of them looking at the subtitles (it was a quick search so the numbers are approximate).
I was mostly looking for the subtitle “For the choir director” and I found it quite a few times. But I saw that some psalms were just subtitled “A Song” (for instance there are 15 psalms that said “A Song of Ascents”). I added up everything that looked musical. I found 68.
The majority of music-psalms showed up the first half of the book.
A couple of psalms were called “A Shiggaion” (the margin said this was a “dithyrambic rhythm; or, wild passionate song”).
I found one that was for “soprano voices”.
About 10 music psalms were also called “Maskils” (the margin said “Possibly, Contemplative, or Didactic, or Skilful Psalm”).
The “Miktam” psalms were “Possibly, Epigrammatic Poems” that (it looks like) were set to music by the choir director.
A few psalms were to be accompanied by “stringed instruments”.
My main goal was to find out how many psalms were musical in some way and it looked like about 45% were – give-or-take.
It’s a reminder to me: psalms are not all necessarily literal & precise & concrete lists of factually tried-and-true statutes & regulations. Some of them sing.
Note: subtitles & quotes from NASB