They came upon me in the day of my calamity:
But the Lord was my stay.
He brought me forth also into a large place;
He delivered me, because He delighted in me.
It may be true that the value of the psalms to the Church does not depend upon the settlement, one way or another, of the rival claims of singers before and after the Exile, yet the question is of vastly more than mere literary or historic interest. We lose much if we lose David and the psalmists of the kingdom from ‘the glorious choir’ which sings for ever the praises of Israel’s God and David’s Son. And we are all the poorer if the sources of Christian song are to be sought, not by
Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracles of God,
but by the dull canals of Babylon, where the exiled people wept when they remembered Zion. Even the most extreme of modern English critics tells us that, ‘As mere academical exercises, by not merely unnamed but unknown individuals, the psalms will neither edify the Church nor charm the literary student.’[38] But, after all, we have not yet lost our fellowship with the men of David’s time. The psalms are to us a memorial of the golden days of Israel’s history. They are still to us, as to Francis Davison,
Hymns which in the Hebrew tongue
First were sung