The Psalms of David are the Prayer Book of the Bible, not only for the ancient Jewish people, but even more for Christians, who discovered that these elusively simple poems contained far more than their Hebrew predecessors had realized, for Christ Himself appears everywhere throughout them. As Fr Patrick Henry Reardon points out in his fine book Christ in the Psalms, it is the Old Testament book that is most often cited in the New Testament.

But modern ears and modern temperaments may find the Psalms challenging and enigmatic. This is, in fact, as it should be, for the Psalter is the ideal (and indeed God-prescribed) medicine to free us from the blinders or modernity, to deliver us from the skepticism and reductionism and spiritual banality of our modern world, which has closed itself off from spiritual reality.

The Psalms are the poetic means (that is, the truest means) to give us the mindset needed for authentic prayer and worship, so it is no surprise that they are woven throughout the words of the Divine Liturgy. That is, they must be prayed and indeed sung to be understood, for they are poetry of a very special kind—poems that help us what St Prophyrios meant when he said: “Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet.”

In his poetic translation of the Holy Psalter, which preserves the parallelism of the Septuagint couplet form, Archimandrite Lazarus Moore includes an introductory essay that helps us see the critical importance of the Psalms, as well as overcome some of the modern difficulties preventing us from loving them. We present it here with only minor editing, followed by Fr Lazarus’ translation of Psalm 146 as a sample.