One hundred and fifty prayers, gathered over centuries, from palace to exile and back. David is the loudest voice in the book, and far from the only one.
So who wrote Psalms? Many people did, over several centuries. The Hebrew headings name David on 73 psalms, Asaph on 12, the sons of Korah on 11, Solomon on 2, and Moses, Heman and Ethan on one each. About 50 carry no name at all.
The Psalms are a hymnbook, not a single author's journal, and the collection kept growing from the time of David until well after the exile in Babylon.
David is the anchor of the collection, and his name sits over nearly half of it. But the book's own headings tell you other singers were in the room.
Most psalms open with a short line before verse one: “A Psalm of David,” “A Maskil of the Sons of Korah,” “A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.” Scholars call these superscriptions. Here is the count, using the standard Hebrew text behind most English Bibles.
Concentrated in Psalms 3 to 41 and 51 to 70, with eighteen more scattered through the later books, including 86, 101, 103, 108 to 110, 122, 124, 131, 133 and 138 to 145.
Psalm 50 and Psalms 73 to 83. Asaph was a Levite singer, named in 1 Chronicles as one of the leaders of temple music.
Psalms 42, 44 to 49, 84, 85, 87 and 88. A guild of Levite singers descended from Korah. Psalm 43 has no heading and reads as the second half of 42.
Psalms 72 and 127.
Psalm 90, the oldest voice the book claims, on how short a human life is next to God.
Psalm 88, which also carries the sons of Korah in its heading.
Psalm 89, the long lament over the covenant with David.
Some have a heading with no person in it, many have no heading at all. Counts run 49 or 50 depending on how Psalm 43 and a few others are handled.
Ian Vaillancourt, writing in the journal Themelios, puts it this way: “One hundred and one psalms in the Masoretic Text refer to an author, with David taking pride of place with seventy-three.” Our table adds up the same way.
The Greek translation called the Septuagint, made a couple of centuries before Jesus, does not agree. It adds David's name to more than a dozen psalms that have no name in Hebrew, including Psalms 33, 71, 91 and 93 to 99, and drops it from a couple. In the Greek Bible David's total climbs into the eighties. So when someone quotes you a number, the fair follow up question is, which text?
In Hebrew the heading is usually one word, l'david. The name is David, and the l in front is a small preposition that does a lot of work in Hebrew. Depending on context it can mean by, for, belonging to, or about. So “a psalm l'david” can mean a psalm David wrote, a psalm written for David or for the king in David's line, a psalm belonging to the David collection, or a psalm about David.
Every heading is a byline written by the psalmist himself, so “of David” always means David sat down and composed it.
The headings are old, older than our earliest manuscripts, but they read like a collector's labels. The preposition allows several meanings, and the Greek translators added and removed names.
Here is the strongest case for the traditional reading, and it deserves a fair hearing. Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, in his commentary on Psalms 1 to 41, argues that l'david should be read “by David” consistently. The same construction plainly marks an author in Isaiah 38:9 and Habakkuk 3:1. Fourteen of David's headings tie the psalm to a specific moment in his life, like fleeing from Absalom in Psalm 3. And the New Testament quotes several psalms as David's words.
Still, the book shows signs of an editor's hand. Look at the note at the end of Psalm 72.
“Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory! Amen and Amen! The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.”
Psalm 72:19 to 20That line closes a collection. Yet Psalm 72 itself is headed for Solomon, and eighteen more psalms with David's name show up later in the book. Somebody once had a David scroll that ended there, and later editors kept adding.
At Sound of Heaven we read the headings as very old and worth taking seriously, and we also read them as the work of the people who gathered and arranged the psalms rather than as part of the original poems. Even Vaillancourt, who defends authorship, writes that the superscriptions “were added prior to the translation of the LXX.” Added is the right word.
So David wrote many psalms. Some headed l'david were likely written for him, about him, or in his tradition by singers who came after him. We cannot sort each one with certainty, and saying so is more honest than pretending we can.
This is the same way we handle the heading on Psalm 51 in our post on how to repent to God: likely added by the collectors, and the prayer still fits the moment it names. A heading can be editorial and still be true to the story.
And we refuse the opposite error too. Some people hear “editorial” and conclude David wrote nothing. That goes beyond the evidence. Scripture remembers him as a musician and poet, and there is no good reason to strip him out of his own hymnbook.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Psalms is divided into five books, and each ends with a short burst of praise called a doxology. Those seams show how the collection was stitched together.
Almost entirely David. Ends at 41:13 with blessing the Lord from everlasting to everlasting, and a double amen.
Opens with the sons of Korah, returns to David, ends with Solomon and the doxology and colophon of 72:18 to 20.
Mostly Asaph and Korah. It ends with Psalm 89 asking where God's covenant love for David went, then 89:52, “Amen and Amen.”
Opens with Moses, as if reaching back before the kings. Ends at 106:48, “And let all the people say, ‘Amen!’”
Songs of ascent, the Hallel psalms, the long alphabet poem of Psalm 119, and a final run of praise.
Psalm 150 works as the doxology for the whole book: “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!”
Notice the arc. Book Three ends in the ashes of the monarchy, with Psalm 89 grieving a broken crown. Book Four answers by going back to Moses and declaring that the Lord reigns, a phrase that repeats through Psalms 93 to 99. Many scholars read that as the editors' answer to losing the king. The book moves from lament to praise.
The five books and their amens are fingerprints of the collectors. The Psalms were arranged on purpose, and the arrangement itself preaches.
Nobody can date most psalms to a year, but the book gives us clear markers.
Psalm 90 is the only psalm that claims a voice from before the kings.
1 Chronicles 15 and 25 remember David organizing Levite musicians, naming Asaph, Heman and Ethan. The Korahite singers appear in 2 Chronicles 20:19, standing to praise the Lord.
Psalms 74 and 79 grieve a ruined sanctuary. Psalm 89 asks what happened to the promise to David.
Psalm 137 cannot be David's. “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.” That is a song from after 586 BC.
Psalm 126 celebrates the restoration of Zion. Over the following centuries the five books settled into the form the Septuagint translators and the Dead Sea Scroll copyists knew.
Which psalm makes it clear that the collection kept growing after David's lifetime?
Psalm 137 describes captives weeping in Babylon, centuries after David. The Psalms kept gathering new songs through the exile and after it, which is why the book carries so many voices.
Whoever wrote each psalm, Jesus knew them by heart and treated them as his own prayers. In Luke 24:44 he names them as one of the three parts of Scripture that speak about him: “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Jesus prayed the opening line of a psalm that begins in abandonment and ends with the nations turning to God. We walk through it in My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me.
His final words in Luke come straight from Psalm 31:5. Jesus added one word the psalm does not have: Father.
“Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’ And having said this he breathed his last.”
Luke 23:46In Mark 12:36 Jesus says “David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared” the words of Psalm 110. Here the heading's attribution to David is part of the argument. His point was about who the Messiah is: David's son and David's Lord. The New Testament then reads Psalm 110 as fulfilled. The risen Christ is seated at the right hand, reigning now, not waiting to begin.
Jesus spoke of Psalm 110 as David's, and we have no quarrel with that. He was not settling a debate about all 150 headings. He was showing his hearers that their Scriptures pointed past David to someone greater. Hebrews 4:7 does something similar with Psalm 95, saying God spoke “through David,” even though the Hebrew text of Psalm 95 has no heading at all, only the Greek one does. The New Testament writers cited the Psalms as their Bibles labeled them, with their eyes on Christ.
Jesus borrowed words from the Psalms at the worst hour of his life. You are allowed to do the same. When grief, fear or numbness leaves you without a prayer, open to Psalm 22, 31, 42 or 88 and read one aloud.
And if you would like someone to pray with you, our team is here. You can send us a prayer request any time.
A shepherd king, temple singers, a grieving poet at a Babylonian river, and people whose names nobody kept. God let all of them into his book, flaws and fury included, and the Spirit carried their prayers forward until they landed on the lips of Jesus.
That is the lens. The Psalms are not a flat rulebook. Some lines, like the last verses of Psalm 137, are honest cries for revenge, and we read them as real human pain rather than God's heart for anyone. Jesus is the one who shows us what God is like, and he took these songs, prayed them, fulfilled them, and now reigns as the King they were longing for.
For more, read about who David was, the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, the valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 23, Psalm 46:5, what Selah means, the book of Lamentations and what Jesus said on the cross. Or plan a visit and sing some of them with us in Deer Park.
David is named on 73 psalms, Asaph, Korah, Solomon, Moses, Heman and Ethan on 28 more, about 50 are anonymous, and editors gathered them into five books over centuries until Jesus prayed them as his own.
Tell us the psalm that has carried you, or the one that confuses you, and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you and write back.
Many people wrote the Psalms over several centuries. The Hebrew headings name David on 73 psalms, Asaph on 12, the sons of Korah on 11, Solomon on 2, and Moses, Heman and Ethan on one each. Roughly 50 psalms carry no name. The headings are very old but were likely added by the people who collected the psalms, and the Hebrew word usually translated “of David” can also mean for, belonging to, or about David.
The Hebrew text puts David's name on 73 psalms. The Greek Septuagint adds his name to more than a dozen others, so its count runs into the eighties. Because the Hebrew preposition in the heading can mean by, for, belonging to, or about, not every psalm marked with his name is necessarily his composition. David clearly wrote many psalms, and it is fair to say some of the rest were written in his honor or in his tradition.
Psalm 23 is headed “A Psalm of David,” and it has long been read as his. The shepherd imagery fits a man who grew up keeping sheep, and nothing in the psalm argues against him. As with every heading, the label came from the collectors, so certainty is not possible. What matters more is that the psalm pictures God as the shepherd who stays with you through the darkest valley, which Jesus fulfilled when he called himself the good shepherd.
Most Protestant Bibles follow the Hebrew numbering. The Greek Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate after it, joins Psalms 9 and 10 into one, joins 114 and 115, and splits 116 and 147 in two. The result is that for most of the book the Greek number runs one behind the Hebrew. That is why older Catholic and Orthodox Bibles call the shepherd psalm Psalm 22 instead of Psalm 23. The words are the same, only the count differs.
Asaph, with 12: Psalm 50 and Psalms 73 to 83. He was a Levite musician whom 1 Chronicles names among the leaders of temple worship, and “Asaph” may also stand for the guild of singers who carried his name. The sons of Korah come next with 11. Their psalms include some of the most loved in the book, like Psalm 42 with the deer longing for streams of water, and Psalm 46, God is our refuge and strength.