ABSTRACT
The 150 poems contained in the biblical Book of Psalms do not exhaust the inventory of Israel's hymns. Undoubtedly there were thousands more, and Jews continued to write them long after the biblical period. A number of these previously unknown psalms have turned up in the ancient library of Qumran (perhaps even in their Book of Psalms!). Some of them represent imitations of the biblical genre with a sectarian twist, while others would not be out of place within the biblical psalter. Some, including the one translated here, are particularly pure examples of the songs of Israel, although their wording is often derived from biblical expressions; occasionally verbatim excerpts from the Bible occur. But, as with the Qumran Hodayot,
It is often difficult to decide to how great an extent it is a question of the individual author himself extracting texts from the Old Testament in his composition, and to how great an extent he is just employing [current] terminology … which was originally drawn from the Old Testament. 1
