I prospered up assuming two things around the publication of Psalms, and also they both turned the end to it is in wrong:

David didn’t write the book of Psalms. In fact, David just wrote about half of the Psalms—73 the end of every 150, come be an exact (though the Latin Vulgate and also Septuagint credit a couple of more come him).

You are watching: How many psalms did david write?

He wasn’t also the one who placed the totality collection together: some were written thousands of years after that died!

So that pipeline us with a couple of questions:

How perform we recognize who wrote the Psalms?How many people besides David contributed to Psalms?Which psalms were composed by David?Which psalms were created by the others?

The an excellent news is that we can find the answers using the psalm titles, part cross-references, and a small math. Let’s handle these questions one by one.

How execute we understand who composed the Psalms?

Old testament authorship can be tricky, yet Psalms renders it pretty easy for us in many cases. While most of the Old Testament publications don’t clearly state your authors—we’re looking at you, Job!—whoever put the book of Psalms with each other labeled the Psalms by author.

When look increase a Psalm in your Bible, you’ll typically see something choose this:

*
*
I composed The Beginner’s guide to the Bible to give people an introduction of what the scriptures is, what the for, and what it’s every about. I explore how each of the Bible’s 66 books fit right into the huge picture, and also you’ll walk away with enough knowledge to have actually a thoughtful conversation about the holy bible with a pastor, one atheist, or anyone else.

David had a lot of help

Just by feather at these numbers, we check out that David wrote an ext psalms than anyone else, yet God offered a wide variety of talented musician over numerous years to write these pieces back to Him.

See more: Do Brown Recluse Spiders Live In Pa, Venomous Spider Invasion Closes Elementary School

We can’t neatly attribute Psalms to David, but I think that provides the book of Psalms a lot much more interesting.

Don’t you?

Oh, and also one much more thing: the Jews worshiped with songs written over a period of 700 years—and below we contact 200-year-old hymns “old-fashioned.”