Adding
David
Starting
with the relation between David and the Psalms, it has long been recognized
that the superscriptions featuring his name (most commonly לדוד) are later
additions. In fact, the psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls provide clear evidence
that לדוד was added over time and that the process was still ongoing in the
late Second Temple period—that is, at a time when psalms were interacted with
as authoritative Scripture. Looking at Pss 33, 103, and 104, for example, they
are all found with and without לדוד, and in all cases, the older manuscripts
lack לדוד, while the younger ones feature it. That לדוד was added to psalms
that were transmitted as authoritative thus underscores the conclusion above
that in the Mesopotamian trajectory, attaching names to texts did not make them
authoritative but rather demarcated them as distinct from other texts. This was
not consistently done, however—in neither the Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls nor the
MT are there any attempts to supply every psalm with a superscription
featuring a named individual. (David Davage, How Isaiah Became an Author:
Prophecy, Authority, and Attribution [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022], 174)
