Monday, March 4, 2024

David Davage on לדוד in the Book of Psalms

  

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)