A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity

Professor A.J. Berkovitz's mother kept a worn copy of Tehillim by her bedside and finished the entire book every week. She was an Eastern European Jew who never received a formal Jewish education, yet the psalms were her daily companion. This personal observation became the seed of Berkovitz's scholarly work: what did it mean for ordinary Jews to use the psalms, and how did that practice begin? His new book, A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity (Penn University Press), traces the answer back to the period between the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the rise of Islam—the formative era when rabbinic Judaism took shape and the psalms became woven into the fabric of Jewish life.

Authorship and the Problem of "Who Wrote Tehillim"

The question of who authored the psalms is more complicated than the popular answer "King David." Berkovitz explains that the ancient concept of authorship was far looser than our modern notion of a solitary writer at a desk. The Hebrew verbs katav (to write) and amar (to say) could mean to compose, commission, copy, or transmit—leaving wide interpretive room.