Who Wrote the Psalms? (Hint: Not Just David)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Who wrote Psalms? Any discussion of this fascinating collection of ancient poetry reminds me of one of the most memorable scenes in the Gospel of Mark. 

As Jesus hangs on the cross, moments before his death, he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34). These famous final words aren’t original to Mark’s Jesus. They come directly from the opening line of Psalm 22, a poem of anguish that begins in abandonment but eventually moves toward confidence and praise. 

For the author of Mark, as for many Jewish and Christian readers after him, the Psalms provided a language through which suffering, hope, fear, gratitude, and devotion could be expressed. 

Few biblical books have exercised such a lasting influence on religious imagination, worship, literature, and even the way people articulate their most personal experiences of God.

But this article isn’t about Jesus, his death, or the memorable words the Gospel of Mark attributes to him on the cross. 

It’s about the Psalms themselves and, more specifically, a deceptively simple question: who wrote them? David is a figure commonly associated with the collection. Did David write all the Psalms, and if not, how many Psalms did David write? At first glance, the answer may seem straightforward. Yet the moment we begin examining the collection more closely, the question becomes considerably more complicated. 

What exactly is the Book of Psalms? Is it the work of one great poet, a collection of writings by several identifiable figures, or something that developed over a much longer period of time? Before we can answer who wrote the Psalms, we first need to understand what kind of book the Psalms actually is.

But wait a second! Before all of that, I think this is the best moment to invite you to explore a closely related question: Who actually wrote the first five books of the Bible? 

In his 10-lecture course, The Bible by Committee: How the Pentateuch Was Really Written?, Yale professor Joel Baden takes you inside the evidence behind one of biblical scholarship’s most fascinating conclusions. Why does Genesis contain two creation accounts? Why does the flood seem to last both forty days and 150 days? And why do entire stories sometimes appear twice in noticeably different forms? 

Rather than simply telling you that the Pentateuch developed from multiple sources, Baden shows you how scholars know, working passage by passage so you can see the seams, repetitions, and contradictions for yourself. If the question of who wrote the Psalms has caught your attention, this course offers the perfect opportunity to investigate the authorship of another foundational part of the Bible, and to learn how historians actually reconstruct the texts’ complicated origins.

What Are the Psalms? A Brief Summary

As Martin Rose observes in his Introduction à l'Ancien Testament (Introduction to the Old Testament):

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This is an important point to keep in mind. It’s not easy to summarize a collection of poetry as diverse as the Psalms, precisely because the book doesn’t tell one continuous story or develop a single argument from beginning to end. 

Rather, it brings together individual compositions that differ considerably in subject matter, tone, purpose, and historical setting. Nevertheless, several recurring elements allow us to gain a basic sense of what kind of collection the Book of Psalms, or Psalter, is.

Can readers identify a central Psalm meaning within the texts? At the most general level, the Psalms are poetic compositions concerned with the relationship between human beings, the community of Israel, and God. 

The name “Psalms” comes from the Greek term Psalmoi (originating from a word meaning to sing along with stringed instruments), whereas Hebrew tradition refers to the collection as tehillim ("praises"), a title built on the root hll found in the joyful cry "Hallelujah."

Some of the Psalms are hymns of praise celebrating God as creator and ruler of the world, while others give thanks for divine protection or deliverance. 

Many take the form of laments in which an individual or a community cries out to God in the midst of suffering, persecution, military defeat, illness, or some other crisis. As John J. Collins explains:

Still others focus on Israel’s king, Jerusalem, the Temple, divine law, or the history of God’s relationship with Israel. 

There are also psalms that reflect upon the conduct of the righteous and the wicked, the apparent prosperity of evildoers, the brevity of human life, and the question of what it means to live wisely before God. 

Consequently, the Psalter encompasses a remarkably wide range of human emotions: from confidence, joy, and gratitude to despair, anger, fear, and bewilderment.

The collection is also internally organized.

The 150 psalms found in the Hebrew Bible are traditionally divided into five books: Psalms 1–41, 42–72, 73–89, 90–106, and 107–150. 

Within these larger divisions, readers encounter smaller groups of compositions connected by shared titles, themes, terminology, or liturgical functions.

Some psalms are associated with particular individuals or groups, while others remain anonymous; some appear closely connected with communal worship, while others are voiced from the perspective of an individual speaker.

In other words, what we call the Book of Psalms is best approached as an anthology of religious poetry rather than as a single literary composition comparable to a continuous narrative such as Genesis or Samuel.

This variety inevitably brings us back to the question at the heart of this article: Who wrote the book of Psalms?

To begin answering it, we first need to consider the traditional understanding of its authorship. It’s a view that, above all, connected this remarkable collection with one of the most famous figures in the Hebrew Bible. Let’s take a look!

Who Wrote the Psalms? The Traditional View

Writing in the 1st century C.E., the Jewish historian Josephus noted:

So, by the end of the Second Temple period, it had become a common assumption among Jewish (and soon also early Christian) authors that the famous King David stood behind a major body of sacred song. 

His reputation as Israel’s great royal poet and musician made him the natural figure with whom the Psalms could be associated, and later tradition increasingly treated him as the paradigmatic author of the collection as a whole.

But this attribution developed gradually. As Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger explain, the association of the Psalms with David built on older biblical traditions that already portrayed him as both a musician and a poet. 

The books of Samuel, for example, depict David as a skilled lyre player and preserve poetic compositions associated with him. 

Against that background, individual psalms and collections came to be linked with David through their headings, especially by means of the Hebrew expression le-David. Some psalms were even connected with specific episodes from David’s life, which helped readers interpret them as prayers spoken by the king in moments of danger, persecution, guilt, or deliverance.

Over time, this process of what Hossfeld and Zenger call the “Davidization” of the Psalter (“der Davidisierung der Psalmen”) became increasingly expansive. 

The formula le-David could be understood as “by David,” but it could also mean “for David” or indicate that a psalm belonged to a Davidic collection. In later reception, however, the first meaning became especially influential: David was increasingly imagined not simply as a figure associated with certain psalms, but as the great model and authorial authority standing behind the Psalter itself.

By the 1st century C.E., this tradition had become remarkably strong. A prose passage in the Qumran Psalms scroll 11QPsᵃ, for instance, credits David with thousands of hymns and hundreds of songs, showing just how deeply rooted his reputation as a sacred poet had become.

Later Jewish tradition pushed the comparison even further. Just as Moses could be remembered as the giver of the Pentateuch, David could be remembered as the giver of the five books of Psalms. 

In this way, the traditional attribution of the Psalms to David emerged not from a single statement, but from a long process in which his biblical image as musician, poet, king, and ideal worshiper became progressively attached to the collection. 

But what do contemporary scholars think about this attribution? Is it really possible that the Psalms were written by the famous Jewish king remembered so vividly as a poet and musician?

Who Wrote the Psalms? The Scholarly Answer

The communis opinio of contemporary scholarship is perhaps best summarized by John J. Collins, who writes:

In other words, modern scholarship is virtually unanimous in concluding that King David didn’t write the Book of Psalms as a whole. But what are the main arguments behind this conclusion? And if David was not its single author, who wrote the Psalms?

The first argument comes from the Psalter itself. As Walter Brueggemann and William Bellinger explain in their Commentary, Psalms is best understood as a “collection of collections.”

Alongside groups associated with David, the book contains collections connected with the sons of Korah and Asaph, as well as other identifiable groupings such as the Songs of Ascents. 

Even more importantly, the superscriptions that associate many psalms with David probably do not function as straightforward authorial signatures. 

Most scholars regard these headings as additions made during the process by which the Psalter was compiled, and the Hebrew expression traditionally rendered “of David” can carry several meanings, including “for David,” “belonging to David,” or “associated with David.” 

Brueggemann and Bellinger therefore suggest that David should be understood more broadly as the great royal patron or representative of Israelite psalmody rather than automatically as the person who personally composed every psalm bearing his name.

A second argument concerns the social and literary settings from which the psalms emerged. 

Gunkel’s form-critical work showed that many psalms belong to recurring literary types (laments, hymns, thanksgivings, royal psalms, and other forms) rather than reading like the spontaneous compositions of one historical individual. 

Later scholars, particularly Sigmund Mowinckel, connected many of these forms with Israelite worship and the Jerusalem temple, where singers, priests, cultic officials, and other members of the religious establishment could compose, preserve, adapt, and perform such texts. 

Brueggemann and Bellinger therefore emphasize that many psalms probably arose within the communal and liturgical life of ancient Israel. 

This helps explain both their repeated structures and the considerable variety of voices found throughout the collection. The Psalter, on this reconstruction, reflects generations of religious practice rather than the literary output of a single royal poet.

None of this means, however, that all the Psalms must be late compositions or that nothing in them could go back to the age traditionally associated with David. 

Mitchell Dahood, for example, argued from comparisons with the much older Ugaritic texts that some features of the Psalms are far more archaic than earlier scholars had supposed. 

He even suggested that several psalms might have originated in the 10th century B.C.E., roughly the traditional period of David. 

Yet here is a crucial distinction: dating a psalm to the Davidic period isn’t the same thing as proving that David wrote it. Dahood himself acknowledged the difficulty of reconstructing the history of the various collections, while the Psalter preserves material attributed to several different figures and groups.

The most historically responsible conclusion, therefore, is that the Book of Psalms preserves poetry originating in different periods and settings, composed and transmitted by multiple (usually anonymous) poets, musicians, worshipers, and scribes before eventually being gathered and shaped into the book we know today.

Conclusion

Who wrote the Psalms? For a historian, this seems like an important question, but for millions of believers, the Book of Psalms is more than an issue of authorship. 

For centuries, Jewish and Christian tradition considered David to be the figure who wrote most of the Psalms, adding that identifier along with others attributed to him, such as the celebrated king, musician, and poet of ancient Israel. 

Yet, as we have seen, contemporary scholarship paints a considerably more complex picture. The Psalter isn’t the literary creation of a single individual but an anthology that developed over a long period, preserving prayers and songs produced, transmitted, adapted, and eventually collected by many different people and communities. 

Some compositions may indeed be very old and could even reach back to the period traditionally associated with David, but that does not establish David himself as their author.

In most cases, the names of the people who actually composed these poems have simply been lost to history. And perhaps that anonymity is fitting. 

Whatever their precise origins, the Psalms ultimately became the shared language through which generations of people expressed joy and despair, gratitude and anger, confidence and doubt before God. 

It’s a role they continue to play for millions of readers today.