The Psalms of Solomon
Eighteen Jewish psalms written in Jerusalem in the middle of the first century BC. They lament the capture of the city by a foreign conqueror, generally identified as Pompey, and pray for a king, the son of David, “the anointed of the Lord”.
The collection bears Solomon’s name but comes from Jerusalem in the generation that saw the Romans arrive. It survives in Greek and in a Syriac version; scholars hold that it was composed in Hebrew. It was never part of the Hebrew Bible, and although some early lists of Christian Scripture mention it, no church counts it as canonical today.
The psalms name no one. The second describes a foreign “sinner” who broke down the walls of Jerusalem with a battering-ram and whose soldiers trampled the altar, and then tells of his death in Egypt, his body left unburied on the shore. That matches Pompey, who took Jerusalem in 63 BC and was killed on the coast of Egypt in 48 BC, and the identification is accepted by almost all scholars: see Kenneth Atkinson, I Cried to the Lord: A Study of the Psalms of Solomon’s Historical Background and Social Setting (2004). The eighth psalm tells how the leaders of the land went out to welcome the invader and opened the gates to him. The seventeenth blames rulers who “laid waste the throne of David”, usually understood as the Hasmoneans, and asks God to raise up a king, the son of David.
The psalms are the reaction of pious Jews in Jerusalem, written within a few years of the events, and they are one of the fullest statements of the hope for a Davidic messiah before the New Testament. See Pompey Takes Jerusalem.
Cited in
- 142 BC, firm date
- 63 BC, firm date