The Psalms of Solomon, Explained

The Psalms of Solomon are a collection of eighteen Jewish psalms composed in the middle decades of the first century BC, in the shadow of the Roman general Pompey's capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC. Written in the style of the biblical Psalter but never included in it, they wrestle with why God allowed a pagan conqueror to enter the Temple — and they contain what many scholars regard as the clearest portrait of the awaited Davidic Messiah written before Christianity.

Few ancient texts sit so close to the world of the New Testament. These psalms were written in Jerusalem roughly one generation before Jesus was born, by devout Jews watching Rome swallow their city. They pray for a coming king, a son of David, who will judge the nations — using language the Gospels would later echo. This guide covers what the Psalms of Solomon are, the dramatic history that produced them, what each part of the collection says, why they carry Solomon's name, and why they never entered the Bible.

What Are the Psalms of Solomon?

The Psalms of Solomon are eighteen poems of lament, thanksgiving, and hope, almost certainly composed in Hebrew in Jerusalem and surviving today in Greek and Syriac translations. The Hebrew original has been lost; eleven medieval Greek manuscripts and a handful of Syriac ones preserve the collection.

The authors never name themselves. They call their circle "the devout" and "those who fear the Lord," and they position themselves against two enemies at once: the Hasmonean priest-kings who ruled Judea before Rome arrived — whom the psalms accuse of seizing a throne that belonged to David's line — and the foreign conqueror who swept them away. Older scholarship confidently labeled the authors Pharisees, and the collection was long nicknamed "the Psalms of the Pharisees." Most scholars today are more cautious, describing the writers simply as a pious Jerusalem community, deeply attached to the Temple and outraged by what happened to it.

Unlike many texts of this era, no fragment of the Psalms of Solomon turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls — which makes their survival through Christian copyists all the more remarkable, and their historical anchoring all the more valuable. These are datable, locatable voices from the last generations of the Second Temple period.

The History Behind Them: Pompey in the Temple

The collection was born from a national trauma that can be dated to the year. In 63 BC, the Roman general Pompey the Great intervened in a civil war between two Hasmonean brothers fighting over the Judean throne. One faction opened Jerusalem's gates to him; the other barricaded itself on the Temple Mount. After a three-month siege, Rome's battering rams broke through, thousands died in the Temple courts, and Pompey did the unthinkable: he walked into the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary that only the high priest could enter, and only once a year.

The psalms relive this with raw immediacy. Psalm 2 opens with the arrogant sinner battering down the walls while God does not intervene; gentile foreigners tread the sanctuary with their sandals. Psalm 8 remembers, bitterly, that Jerusalem's own leaders opened the gates and garlanded the walls to welcome the invader. Psalm 17 describes a man alien to Israel's race casting down the Hasmonean rulers — a judgment the psalmist half-approves, since in his eyes they were usurpers — before turning on the land itself.

Then history handed the psalmists an ending. In 48 BC, Pompey — defeated by Julius Caesar in Rome's civil war — fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated as he stepped ashore, his body left unburied on the coast. Psalm 2 reads this as the verdict of heaven: the psalmist describes the proud conqueror struck down on Egypt's shore, his corpse tossed on the waves with no one to bury him, because he did not reckon that he was only a man. The one who dishonored God's sanctuary was himself dishonored in death. This precise, verifiable historical reference is why scholars can date the core of the collection with unusual confidence to the years between 63 and roughly 40 BC.

What's Inside: A Tour of the Eighteen Psalms

The collection is short — about the length of a single biblical prophetic book — and it moves through a recognizable emotional arc: shock, self-examination, consolation, and finally hope. Its main threads:

• Lament over Jerusalem (Psalms 1, 2, 8). The city that thought itself secure is broken open. The psalmists refuse the easy conclusion that God failed; instead they argue that the city's hidden sins — including corruption in the Temple itself — invited the disaster.
• The righteous and the sinners (Psalms 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13–16). A sustained meditation on two ways of life. The righteous stumble, are disciplined, confess, and are raised; the sinners fall and are not heard from again. Psalm 3 states the collection's boldest hope plainly: those who fear the Lord will rise to eternal life — one of the earlier clear statements of resurrection hope in Jewish literature.
• Discipline, not abandonment (Psalms 5, 7, 18). God's chastening of Israel is a father's correction of a firstborn son, measured and merciful — fundamentally different from the destruction awaiting the arrogant.
• The prayer for the King (Psalms 17–18). The collection's climax: a plea for God to raise up the true king from David's line, and a portrait of what his reign will look like.

What makes these poems compelling is their theological nerve. The psalmists watched pagan soldiers profane the holiest place in their world, and rather than concluding that God was absent, they built a careful theodicy: God is a righteous judge; Jerusalem fell because judgment begins at home; Pompey's corpse on the Egyptian shore proves the instrument of judgment is judged in turn; and the story is not over, because the true King is still to come.

Psalms 17 and 18: The Son of David Who Will Judge

Psalm of Solomon 17 is the reason this collection appears in virtually every scholarly discussion of the origins of Christianity. It contains the most detailed description of the expected Davidic Messiah to survive from any Jewish text written before the New Testament.

The psalm begins by rehearsing the failure of every earthly throne: the Hasmoneans seized a crown that was not theirs, and Rome swept them away. Then comes the turn — the psalmist prays: "See, Lord, and raise up for them their king, the son of David" (Psalm of Solomon 17:21). What follows is a sustained portrait of that king's reign. The text describes a ruler who will purge Jerusalem of its conquerors, gather a holy people, judge the tribes of Israel, and hold the nations to account — yet who relies on no horse, rider, or bow, destroying the arrogant not with weapons but with the word of his mouth. He is sinless, taught by God, and his glory is wisdom and righteousness rather than gold.

The vocabulary is striking. This psalm gives us one of the earliest surviving uses of the exact phrase "Son of David" as a messianic title — the very title the crowds use for Jesus in the Gospels. Some Greek manuscripts of 17:32 even read christos kyrios, "Lord Messiah," a phrase that appears almost nowhere else in ancient literature — the announcement to the shepherds in Luke 2:11 being the famous parallel — though many scholars think the original Hebrew read "the Lord's anointed" and the Greek shifted in transmission. Psalm 18 closes the collection with a shorter meditation on the blessedness of the generation that will live under the Messiah's rod of discipline and the fear of God.

Scholars prize these two psalms because they document, from a source that is unambiguously Jewish and unambiguously pre-Christian, what at least some first-century Jews were actually expecting: a royal, righteous, conquering-yet-unarmed son of David. Whether the Gospel writers knew this text directly is debated; that they moved in a world shaped by exactly these hopes is not. Readers interested in the other great messianic portrait of the era — the heavenly Son of Man — will find it in the Book of Enoch, making the two texts natural companions.

Did Solomon Actually Write Them?

No — and the psalms themselves never claim he did. Nothing in the poems refers to Solomon's life, reign, or era; the historical events they describe happened nearly nine centuries after his death. The title was attached to the collection later, almost certainly because the psalms of a coming son of David naturally evoked the most famous son David ever had, and because Solomon's name had long attracted wisdom and poetry — the biblical Psalter itself contains psalms superscribed to Solomon.

That makes the collection part of the pseudepigrapha — ancient writings that circulated under the name of a revered figure from the past. In this case the label is gentler than usual: the attribution looks like a librarian's shelf-tag rather than an author's disguise, a way of grouping anonymous Davidic-style psalms under a suitably royal name. Scholars accordingly treat the question of "authenticity" as settled and uninteresting; the real value of the collection is that it is a genuine, datable witness to Jewish faith in the first century BC, whoever wrote it.

How Do They Relate to the Biblical Psalms?

The Psalms of Solomon are consciously modeled on the biblical Psalter. They use its genres — individual lament, communal lament, hymn, thanksgiving — its parallel line-structure, and its stock images of the righteous poor and the arrogant rich. Several even carry musical-style superscriptions, as though meant for use in worship. The psalmist of Psalm 17 deliberately echoes the canonical Psalm 2, where God's anointed shatters the nations like pottery with an iron rod.

The differences are just as instructive. The biblical psalms rarely allow us to date them; the Psalms of Solomon are pinned to named, verifiable events. And their theology is later and more developed: explicit resurrection to eternal life, a sharper division of humanity into the devout and the sinners, and a far more detailed messianic expectation than anything in the canonical Psalter. Reading them side by side with the biblical psalms is one of the best ways to watch Jewish prayer evolving between the Old and New Testaments.

Why Aren't They in the Bible?

The honest, history-framed answer has several strands, none of them conspiratorial:

• They were written too late for the Hebrew canon. By the time these psalms were composed, in the first century BC, the Psalter was effectively a closed collection. Jewish authorities consolidating the Hebrew Bible after 70 AD did not include them, and there is no evidence they were ever candidates.
• They survived on the margins of the Greek Bible. The collection traveled with Christian copies of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament — and is found appended in some of its manuscripts rather than integrated among the canonical books. The table of contents of Codex Alexandrinus, one of the great fifth-century Bibles, lists the Psalms of Solomon at the very end, after the New Testament — though the pages that contained them are lost.
• Canon lists classed them as outside books. Where early Christian canon catalogs mention the Psalms of Solomon at all, they place them among the disputed or apocryphal writings, not the Scriptures read in church.

The pattern is familiar from the wider Apocrypha: a book valued enough to copy, but never received as Scripture by either synagogue or church. Once it fell out of the manuscripts that scribes routinely reproduced, it nearly vanished — the collection was effectively unknown in the West until a Greek manuscript was published in 1626. Only a handful of copies carried these eighteen psalms across sixteen centuries.

Should You Read the Psalms of Solomon?

If you are interested in the world that produced the New Testament, few texts repay an evening's reading so well. Here is what you get:

• The clearest pre-Christian portrait of the Davidic Messiah — essential background for every Gospel passage that calls Jesus the Son of David.
• Eyewitness-generation poetry about a datable catastrophe — Rome's capture of Jerusalem in 63 BC, and Pompey's death read as divine judgment.
• A serious ancient theodicy — a community explaining suffering without abandoning faith, in psalms of real literary power.
• A missing link between the Testaments — resurrection hope, the devout versus the sinners, and messianic longing, all in the generation before Jesus.

A practical reading order: start with Psalm 2 for the Pompey drama, read Psalms 3 and 13–15 for the collection's heart, and finish with Psalms 17–18 with a Gospel open beside you. The whole collection takes about an hour. As with most of the lost books of this era, the older public-domain translations are accurate but stiff; a modern English edition makes the poetry breathe again.