David’s Song of Praise

This apocryphal psalm is found in the Greek Septuagint and the Peshitta, a Syriac translation of the Bible from the second century CE. A Hebrew original was preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, on the Psalms scroll from Qumran Cave 11, and was likely composed before the second century BCE. Its author takes on the persona of King David, recalling his humble origins as a shepherd boy. The larger theological motif is that God contravenes conventional expectations by choosing the lowly over the powerful.

In the Greek and Syriac versions, Psalm 151 is a single psalm, which ends with the slaying of Goliath. In the Hebrew, the slaying of Goliath begins a separate psalm (151B), of which only a few lines are preserved. The translation of Psalm 151A and the first lines of Psalm 151B below are based on the Hebrew. The remainder of Psalm 151B is translated from the Syriac.