150 songs and prayers spanning the whole range of human emotion — what the book is, who wrote it, and how it's organized.
Psalms is a collection of 150 individual poems and songs, originally written to be sung or recited, often with instrumental accompaniment — many carry musical instructions in their headings, like “To the chief Musician.” It's the longest book in the Bible and the most quoted Old Testament book in the New Testament. Unlike most books of the Bible, it isn't a continuous story — it's an anthology, gathered and arranged over centuries.
Psalms doesn't have a single author. About 73 psalms are attributed to David, but others are credited to Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Moses (Psalm 90), and Ethan the Ezrahite, while roughly a third have no named author at all. It was compiled over a long span, from Moses's era through the return from Babylonian exile — more like a hymnal built up over generations than a single work.
The 150 psalms are traditionally divided into five “books” (1–41, 42–72, 73–89, 90–106, 107–150), each ending with a short doxology of praise — a structure some scholars think deliberately echoes the five books of the Torah. Within that, psalms fall into recognizable types: laments crying out in distress, praise, thanksgiving, royal psalms, wisdom psalms, and the “songs of ascents” (120–134), likely sung by pilgrims traveling up to Jerusalem.
A handful of psalms account for a huge share of the book's popularity. Psalm 23 (“The LORD is my shepherd”), Psalm 91 (the psalm of protection), and Psalm 121 (“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills”) are among the most quoted, memorized, and read aloud in worship and at major life moments, alongside Psalm 51, David's prayer of repentance after his affair with Bathsheba.
Psalms doesn't hide anger, doubt, or despair — some psalms, like Psalm 88, end without resolution, which many readers find more honest than tidier parts of Scripture.
Many psalms were composed as temple worship music, and are still set to music and sung in churches and synagogues today.
New Testament writers, including Jesus, quote or allude to Psalms more than any other Old Testament book.