The book of Psalms, consisting as it does of one hundred and fifty songs used in the homes of the Hebrews and in their places of worship, may justly be described as "The Hymnal of the Jewish Church," especially since the Hebrew name of the book is tehillim— "hymns." The book itself and other early records inform us as to certain special occasions on which particular Psalms were used.
We read of the Master and his followers that "when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives" (Mark 14:26), and this "hymn" was almost certainly a group of six Psalms (Psalms 113 to 118), which were regularly sung at the Passover and other great religious feasts of the Jews. This group of Psalms, known as the Hallel, because it begins with the words Hallelu-Jah ("Praise ye Yahweh"), is known to have been one of the earliest passages memorized by the Jewish child in Jesus' day.
A prefatory note to Psalm 92 designates it as "a Psalm or Song for the sabbath day;" while we read at the beginning of Psalm 30 that it is "A Psalm and Song at the dedication of the house"—for the words "of David," which follow in our Common Version, refer either to David's reputed authorship of the poem, or to the fact that this Psalm was inscribed "to" or written "for" David, since the Hebrew permits these varied renderings both here and elsewhere in the book of Psalms. Indeed, many of the Psalms were written long after David himself lived. In the case of Psalm 30, commentators feel that the reference is to the dedication of "the house" in the sense of "the temple," whether the first great temple, erected by Solomon, or the one which was cleansed and rededicated "with songs" by Judas Maccabaeus, as recorded in the Apocrypha (I Maccabees 4:54). It would appear from verse 3 of the eighty-first Psalm that here we have a hymn intended for some "solemn feast day," and it is said to have been sung at the "feast of trumpets" (cf. Numbers 29:1).
