The Psalms, initially shaped by the experiences of ancient Israel, served to express the hopes and fears, the yearnings and devotion, of two religious traditions, each diverse in time and space. To study the Psalms, therefore, it is necessary to move beyond their initial cultural context and to see how they were appropriated by and contributed to the religious lives of Jews and Christians across the centuries. These essays provide that complex diachronic perspective on the Psalms. They were originally presented at the Yale Tercentennial Conference 'Up with a Shout: Psalmody in the Jewish and Christian Traditions' and represent a spectrum of pertinent scholarly disciplines including biblical studies, liturgical studies, musicology, art history, theology, and literature. The result is a richly textured appreciation of the way the Psalms have functioned in communities of conviction for more than two thousand years.
