Psalms of the Muslim Prophet David

Rewritten Bible in a Qur’anic Idiom

David Vishanoff
University of Oklahoma
[email protected]

American Academy of Religion—Southwest Region

March 10, 2019, Irving, Texas

Abstract
Some Arabic manuscripts of the “Psalms of David” contain not the Biblical Psalms but Muslim
compositions that sound more like the Qur’an: not human praises and prayers to God, but
God’s admonitions to the prophet David, urging him to flee the pleasures of this world, spend
his nights in repentant prayer, and prepare for the Day of Judgment. There are echoes of the
Biblical Psalms and Gospels, but the ethos is markedly different: rather than the Psalmist’s
plaintive laments or grandiose descriptions of creation, one hears God thundering his own
majesty and warning of the fires of hell. This new scripture exists in several recensions
stemming from a single eighth– or ninth–century collection of one hundred psalms. Only a
small fragment of that text has been preserved in its original form, but it was edited, rewritten,
rearranged, and expanded by later editors, each of whom sought to align it to his or her own
religious vision, resulting in what I call the Koranic, Orthodox, Pious, and Sufi versions.

By purporting to present the authentic Psalms of David, these texts appear to embody the
common Muslim claim that the Bible is textually corrupt, but in fact they show little concern
for textual authenticity. Each editor freely rewrote and improved the text, using the concept
of “the Psalms of David” as an opportunity for creative writing in a Qur’anic style. When these
psalms were last studied by orientalists over a century ago, they were dismissed as polemical
forgeries, but that misses the point. Their interreligious polemic is incidental; their main
target is worldly Muslims. In fact, they illustrate vividly how many symbols and values their
Muslim authors shared with Jews and Christians: the figure of David, his Psalms and his sins,
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virtue and repentance, asceticism and spirituality, heaven and hell, and a rich common stock
of maxims and metaphors. At a time when both scholars of religion and the American public
are probing the boundaries of western and Islamic civilizations, and making crucial decisions
about whether to imagine them as distinct or bound together, this curious instance of
“rewritten Bible” provides a concrete manifestation of the contested but interwoven moral
landscape that they share.

Introduction
There are many Arabic manuscripts of the Psalms
listed in library catalogs, but some of them turn out
not to be Arabic translations of the Biblical Psalms,
but rather a completely new Zabūr Dāwūd, written
by a Muslim and then rewritten several times by
subsequent editors.

Here is a sample.

Today I want to give you an overview of this

literature: where it came from, how it developed,
and what it means.
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Why Islamic Psalms?

I suppose it’s not that surprising that a Muslim might rewrite the “Psalms of David.”

David was known for his Psalms in Islamic tradition,

and already in the Qur’an. His recited the Psalms so
beautifully that the birds and the hills joined in his
praises. (He did not play the harp, as in the Biblical
tradition; musical instruments were invented by the
demons in an attempt to imitate David’s beautiful
voice.)

The Qur’an refers to David’s Psalms as the Zabūr,

and even gives one brief and fairly accurate quotation from the Psalms, echoing Psalm 37:29,
“The righteous shall inherit the land, and live in it forever.”

But the idea that Jews and Christians might have corrupted and modified their copies of their
own scriptures, though not spelled out clearly in the Qur’an, was articulated early on and
eventually became a pretty dominant view.

So David’s Zabūr was a scripture without a text, a concept and an empty symbol waiting to be
filled with content.

Ascetic origins
So, at some point in the eighth or perhaps the early ninth century, an anonymous and very
pious Muslim decided to fill this gap by writing a new Zabūr Dāwūd from scratch. He composed
a set of 100 psalms, modelled on the Qur’an, with God addressing to David a torrent of
warnings and exhortations.

What do we know about this Muslim psalmist?

He was probably a man, given the distinctly male and sometimes misogynistic perspective of
these psalms.

He seems to have been one of those pious early Muslims known as the khāʾifūn, who were so
keenly aware of their own sin and so frightened about what might happen to them on the Day
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of Judgment that some were known to faint if a Qur’anic description of judgment was recited
during prayer at the mosque, for example.

We already say this exhortation to a fearful form of

piety.

A synonym for khāʾifūn would be ruhbān, which

means fearful and happens to be the term for
Christian monks—who likewise withdrew from
society and engaged in nighttime vigils, reciting,
among other things, the Psalms.

One often hears that “there is no monasticism in Islam,” but many early Muslims, probably
including the author of this text, regarded Christian monks as models for their own ascetic
piety.

Notice also the concern with sexual immorality, which is pervasive in these psalms.

Another major theme is repentance. Here God

quotes David, who calls out to God in a way
reminiscent of the Biblical Psalms.

Here the concern with sexual immorality is

pointedly directed at the well–known story of
David’s adultery with Bathsheba. That incident was
mentioned only rather vaguely in the Qur’an, and
Muslims soon cleaned it up so that David has
relations with Bathsheba only after her husband dies and David marries her. The fact that
these psalms refer so often and so explicitly, in some places, to David’s sin of adultery is a
strong indication that they were composed within the first few Islamic centuries, before the
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sanitized version of the Biblical story came to dominate Muslim discourse. For those Muslims
who remembered the Biblical story of David’s adultery, he made an ideal model of repentance.

Finally, these psalms are distinctly ascetic in tone.

Sometimes they prohibit outright the amassing of
wealth, and sometimes they allow it as long as one’s
heart remains focused on God and the afterlife, but
always they aim to pry the believer’s heart away
from the delusions of this world. They urge tearful
and fearful meditation on death, and storing up
treasure for the world to come.

The character of the ascetic movement among early Muslims, and even its existence, has been
the subject of some dispute. According to Christopher Melchert’s chronology, the kind of
asceticism encouraged in these psalms flourished in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, before
the emergence of the more mystical Sufi piety that eventually replaced it beginning in the
later 9th century.

That our text actually does date back that far has
been confirmed by the happy discovery in Vienna,
by Ursula Bsees of Cambridge University, of a
papyrus dating to the late eighth or ninth century.

The two surviving leaves of this papyrus codex

contain psalms 7–13, sandwiched between other
stories and poetry about death and the afterlife.
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Later recensions
That is the only known fragment of the original 8th–
century composition, consisting of 100 psalms,
which I call the Core text. The fifty–some other
manuscripts I have identified represent later
revisions and expansions of that Core text, each
with its own character.

The Koranic recension is especially notable for its

efforts to align the text with the style and
vocabulary of the Koran, even more than in the other versions.

The Core Plus recension added 50 new psalms, which were then recopied and edited by the
Orthodox editor, who changed or omitted anything that smacked of unorthodoxy, including
obvious references to David’s sin.

I also discovered recently that several manuscripts of Core Plus represent yet another
expansion and revision for which I have not yet found a suitable name, so for now I’m calling it
Core Plus Plus.

The Sufi recension adds a hundred different psalms of its own, some of which were already in
this other puzzling version that I am calling the proto–Sufi text. But the Sufi version doesn’t
just add new material; it reorders and radically rewrites a great deal of the Core text,
elaborating and expanding on vaguely Sufi themes like love for God and dependence on God.

Finally, what I call the Pious recension tends to replace vocabulary about love, for example,
with obedience to God’s law.

A completely separate text, forty short chapters purportedly from the “Torah of Moses,” was
converted at some point into “Psalms of David” and then appended to the end of one partial
copy of the Pious text to form the “Broken Pious with Moses” recension, which became very
popular. There seem to be lots of copies of it floating around Jerusalem, some of them
containing only the second half of that text, BPM2.

I won’t dwell on the differences between these versions today, but as you can imagine, keeping
track of which snippets of text reappear where, in what form, in each version, has been very
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challenging, and when I publish a translation of the Koranic recension that I am working on, I
plan to put online my whole database of notes which will allow others to track each snippet of
text across all the different versions and manuscript copies. People very generously keep
pointing me to more and more manuscripts of these psalms, and every time I have to figure
out which version it is, or whether it represents a new version entirely.

Sources
Neither the eighth–century ascetic preacher who composed the Core text, nor the later
redactors, worked completely from scratch, out of their own heads. A lot of their material
resembles sayings that can be found elsewhere in Islamic literature, and I keep finding
parallels in surprising places.

The most obvious parallels are with the Islamic

literatures on zuhd, asceticism or renunciation, and
ḥikma, or wisdom literature.

In ḥikma collections we find plenty of wise maxims

like this one in al‑Mubashshir ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār
al‑ḥikam, attributed to either Hermes or Luqmān.

The maxims below, from the Moses text, are quite

similar in form, though they are more concerned with good deeds than with good manners.

Some of these sound an awful lot like sayings in the Gospels: sowing seed on rocky soil, casting
pearls before swine.

In fact the Muslim psalmists were quite aware of some parts of the Bible. The Sufi redactor
seems to have used an Arabic translation, made I think from Hebrew, of the Biblical Psalms.
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But the others, like most Muslims of their time,

knew only a limited repertoire of quotations and
paraphrases of certain famous Biblical passages that
circulated widely among Muslims; and they quoted
or paraphrased them freely, without regard for their
source.

Here we see that the original author of the Core text

was at least aware that the Biblical Psalms contained
passages such as Psalm 25:2, “do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over
me,” and Psalm 51:10–11, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit
within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from
me.”

But the single greatest source of inspiration was the

Qur’an itself.

Here the Moses text simply reproduces a verse from

sura 3.

And here the Orthodox editor rewrites sūrat al-ikhlāṣ

in the first person:

‫ٕا ّﱐ وا ﺪ ٔا ﺪ ﲳﺪ ﱂ ٔا وﱂ ٔاو وﱂ ٔا ّﲣﺬ ﺻﺎﺣ ﺔ وﻻ‬

.‫و ًا وﱂ ﻜﻦ ﱄ ﻛﻔﻮ ًا ٔا ﺪ‬
I could cite a hundred examples of echoes of Qur’anic language.

Reception
So these psalms originated in early ascetic circles; they drew on Islamic and Qur’anic and,
indirectly, Biblical sources; and they were redacted to reflect a range of evolving forms of
Muslim piety.
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Why did people continue to copy them, long after

asceticism lost its appeal? What were they used for?
We can get some idea from the manuscripts
themselves.

The early papyrus copy of the Core text was part of

a personal collection of material about death and
the afterlife, perhaps intended for use in preaching
or perhaps just personal reflection. One later
manuscript appears in a collection of sermons, and another alongside a book on waraʿ,
scrupulous piety. So people clearly copied them for the moral and exhortative value of their
content.

Copies circulated from the Caucasus and Iran to al-Andalus and West Africa. In the lower right
corner is a copy of the short Moses text from Timbuktu.

The Moses text was printed in the mid–twentieth century under the title of “Eloquent Sermons
from the Zabūr,” but the main text—the Core text and all its offspring—seems to have been
forgotten since the early 20th century, when it was still being copied by hand, and when a few
Western scholars published excerpts from a few scattered manuscripts.

Yet somehow they persist. The other day I stumbled upon a long quote from the Sufi version in
Arabic and Persian on a Shiite web site, in a piece of spiritual advice about the problem of
unanswered prayer. The psalm was quoted indirectly, via a 15th–century book on prayer that
is still available in Persian and English translations on amazon. Clearly these psalms were
cherished in part for their spiritual and psychological wisdom.

But some copyists also regarded them as sacred scripture. Some manuscripts are elegant, with
features similar to copies of the Qur’an. Chapters are often called suras, and sometimes a
keyword or the number of verses is mentioned at the beginning of a sura. The 13th–century
copy on the upper right even includes recitation marks, though I don’t think you can see any
here.

That seems a bit ironic, given how freely some of those same copyists and editors changed or
improved or rewrote the text, showing very little concern for faithfully transmitting this
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divine revelation which, finally, had been reclaimed from the corruptions of the Jews and
Christians.

Implications
Were they really attempting to replace the supposedly corrupted Psalms of the Jewish and
Christian Bibles?

When orientalists like Ignaz Goldziher encountered these “pseudo–psalms” over a century ago,
they dismissed them as polemical forgeries. By the very fact that they purport to present the
authentic Psalms of David, these texts do embody the claim that the Bible is textually corrupt.
And they do contain some polemical accusations about corruption.

The Qur’an suggested that prior scriptures had

contained prophecies about the Prophet Muhammad
which were somehow excised, concealed, or at least
ignored. The Sufi editor supplied a striking example
of such a prediction. It goes on to accuse Christian
monks of erasing Muhammad’s name from their
scriptures—in sharply polemical language.

But on the whole I must say that such polemic is rare

in these psalms, and seems to be included almost as an afterthought. There are occasional jabs
at the Christian doctrine of Jesus’ divine sonship, and at Christian liturgical practices; and
naturally every version includes a prediction of Muhammad, which it accuses the Jews or
Christians of removing. But the freedom with which the later redactors rearranged and
improved the Core text, and appended their own compositions to it, shows that they saw their
work as a constructive and creative literary endeavor, not as an attempt to recover the
genuine Psalms of David. They were engaged in what Biblical scholars call “rewritten Bible,”
but they did not set out to rewrite it.

The Muslim psalmists’ main beef was not with non–Muslims but with sinful, hypocritical,
worldly Muslims, who needed to repent and pursue a life of renunciant and otherworldly
devotional piety. This was primarily an intramural critique and exhortation, and only
secondarily an interreligious one.
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In fact, if anything this text shows how much the original 8th–century Muslim author still had
in common with his Jewish and Christian neighbors, and especially with the monks who served
as an inspiration to Muslim ascetics. The Core text was not just part of an internal Muslim
debate, but of a broader Near Eastern pietistic movement that spanned several religious
communities—part of a broader “believers’ movement” with many common stories, symbols,
and forms of piety, which in the eighth century was mostly but still not entirely differentiated
into what we call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.