Psalm 151 Arabic

[Tripp Powell]

Doyou want to help arabic.fi?

We have thousands of words and almost two thousand phrases with detailed information, grammar lessons and many other resources. Everything is free to use. With your help, this website can be even better.

Read more here

One of the best loved psalms among both Jews and Christians is the Psalm "The Lord is my Shepherd (Psalm 23). We publish here a number of links to very different performances of the psalm.

In the heat of summer, we pray with particular intention the verse: "He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters". In these days, the children's summer camp of the Vicariate is underway and we pray the psalm for our children and for their experience of being one flock with one shepherd.

3. The Lord is my Shepherd (Psalm 23) from the Jewish American composer Leonard Bernstein, a part of his "Chichester Psalms", performed by the choir of Clare College in Cambridge.

View and listen

The psalms are well suited to their task due to the variety of subjects covered, almost every aspect of life. There are, for example, psalms for thanksgiving, for safety in traveling, for the sick, for the broken-hearted, and many others. Believers use the psalms not only in liturgical prayer, but also on a personal level. They recite or write those psalms that fit their current situation. It is most probably through this that the psalms began to be used in superstitious practices. Believers used the psalms to seek help and to find solutions for their problems. They used them for protection from plague, disease, and the like. They did this either by reciting the psalms orally or by writing them down (later in the form of amulets). The Jewish work Sefer Shimmush Tehillim provides a manual on the magical use of the psalms and assigns to each psalm a specific magical purpose together with an indication of how to use it. There are psalms against diseases, robbers, and miscarriage, among other misfortunes, and others that can be used to avoid the actions of enemies and imprisonment, for example. Unfortunately, there have been few studies on this topic, although the edition of the Sefer Shimmush Tehillim by Rebiger is a commendable achievement, and has made available to us what is perhaps the source of similar traditions in Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopic. Rebiger himself has pointed out that there is a Judeo-Arabic translation of the Aramaic text, from which only two fragments have been published.[1]

Dallāl al-mazāmīr has been published four times, all in Egypt. The first publication was by Murqus Ǧirǧis,[6] as a handbook under the title Kitāb Dallāl al-mazāmīr al-kubār (Book of the guide to the great psalms) alongside a booklet titled Kitāb Dallāl al-Dallāl (The guide to the guide [of the psalms]) on the mathematical speculations and permutations of every psalm.[7] The editor gives no information about the source of the text and there is no date of publication. They are in no way critical editions of the work; the publisher wanted to preserve these books from being lost, as he believed in their effectiveness. In the preface of the book, he writes:

The edition of Henein and Bianquis is republished in another book, of obscure origin and without date, which is attributed to a certain bishop called Zakarios the Wise (al-ḥakīm); but the book claims that the text is from an ancient manuscript in Istanbul. In the introduction, the publisher explains the instructions on how to calculate the numerical value of the letters of each psalm, constructing the holy names that must be called out for the psalms to be effectively used for magic. Many of the names are not otherwise known. Sentences like the following are common in the book:

At the end of the book there are some spells used for magical purposes. These contain prayers asking for revenge or for getting rid of enemies or for being acceptable to the authorities. Among the names called in these spells are names of God from the Old Testament, such as Adonai, Tzevaot, El Shaddai, and Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In order to complete the whole of the book of Psalms, the publisher provides the first psalm, which was missing from the edition of Henein and Bianquis, in the Van Dyke translation.

The topics in the book cover almost every aspect of life. Henein grouped these topics under 19 titles, which include about 140 cases. These cases cover almost every need in life: accidents, delivery of a child, doing bad or good things to others, protection from disease or enemies, and so on.

None of the published editions of the Dallāl has a critical apparatus or a comparison between different manuscripts. The textual witnesses of the Dallāl vary slightly between the manuscripts when it comes to the purpose and use of the psalms: some have more uses for certain psalms than others.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Dallāl is the range of materials that are required in using the psalms for magical purposes. Among others, there is mention of parchment, birds, ink, and different types of oils and fragrances. A study of these materials from a social viewpoint may deliver interesting information about the society in which this text was used.

Something which is still very obviously lacking is a critical edition of the Dallāl al-mazāmīr. Such an edition would certainly open new fields of study for this text, from a wide range of approaches, perhaps especially in terms of its relation to the Sefer Shimmush Tehillim.

3a8082e126