Psalms 13 and 52: the same psalm?

[Rebecca Gabl]

In my Lenten Psalter reading, I remembered something I've been wondering for a while: Psalms 13 and 52 are practically the same! What is the history of that? Is it possible that whoever compiled the psalter found two separate documents of the same psalm and thought they were two different psalms?

[David James]

Dear Sr. Rebecca:

The only patristic commentary on these psalms I could find was that of St. Augustine, and he does not address the similarity. Here is what Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, a priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese in the U.S., wrote in his excellent book, Christ in the Psalms, p. 25:

"Psalm 13 (Hebrew 14) is almost identical with Psalm 52. The Book of Psalms shows several signs of including earlier collections of psalms, and this duplication of a single psalm is doubtless the result of some ancient confluence from two different [manuscript] collections... [from the commentary on Ps. 52, p. 103] We do not know when this conflation was made, but it clearly antedates our earliest extant version of the canonical Book of Psalms, that of the Septuagint..."

David James


In my Lenten Psalter reading, I remembered something I've been wondering for a while: Psalms 13 and 52 are practically the same! What is the history of that? Is it possible that whoever compiled the psalter found two separate documents of the same psalm and thought they were two different psalms?