what is the zabur?

وَرَبُّكَ أَعْلَمُ بِمَنْ فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۗ وَلَقَدْ فَضَّلْنَا بَعْضَ النَّبِيِّينَ عَلَىٰ بَعْضٍ ۖ وَآتَيْنَا دَاوُودَ زَبُورًا 

And it is your Lord that knoweth best all beings that are in the heavens and on earth: We did bestow on some prophets more (and other) gifts than on others: and We gave to David (the gift of) the Psalms. (17:55)

I've been thinking about ways to respond to Christians who want to insist that the Quran is telling Muslims to essentially affirm the Bible as valid with little to no qualification or criticism. InshaAllah, I will make a series of posts containing some modest reflections on the subject. The current post is on the Zabur.

As we can see above, the Quran describes the Zabur as a revelation which was given to David (as). But as we will see, we cannot simplistically identify the Zabur with the book of Psalms in the Bible. First of all, by its own admission, only some of the Psalms in the Bible are attributed to David, while others are attributed to other people (Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Korah, Moses, Ethan the Ezrahite, Herman the Ezrahite, Haggai, Zechariah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah).

Secondly, most modern Biblical scholarship assigns very late dates to final completion of the Biblical book of Psalms. Parts of the book were not even written until after Solomon's Temple was destroyed and rebuilt. So the Biblical book was only arranged in its final form hundreds of years after David (as) lived. So even if there is a Davidic core, other layers of text have certainly been added to it.

And finally there seems to have been some significant variations in the text over the years. For example as part of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls near Qumran, archeologists found The Great Psalms Scroll or 11Q5.

The reason this manuscript is of such great interest to scholars is due to its major deviance from the Masoretic Psalter. Its textual makeup is that of “apocryphal compositions interspersed with canonical psalms in a radically different order”. It contains approximately fifty compositions, forty of which are found in the Masoretic text. While some maintain the masoretic order, such as some of the Psalms of Ascent, others are scattered throughout in a different order.

11Q5 has generated a lot of interest in scholars due to its large difference from the Masoretic Psalter, “both in ordering of contents and in the presence of additional compositions.”[ It contains several compositions that are not present in the Masoretic Psalter of 150 hymns and prayers and therefore, “challenges traditional ideas concerning the shape and finalization of the book of Psalms.” There are eight non-Masoretic compositions with an additional prose composition that is not formatted like a psalm. Three highlighted compositions include “The Apostrophe to Zion”, “Plea for Deliverance”, and Psalm 151; in addition, the prose composition is researched to be known as “David’s Compositions.” While these are non-Masoretic, some of them, Psalm 151, was known in the Septuagint.

[...]

The additional prose composition is also known as David's Compositions. It references many Psalms associated with David, including 364 songs for each day of the year, conforming to calendars found in distinctively sectarian texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These songs were hymns attributed to King David, praising him for composing the Psalms, classifying the hymns and prayers he wrote. According to this list, David composed 3,600 psalms, 364 songs to be performed each day of the year during regular sacrifices, another 52 songs for the weekly Sabbath sacrifice, 30 songs for sacrifices of annual festivals and the new moon, and 4 songs for the sick. Therefore, 11Q5 concludes with the bold statement that David was an avid sage and hymnist, crafting upwards of 4,050 psalms.

In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to show at least one "book of Psalms" with a great number of non-trivial differences from the Masoretic Psalter found in the the Western Bible. Perhaps this is the true Zabur? Furthermore, if there are thousands of Psalms written by David, then perhaps those texts, not found in the Bible is where we might identify the Zabur of David to which the Quran refers.

Bottom line, while its certainly possible that the original Zabur of David overlap a great deal with the Biblical book of Psalms, it would be a mistake to claim the two were perfectly identical. Allahu alim.

"sing dis song. doo dah, doo dah!"

By the rivers of Babylon‚—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How could we sing the LORD's song
in a foreign land?
Psalm 137:1-4

I started this post over a week ago and I had intended to talk about how Muslims might make sense of the Psalms (and the Torah and the Gospel) which are mentioned in the Quran as other examples of revelation. But I think I'll save that larger discussion for later. Instead I'll just share a few thoughts on a more specific issue.

The above passage from the Psalms is one of the most intriguing for me. Firstly, it is probably among the more ancient songs which you'll ever hear on the radio. Don McClean (more famous for the song American Pie) recorded a version of this song in the form of a round simply called Babylon. A second version with was composed by the Rastafarian group, the Melodians as Rivers of Babylon and was subsequently covered by other artists.

The second reason why the above passage interests me is because I was really impressed by how the comedy film maker Mel Brooks uses it in a famous scene from Blazing Saddles. (warning: crude language). His films have a huge amount of silly humor, but he can be deep when he wants to be.