SON OF DAVID PSALTER

My name is Izzy Avraham and this is the story behind the Son Of David Psalter. 

If you don’t know what a psalter is, that’s normal—my friend Jim thought a psalter was a saltshaker! Basically a psalter is a translation of the book of Psalms that rhymes and has rhythm, so you can sing it. Like a hymnbook, but a psalmbook. 

Considering I’m the editor of the Son Of David Psalter and that psalm-singing is something I’ve really come to believe in, I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know anything about psalters until a couple years ago, and that this psalmbook was an afterthought that only became deeply important to me after I got started on it. 

The Psalms and I

Of course, the Psalms have always had a special place in my life. As a young teenager my daily time with God consisted of reading a chapter of Proverbs and a Psalm, usually from my little red Gideon Bible which eventually became so dog-eared that I covered it with duct tape. My favourite was Psalm 15 because it portrayed the kind of man I wanted to become—strong, honest, and kind. I still remember my Mom reading that psalm to me as I lay in a hospital bed after surgery. 

In my twenties I got turned on to Hebrew and had the pleasure of reading through Tehillim in the actual language in which David wrote them and Jesus prayed them. While this was a deeply meaningful experience, it was also hard work as I plodded along, trying to figure out the meaning of each word by consulting my pocketsize Hebrew dictionary and comparing with my favourite literal translation, the NASB. 

In my thirties, when I found myself going through the most difficult time of my life and had to persevere through literally months of non-stop emotional anguish, it was the Psalms that pulled me through—every morning long before sunrise my phone would wake me up to “Help Me” by Johnny Cash, I would open it to my lock screen of Simon helping a gasping Jesus to carry his cross, and then I would climb out of bed to slowly pray the Psalms, pour out my heart through the tears, and receive the strength I needed to make it through another day. 

And now in my forties, I take my two sons on ‘Scriptures walks’ several times a week. I calculated recently how many miles I’ve already pushed those little guys in their double stroller as we listened to God’s word and realized the distance was all the way from Albuquerque, New Mexico (where we currently live) to California! After finishing each section of Scripture in Hebrew (Law, History, Epistles, etc.) we would listen to a Rabbi chanting the book of Psalms to ancient Jewish melodies. 

Along with all this, as a religious Jew I’ve also attended synagogue for years and, as part of the service, sang portions of the Hebrew Psalms to the point where I know them all by heart. 

Confession

Yet through all this time, even though I knew that the Psalms were originally made for singing, it never occurred to me to sing the Psalms in English—never mind that the Bible tells us twice to sing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs”! Like most of us, the reason was that I didn’t know how. I was vaguely aware of the Psalter and had heard its famous rendition of Psalm 23 before (The Lord’s my shepherd I’ll not want), but that was as far as it went. I didn’t know anyone who sang the Psalms, had never been to a church where it was done, and didn’t even know what a Psalter looked like. 

All that changed after I published the God Of Abraham Hymnal. While I hadn’t grown up singing psalms, I had grown up singing the old hymns with my family, both at home and at church, and they held a special place in my heart. (That story’s here.) I knew that a psalmbook was similar to a hymnbook, and that many of the psalms were even sung to the same melodies, so in July 2024 when I bought the domain name ourhymnal.com I thought, “why not publish a companion psalter?” and bought ourpsalter.com too. 

Little did I know the journey of discovery that little question would become, or what a big project the Son Of David Psalter would be! 

Discoveries

In the fall of 2024 I was in the thick of publishing the hymnal, but still managed to find enough time to play with the concept of its matching psalmbook that by early winter I already had a mockup cover. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2025, though, after I had announced history’s first Messianic Christian Zionist hymnal, that the work began in earnest. 

I started by taking time to actually learn about the history of the Psalter, and was surprised to discover that there wasn’t just one Psalter—there were many! I was aware of the most popular and long-standing psalmbook, the Scottish Psalter which traced its roots all the way back to 1650, but I learned that there were older psalmbooks that had already fallen out of disuse centuries ago, and also many newer metrical translations of the Psalms. 

I was familiar with meter (the number of syllables per line), but had never stopped to think that what all these psalters had in common was that they were actual translations of the book of Psalms into poetic meter and rhyme. This was most apparent in the Scottish Psalter, which was also called the Scottish Metrical Version (SMV) because it even had verse numbers like a regular Bible translation! 

As I continued to read about the history of English psalm-singing, I was surprised to discover that it was at the heart of the revival that today we call the Reformation—in Germany under Martin Luther, in France thanks to John Calvin, and in England at the behest of Queen Elizabeth herself, the Psalms were translated into rhyming meter for the common people. Crowds of literally thousands gathered in the open air to sing God’s praises at the top of their lungs, and many died singing as they were arrested and burnt at the stake by the Roman Catholic church as it did everything in its power to stop the revival. 

I want to tell you how the Psalter made England literate as Parliament put it in every home, and how it went on to become the first book published in America, but I already tell those stories in the Introduction to the Son Of David Psalter and will also do so visually in the forthcoming ‘Revival Songs’ video series at holylanguage.com, so I’ll stop breathless there. 

Complications

My original plan was just to publish the text of the Scottish Psalter, which was in the public domain. And, of course, to make beginner-friendly audios available for every psalm, just as I had done with the hymnal. And that was where the first complication arose—because, unlike worship songs today, most of these psalms didn’t have just one melody! This happened because almost all these psalms were set to Common Meter (CM), which means the first and third lines of each verse had eight syllables, and the second and fourth had six. (This is written as 86.86—if you clap out the syllables in Amazing Grace you’ll find it’s set to Common Meter.) 

The fact that the entire Psalter was in the same meter meant that any psalm could be sung to any tune with that same meter, almost like musical mix and match—and that’s exactly what happened! Composers churned out thousands of melodies, and the best tunes not only became the most popular, but over time became traditionally associated with certain psalms. 

As a slide note, when I say the “entire Psalter” I should clarify that the Scottish Psalter has 13 instances where, along with the standard psalm in Common Meter, a second is given in an alternative meter—usually Short (66.86) or Long (88.88), but also in meters as uncommon as 6.6.6.6 and 10.10.10.10.10! These were marked by the heading ‘Another of the same’, a phrase which struck me as being especially quotable. I wondered how many Scottish parents looked at each other upon the birth of their second son and simultaneously exclaimed, “Another of the same!”

Preparations

So anyways, my first job was to decide which tunes would go with which psalms—not in some random arbitrary way, but on the basis of three criteria. First, which most often went together historically? Second, which were the most singable and beginner-friendly? And third, which were already used with another psalm? This last question was important because some of these tunes had become so popular that literally dozens of psalms were all sung to the same tune. I didn’t just want to create a treasure chest of psalmody’s highest quality songs—I wanted the Son Of David Psalter to also become a living repository of the greatest quantity of these resonant gems. 

I began by compiling my sources. I chose two modern references (an index and an app) that both suggested tunes for each psalm, and also found a website that not only listed the sometimes dozens of tunes associated with each psalm, but also scored their historical popularity in percentage points—but most of my references were much older. Many of the oldest psalters didn’t even list recommended melodies, but I did find four from between 1865 and 1886 that listed popular tunes before each psalm. Sadly, some of these melodies had already been lost to time, but I was able to find most with effort. I comforted myself with the thought that many more of these precious tunes would also become lost and forgotten if it wasn’t for this project that, with God’s help, will not only revive psalm-singing in our generation, but ensure it thrives in the next. 

Most of these psalters listed three or four tunes for each psalm, but several psalms had a dozen. Psalm 18 took the prize with fourteen! I should explain why this was the case. For one thing, some of the psalms are really long—Psalm 78, for instance, has 72 verses. Who could sing that whole thing to one melody without having their mind wander? For another thing, King David was an emotional man, and the mood-swings of some of his psalms are simply impossible to capture with a single melody. The solution was to take the psalms that were longer, or that expressed a broad range of feelings, and break them up into shorter songs. I took a cue from these old psalmbooks and mostly based my songs-breaks on their historical precedents. Mind you, these breaks aren’t reflected in the actual text, which still reads like a regular translation with verses. Instead, these individual songs are only visible in the melodies collection at ourpsalter.com. There, for instance, you’ll find Psalm 78 subdivided into seven different songs, each listed by reference and opening line or incipit: “Psalm 78.1-8 – Attend My People to My Law”, “Psalm 78.9-20 – The Sons of Ephraim”, etc. 

Granular Crawl

I fear that I may be oversharing right now, but I hope that hearing the details that went into the making of the Son Of David Psalter will give you a deeper appreciation as you sing from it. 

Having now created a clear-cut process, I began working in a slow and granular fashion through each psalm: first listening to every one of their associated melodies from my seven sources, and then listing those melodies alphabetically in four columns: “Yes” if they were singable, “No” if they weren’t, “None” if there was no audio, and “Other” if they weren’t in Common Meter. I also noted familiar tunes (“Joy to the World”) and general moods (random descriptors that popped into my head such as cheery, confident, dramatic, fancy, lofty, minor, noble, passion, plaintive, and solid.) After recording these melodies, I made the final decision based on the three questions mentioned above: which tune has the strongest historical associations, is most singable, and isn’t already used? Of course, as time progressed, I had to change some of these decisions when it emerged that certain popular melodies were even more strongly associated with other psalms (for instance, the “Old 100th” with Psalm 100, surprise!)

I continued in this fashion from January to July of 2025—not fulltime, mind you, as I was busy finishing the hymnal, teaching video series, and working on two books: Yeshua Groups, and a forthcoming work listing the 713 commandments of the New Testament. Instead, because I’m deeply musical and found this perusal to be highly pleasurable, I made it my “Shabbat project” and also indulged on evenings when I was too tired to do anything else. 

By the time July rolled around I had settled on melodies for every psalm and their subdivisions, which amounted to almost three hundred. I’ll share two anecdotes from this time. Firstly, as I made my way through these many melodies I met one named CAITHNESS, and the name struck me as so quaint and charming that I gave it to my youngest daughter as a nickname. And secondly, in my process of painstakingly determining the best tune for each psalm based on those three criteria, I did make one exception: I stumbled upon a melody named DURROW with a major/minor shift that deeply gripped me and instantly became my favourite, and I decided to combine it with my favourite psalm from my teen years which, you may remember, was Psalm 15—just to honour my own journey with the Master which started all the way back then. I imagined someone singing this combo at my funeral with particular satisfaction—which is a dream that I hope won’t come true for a very long time! 

Take Two

By July I had also learned more about the the various psalters out there and had made two discoveries: that along with the Scottish Psalter there were two others that were especially popular in the history of English psalm-singing, and that I wanted them in the Son Of David Psalter. I go into the historical details of these two in the Introductory chapters so I won’t repeat that here and will just say that if the Scottish Metrical Version is best understood as a word-for-word translation then the first of these two discoveries, the 1912 Psalter, could be compared to a thought-for-though version, and the second, by Isaac Watts, could best be appreciated as a paraphrase. 

I spent all my free time for the next two months subjecting these metrical versions of the Psalms to the same rigorous process. The difference with the 1912 Psalter was that it was already broken down into shorter songs, each with only one melody. Finally, on September 11, 2025, I had finished my quest. The Psalter would have over 1,000 songs, set to over 800 historical melodies—songs that millions of the faithful sang over the course of several centuries, songs that I had never heard before, but that I couldn’t wait to learn with my family and, hopefully, bring back to the body of Christ. 

Production

I paused my work on the 713 Commandments and gave my full attention to the Psalter. My first job was to prep this treasure trove of melodies: converting midis to mp3s, and then ensuring every track had the best speed and volume. My next job was to prep the text, which required formatting it with slashes between lines like real poetry, spellchecking, and proofreading. After that it fell to me, as the editor, to edit the text. I changed as little as possible, but was forced to make small adjustments on three levels, which I thoroughly explain in the introductory ‘Technical Notes’ so won’t repeat here. 

By October the text and melodies were ready, but it was lacking an Introduction and chapter breaks. Both Jews and Christians have been praying through the Psalms monthly for literally thousands of years, so I combined their 30-day systems and then adapted it to the needs of our specific text. After some in-depth research I also created a list of the psalms that Jesus would have sung with his family and disciples for the Jewish feasts and fasts, and also for circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. I had already been working on a reconstruction of the Jewish liturgy as it would have been experienced by our Messiah and his followers two thousand years ago, and had worked through literally thousands of pages of source texts, so I felt especially well-prepared to prepare this introductory chapter on ‘The Feasts’. 

I also wrote chapters on psalm-singing in the life of Jesus and the early church, on the history of the Psalter (which I found to be incredibly inspiring), and on the Son Of David Psalter (which I hoped would also be inspiring.) I finished these introductory chapters with Instructions—how to learn the tunes, make use of the monthly system, and journey all the way through the book of Psalms. 

Excitement

After the manuscript was prepared it was time to go to press. That required creating and ordering test covers with different hues because my two publishers rendered basic colours differently; metadata research into best keywords and categories; and going through multiple rounds of ordering author copies, waiting weeks for them to arrive, making corrections, and then re-ordering. 

In contrast with that last cycle, which literally dragged on for months, publishing the ebook was a snap! I submitted it at the end of October and only five days later, on November 5, the Kindle version was live on Amazon. That was exciting, even though I couldn’t announce it. I don’t know if this is a strength or weakness, but I don’t like to talk about what I’m doing until it’s done. What that meant in this case was that most people didn’t even know I was working on a companion to the God Of Abraham Hymnal, and it was still going to be months before I could officially announce it, so in the meantime I shared a sample PDF with our 130,000+ followers and supporters by email and social media and at least let them know about the project. And I was glad I did, because they shared my excitement! 

Videos

In the meantime, while I waited for the test copies to arrive, there was much to do: making the melody collection available as mp3 downloads and YouTube shorts that would play on repeat; compiling worship leader resources that included a slides PDF, chord sheets, and a coilbound large print edition of the Psalter; and creating an introductory videos series that would lead into my ‘Revival Songs’ course telling the historical story of psalm and hymn singing in the English church and synagogue. 

The video series took longer to prep than I had originally planned because I kept having great ideas—a problem that has plagued almost every project I have ever set my hand to. As I wrote this story, shortly before the big announcement, it looks like there will be at least a dozen videos: the first five will present the big WHY behind singing the Psalms in general and behind the Son Of David Psalter in particular, peek at Yeshua singing psalms with his family and disciples with some inspiration from The Chosen, and unpack the relevant Greek words in the New Testament and Septuagint. The next eight will unpack those same words in Hebrew and also reveal the rich mysteries behind untranslated words like Mikhtam and Selah. And, finally, I don’t even know how many videos it will take to tell the story of the Psalter and the many ways it shaped the English world on both sides of the Atlantic—but if you check the Videos page at ourpsalter.com you’ll find out! 

The Vision

The wind is slamming against my studio this March 22, 2026 as I sit up late writing this story on the eve of the announcement of the Son Of David Psalter. I hope it’s prophetic of the fresh gusts of the Holy Spirit that I believe will sweep through our lives as families and fellowships as we return to this ancient path and, on a broader level, are restored to all the ways of the early church. 

After I wrote the introduction to this Psalter, I added a P.S.: “I have a vision of believers walking together across their neighborhoods and cities, states and provinces, and even countries, singing the Psalms as they go. If you choose to lift up the Son of David and cover your region in prayer in this way, please tell me…I want to share your story and inspire more people to go forth and sing in the name of the LORD!” 

I didn’t share the backstory to that vision there, but I’m feeling prompted to do so here. In my teens I and a couple buddies took a road trip across the prairie provinces of Canada to a youth conference in British Columbia. On the drive out, when we weren’t trying to spit out the window after brushing our teeth only to have it fly back in our faces, we passed the time reading the biographies of great revivalists to each other. The conference itself was intense and on the drive home we were as on-fire for God as you could get. We even had an encounter on a long deserted stretch of road that still scares me to think about. As we drove through the night we were suddenly jolted by a strange presence. Shouting, we swerved over onto the shoulder and then jumped out and began praying fervently in a tight huddle. One of us, who was Native American (or First Nations as we Canadians would say), and was especially spiritually attuned, began freaking out in terror as he saw a demon standing at the horizon watching us, and then just as quickly began laughing in relief as saw it turn and flee as we continued to wage vehement spiritual warfare. Chills sweep over me as I remember what happened next—we looked up to behold multi-coloured northern lights streaming down from the middle of the sky, and then a moment later shouted in unison as the perfect shape of a dove emerged from that central point and an indescribable peace washed over us. 

Redemption

That was actually the backstory to the backstory. On that wild drive home we also had an idea—to walk across Canada, praying and claiming our country for God. It was a burning idea, one that excited us as we imagined it together. And then…it never happened. I don’t even remember why. I’ve learned over time to recognize the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and to take it very seriously, but at that point in my life I just thought it was a great idea and nothing more. And so the moment passed us by. It’s one of the few regrets of my life, and I can’t help but wonder how my life would be different if my friends and I had walked across Canada at the age of seventeen. 

But it’s also not too late! And that’s why I want you to ask God what going forth and singing in the name of the LORD could look like for you. Carry your psalmbook and sing as you walk—whether it be across your neighborhood or city, or even across your entire region or country, I can promise you one thing: five of us will rout a hundred, and a hundred strong we’ll defeat whole legions. Just like my friends and I on that unforgettable night, we’ll see the dark prince of this world cast out and look up to witness the Holy Spirit pouring forth over every place the sole of our foot treads. So let the high praises of God be in your mouth like a two-edged sword in your hands, to bring God’s justice and mercy upon the earth and to see his Kingdom come! 

Izzy Avraham
Holy Language Institute

March 22, 2026