Sing Psalms

Description

Published by the Psalmody Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, this TEXT EDITION is to foster the practice of the singing of metrical psalms as a part of the worship of the Christian church. Such became a common practice during the Reformation. This edition of “Sing Psalms” contains only the words of the psalms and includes an appendix of five of the best-known psalms from The Scottish Psalter (1650). There is available also an edition of Sing Psalms with the whole of The Scottish Psalter as an appendix. Because of the constraints imposed by the use of metre and rhyme, a metrical translation of the psalms is inevitably freer than a prose translation. But what it may lose in terms of verbal correspondence it compensates for by rendering the psalms into the metrical idiom to which English language readers are accustomed. A metrical translation is more than a paraphrase which renders in verse certain thoughts suggested by the original passage of Scripture. Sing Psalms is a metrical translation rather than a paraphrase in that every effort has been made to set out in verse what is to be found in the original text. At times compression of expression and also expansion have to be employed to adjust to the metrical format of the English version; this has been done in such a way as to steer a middle course between over-expansion of Scripture and undue omission. To indicate that the versions are metrical translations the numbering of the stanzas corresponds to the verse numbers of standard English translations.