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Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Psalm 72:20
The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended. Yet David's name appears on psalms well after this point.
Psalm 72:20, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a book with a note halfway through saying the author's contributions end here, and then the same author's chapters keep appearing for the rest of the book. That contradiction is a visible seam, evidence the book was assembled out of smaller pieces at different times, exactly what this verse shows about how the Psalter itself was put together.
Because this closing line explicitly states the prayers of David are ended, yet psalms attributed to David appear repeatedly after this point across the rest of the Psalter, showing this verse is a leftover editorial marker from an earlier stage of compiling the book, not a claim true of the finished collection as it now stands.
Every version reads the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended, accurately translating a straightforward Hebrew sentence, but without necessarily flagging how strange the claim is once a reader notices David's name reattached to psalms later in the book, including 86, 101, 103, and many more.
כָּלוּ תְפִלּוֹת דָּוִד בֶּן־יִשָׁי kalu tefillot David ben-Yishai · H8615
This colophon almost certainly closes an earlier, smaller collection of Davidic psalms compiled before the Psalter reached its final, five-book form, a collection later scribes and editors incorporated into the larger work without removing this now-outdated closing note. Scholars debate whether it originally marked the end of a scroll or a specific anthology, but either way it is a visible fossil of the book's own layered compilation history, left standing even after later editors kept adding more Davidic psalms beyond it.
English readers meeting the prayers of David are ended at Psalm 72 have no reason to notice the claim is factually overtaken by dozens of later psalms in the same book still attributed to David, so the verse's real function, as a preserved trace of an earlier editorial stage, is invisible without checking the rest of the Psalter's attributions.
When an editorial statement inside a biblical book is contradicted by material appearing later in the same book, read the contradiction as evidence of the book's compilation history rather than assuming either the statement or the later material must be in error. Both can be original to their own stage of the text's growth.
Reading the colophon as simply describing Book II, Psalms 42-72, as a self-contained Davidic collection treats it as accurate for its original, smaller context. Reading it as a claim about David's total contribution to the finished Psalter runs immediately into the dozens of Davidic psalms that follow, showing the verse was never updated to match the book's later growth.
- Psalms attributed to David appearing after Psalm 72: 86, 101, 103, 108-110, 122, 124, 131, 133, 138-145
- Standard scholarly discussion of Psalm 72:20 as a compilation-history colophon
