A Psalter Revised Twice Before Anyone Sang It

The Scottish Psalter's road to its 1650 authorization ran through a contest most worshipers who have sung it never hear about. In the 1640s the Westminster Assembly of Divines, meeting in London to hammer out a common confession and worship for the British churches, had two rival metrical psalters put before it, one by William Barton and one by Francis Rous. The Assembly picked Rous's version, judging it the more accurate rendering of the Hebrew text, and set about revising it further to bring it closer still to the original. When Scottish commissioners carried that Assembly approved text home in 1647, the Church of Scotland's own General Assembly was not satisfied to simply adopt it. It spent two more years revising the psalter again, checking it line by line against scripture, before a Church commission formally authorized the finished text on 23 November 1649, ordering that it become the only psalter sung in Scottish congregations starting 1 May 1650.

That two stage process, an English Assembly's accuracy standard followed by a further Scottish revision on top of it, produced a text more thoroughly vetted than almost any other psalter of its era, and the discipline behind that vetting says something about the seriousness with which Reformed worship treated the words a congregation was permitted to put in God's mouth. A single mistranslated line was not treated as a stylistic quibble but as a defect worth two years of committee work to correct.