Excerpt from Notes on PsalmodyYet, it must be owned; that among all the calamities which the Jews brought upon themselves by their offences, one of the most grievous was the loss of this very method of praise which had been so suggestive and instructive. After their return from the Babylonish captivity, thelanguage of the psalms ceased to be gener ally spoken and understood in the land of J udea. The people gathered their know ledge of the law and the prophets from the Chaldee interpreters in the synagogues, and must, therefore, have failed to realise, with any thing like ancient appreciation, the glorious burden of the songs of Israel. Indeed, upwards of two hundred and seventy years before Christ, the titles to some of the psalms, which in a number of cases are supposed to be directions to the singers, were unintelligible to the Jews and to the translators of the Sep tuagint version. That version was for several centuries in high estimation with the Jews, and though acknowledging its ignorance of everything relating to psalmody, was used in many Synagogues in Judea in preference to the Hebrew. It is from this version,also, that our Lord and His apostles generally make their quotations from the Old Testament.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.