Not Learning to Lament: Comparing the Psalms to Songbooks

If you are looking for an accessible, pastoral but academically informed study of the Psalms, particularly the lament psalms, let me point you to a book recently published by my ACU colleague Glenn Pemberton. Glenn's book--Hurting with God: Learning to Lament with the Psalms--is a wonderful book that would be great for personal bible study, a sermon series, or an adult/small group study.

One of the provocative things Glenn does in Chapter 2, with the help of Austin Holt, is to inventory the content of the Psalms and compare that content with the content of three different songbooks--Songs of Faith and Praise (used by my faith tradition the Churches of Christ), The Baptist Hymnal, and The Presbyterian Hymnal.

According to the system Glenn and Austin used, the three biggest categories of songs, for the Psalms and the three songbooks, were songs of Trust and Thanksgiving, songs of Praise, and songs of Lament. Using these categories Glenn and Austin inventoried the Psalms and the songbooks, calculating the percentage of the songs in each of the categories. (There were more than three categories. I'm just focusing on the biggest three.)

When Glenn and Austin graphed these percentages they found this:

Notice anything interesting?

Note that 40% of the Psalms can be classified as lament. The three songbooks don't even crack 20%. And two of them don't crack 15%