The Psalms have come down to us by a long tradition; the familiar form of the psalter and the place of the psalms in our services combine to persuade us that, by using them regularly, we are maintaining the Christian faith of the middle ages. Occasionally, however, there is a barbarism of such violence that it cannot be 'spiritualised' into piety; and again, there are cryptic allusions to distant peoples and events from Israelite history, and then we are suddenly aware that the psalms are not, after all, comfortable poems of Christian devotion. They come to us from a pre-Christian, foreign and very distant world.