Imagining a 2-Hour, 4-Week Psalter

Overview

I have always been attracted to the idea of praying all 150 Psalms in one week. I have experimented with praying two such Psalters. First, the Anglican Breviary, which is simply an English translation of the 1911 Divino Afflatu Divine Office, using St. Pius X’s 1-week, but very efficient Psalter. Later, the 1962 Monastic Diurnal (with supplemental resources for Matins), which still uses St. Benedict’s arrangement from the sixth century. Both proved to be too long and arduous for a simple and busy layman such as myself.

Most recently, I’ve transitioned to using the 4-volume Liturgy of the Hours. Despite disliking it more than both of the two previous versions of the Divine Office that I’ve used, it’s much shorter, and it much more manageable. But due to some combination of busy-ness and a lack of discipline, I’ve only managed to be consistent with Lauds and Vespers, which leaves me with a 4-week cycle which does not even include the entire Psalter.

This all led to the question: Is a 4-week Psalter possible if we restrict ourselves to only Lauds and Vespers? Ideally, this arrangement would allow us to reuse the existing antiphons from the LotH, meaning that we’d only be able to pray 3 Psalms per hour.

Simple math says yes:

• 3 Psalms per hour * 2 hours per day =
• 6 Psalms per day * 7 days per week =
• 42 Psalms per week * 4 weeks per cycle =
• 168 Psalms

If we eliminate all of the canticles, it allows us to pray every Psalm, and gives us 18 slots to fill with divisions for the longer Psalms. This is many fewer division slots than the current LotH, so we will have to be strategic in how we use them.

Our goal is to create a 4-week, 2-hour Psalter that:

• Uses all 150 Psalms with minimal repetition (likely no repetition at all)
• Selects Psalm divisions that produce the greatest uniformity in length
• Arranges the Psalms in a way that conforms as much as possible to traditional Psalters

Comparing Major Psalters

Our first step is to review existing Psalters. For simplicity, I’ve chosen 3: the Monastic Psalter, St. Pius X’s Psalter, and the Liturgy of the Hours’ Psalter. Hovering any of the Psalms in the tables highlights all of the instances of that Psalm in all the tables. Two notes about this:

1. Hovering highlights all instances of the Psalm, including divisions.
2. It is possible to switch between Greek and Masoretic numbering. But the highlighting is based on the Greek numbering. So, for example, hovering over an instance of Psalm 9 in the Masoretic numbering scheme will also highlight instances of Psalm 10, since Psalm 9 and 10 in the Masoretic numbering scheme are both the same Psalm in the Greek numbering scheme (Psalm 9).

Monastic (c. 540)

Pius X (1911)

Liturgy of the Hours (1971)