Qumran and Canon

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed the picture. Among the scrolls from Qumran Cave 11 the Great Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) preserved a Hebrew version of the material of Psalm 151, in fact two originally separate short poems (labelled 151A and 151B by scholars) that lie behind the single Greek psalm, showing that it rests on genuine Hebrew compositions of the Second Temple period, not merely a Greek invention.

Canonically the psalm is received as Scripture by the Eastern Orthodox churches, which print it in their Psalters, and it is honoured in the Syriac and other Eastern traditions; it is not part of the Jewish, Roman Catholic or Protestant canons, though Protestant Bibles that carry the Apocrypha may include it. Psalm 151 is valued today both as a small window onto the fluid state of the Psalter in the late Second Temple period, when collections of psalms could still differ in content and order, and as evidence, furnished by Qumran, that a "Septuagint plus" could preserve authentically ancient Hebrew material that the later rabbinic canon left out.