"The Psalms" are prayer-poems, human speech and song directed to an unseen divine presence. Drawing upon a variety of critical perspectives, Levine investigates the rhetorical strategies of the psalmists, explores their struggles to reconcile faith in God with the experience of undeserved suffering, and examines how the psalmists' sense of their own lives interacted with idealized notions of sacred time and space. In an essay in historical theology, he shows how the Psalms have been used by each generation responding to the most significant Jewish national tragedies.