7 October 2025

Following the anti-semitic attack on the Heaton Park Hebrew Synagogue in Manchester on Thursday, it is worth remembering our debt to the Jews and Judaism. We not only have a New Testament but we have embraced the Old Testament too which constitutes three-quarters of our Bible.

The centrality of the Word was a defining characteristic of the Kirk. This led our forebears to sing Scripture. The Psalms were the obvious choice – sung in the Temple, recited by Jesus on the cross, the foundation of the Daily Office, the Latin text and plainsong of the Pre-Reformation Church.

The Scottish Presbyterian love affair with the Book of Psalms is evident in the Scottish Metrical Psalter  which was used in the Kirk until the sixties. It  confirms our roots in Judaism and unites us with our cousins, the Jews. We are all sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And Jesus was a Jew.

In pre-Reformation Scotland, people like John Knox were asylum-seekers, exiled in Europe. There were Anglo-Scottish communities in various European cities like Frankfurt and Geneva. They got permission from the local magistrates to worship with their own liturgy and in their own language.

It was through the influence of the church in Geneva and its French Bible, liturgy and metrical psalms that the Kirk prepared its own resources. It was the experience of exile which provided not only a period of gestation but also interaction with the wisdom of other European people.

So the Scottish Psalter not only ties us into the worship of Judaism but also connects us to our brothers and sisters on the European continent. It is a book which has its origins beyond our shores in places where friendship and collaboration bring fresh vision and new hope to produce a veritable, Scottish work of art.