he believed that the majority of our extant psalms are post-exilic ‘spiritualized’ imitations of the earlier cultic psalms, and that they derived from small, more or less private ‘conventicles’ of pious laymen. He supposed that the many references to cultic matters in the Psalter were only metaphorical. As a result of the work of Mowinckel, however, this view is no longer generally accepted. The psalms are littered with cultic allusions, which only make sense if they were used in public worship in