Very interesting; thank you.  What I was really after was the way either a Greek-speaking or Aramaic-speaking reader would verbally distinguish between the individual psalms.  For example, would he say, “Today, listen to Psalm 23?”  Or perhaps. “Today, I will read “The Lord is my Shepherd?”

In some of the dialogue in a story I am working on, characters frequently refer to the Psalms by means of the numbers assigned them in the King James.  Since the story is set about 50 CE, I assume these references are grossly anachronistic, but that won’t bother me if there is no evidence about how, say, Jesus’ brother James or St. Paul would have referred to them back then.   I would just use the traditional numbers in that case, since we don’t really know what they did.  I don’t read Greek well enough to try to research this myself.

Since you have reminded me, I have always wondered exactly what is meant by “Halleluyah (sic).  How would you render that in contemporary colloquial English?  Ain’t it wonderful?  Praise the Lord?

Robert said
I can’t think of any good books on this topic, but I will keep an eye out for such and let you know if I see any. Perhaps someone else can recommend one? Or maybe ask Bart. 

Most of what I have picked up over the years on this topic has been indirect and through accumulated observations. If you really wanted to dig into an academic treatment, Emmanuel Tov has an excellent introduction into text criticism, but I would not recommend it for general readers.

The Septuagint is ‘the’ translation of the the Torah, ie, only of the first five books, made around the middle of the 3rd-century BCE. The rest of the books were translated later at various times and with various versions. The most common Greek version of these other books is often also referred to as the Septuagint, but technically the legendary origins of the Septuagint only refers to the Torah. The last book written in the Jewish scriptures was the book of Daniel, written around the middle of the 2nd-century BCE, and there are two different complete Greek versions of Daniel that survive. So the dating of the writing of each of the Hebrew books can be compared with this time frame. There’s usually a fair amount of debate for dating each book or the various parts of some books.

Not sure if this is much help and maybe you already knew all of that!

  

Iksander may have known all that, but I sure didn’t.  Do you think a Greek version of the Psalms existed in the early First Century?  I hope so.