De Psalmen Davids ende andere lofsanghen (Datheen's Psalter)
De Psalmen Davids ende andere lofsanghen
Als een hert gejaagd, o Heere, / Dat verse water begeert, / Alzo dorst mijn ziel ook zere / Naar U, mijn God hooggeëerd.
Our renderingAs a hunted deer, O Lord, that longs for fresh water, so my soul thirsts sorely for you, my God most high.
What it is
The foundational metrical psalter of Dutch Reformed worship, Datheen translated the 1562 Genevan Psalter (Marot/Beza texts, Bourgeois melodies) into Dutch, binding it together with the Heidelberg Catechism and liturgical formularies as a single church handbook. The Convent of Wesel (1568) mandated it throughout all Netherlands churches, and successive synods (1574, 1578, 1618) continued to require its use. It remained the official sung psalter of the Dutch Reformed church until 1773, meaning every Orange-Nassau stadhouder from William the Silent through William III worshipped and sang from this book across multiple generations. Datheen had complex relations with William the Silent—he opposed the prince's irenic religious policy—yet the psalter he produced became the sonic fabric of Orange-Nassau court chapel and household devotion.
Why it still matters
The Genevan Psalm tunes Datheen translated are still sung in Dutch, South African, and North American Reformed congregations; Psalm 42 ('Als een hert gejaagd') retains particular resonance as a personal lament and longing for God and can be sung or prayed daily.
Kept alongside
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe (The Wilhelmus)
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe
The 15-stanza hymn whose acrostic spells 'Willem van Nassov,' composed in the voice of William the Silent as a first-person confession of faith and loyalty to God above earthly rulers. Marnix, William's personal secretary, is the traditional attributed author, but authorship remains actively disputed: a 2016 computational stylometric analysis attributed the text to Petrus Datheen rather than Marnix, and the scholarly consensus treats authorship as unresolved. The text fuses the psalmic idiom with Reformed theology, expressing personal dependence on God in the midst of political and military danger. The Valerius edition (1626) gave the hymn the slow, solemn musical setting it retains today as the world's oldest national anthem.
Genevan Psalter (Pseaumes de David / Psaumes mis en rime françoise)
The complete 150-psalm psalter completed under Calvin's direction in Geneva in 1562, with metrical French texts by Marot and Beza set to tunes primarily by Loys Bourgeois, and the direct source from which Datheen's Dutch psalter was translated. William the Silent was a French-speaking prince and Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde—his closest advisor and the translator of the Dutch psalter—studied directly under Calvin and Beza in Geneva, making familiarity with the French psalter highly probable in Francophone Orange circles. The Genevan tunes passed wholesale into the Dutch Reformed church and remain the melodic backbone of Dutch Reformed psalmody to the present day. Court worship in the bilingual Orange household plausibly drew on both the French original and the Dutch translation, though no document specifically records French psalter use in the Orange court chapel.
Genevan Psalter (complete edition: Marot and Beza; German: Lobwasser Psalter 1573)
The Genevan Psalter was created under Calvin's supervision beginning in 1539, using verse translations by the French court poet Clément Marot — who had sung psalms at the court of Francis I — and completed by the theologian Théodore de Bèze with the full collection of 150 in 1562. Its distinctive and memorable melodies, composed or adapted by Louis Bourgeois and others under Calvin's direction, spread Reformed congregational song from Geneva throughout France, the Low Countries, and eventually Germany. Ambrosius Lobwasser's 1573 German translation retained the Genevan tunes, making it the standard hymnal for German Reformed churches and courts for more than two centuries. The Psalter was by definition a public, congregational text: its melodies were known and sung across all social levels in Reformed territories.