In my reading today of Rolf Rendtorff’s The Old Testament: An Introduction, the following on page 246 stood out to me:
The book of Psalms (tehillim, ‘songs of praise’, LXX [psalmoi]) consists of a collection of psalms of very different genres from very different periods of the history of Israel. Many of them originally had particular functions in the temple in Jerusalem (e.g. hymns of different kinds, popular lamentations, royal psalms); others accompanied the cultic acts of individual Israelites (individual lamentations and thanksgivings); yet others are to be regarded more as religious poems without a particular place in the cult (e.g. individual hymns, wisdom psalms).
This addresses a question that a professor said might be on my Hebrew Bible comp: What is a psalm?