Are Psalms 23 and 24 both by David according to their prefixes?

Question

Psalm 23 begins with the annotation:

מזמור לדוד

While Psalm 24 begins with a similar, but slight different one:

לדוד מזמור

Yet both are marked in the NET (and elsewhere) as "A psalm of David". I don't know Hebrew at all, so I'm wondering - does the word order affect the meaning here at all? Is it reasonable still to conclude that they are both presuming to be written by David?

Answer 1

מזמור = "psalm"

לדוד = "of David"

The order doesn't matter. If you wanted to translate the slight difference, you could translate one as "a psalm of David" and the other as "one of David's psalms." For what it's worth, "David" comes first in Psalms 24, 40, 68, 101, 109, 110, 139. The word "psalm" comes first in the other 28 usages. Thus the order found in Psalm 23 is four times more frequent than the reading in Psalm 24, but the word order found in Psalm 24 is hardly abnormal. Remember that Psalms is a book of poetry, and lots of things are done for poetic effect.