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Recently while studying Psalm 23, I learned something that surprised me: in Hebrew, shepherds don't herd their sheep — they feed them.

Adonai ro'i, "the Lord is my shepherd."

I was preparing some remarks to help send off our pastor for a three-month sabbatical, and I intended to draw from Psalm 23's famous first stanza:

Because I knew that our English word pastor comes from the Latin for "shepherd," I thought this was an especially appropriate passage for our pastor. And I thought I'd make a little joke and urge her to think of "the Lord as her pastor" during her sabbatical. So I went to the Vulgate (the ancient Latin translation of the Bible) just to double-check my little joke — and much to my surprise, I saw that they got it slightly wrong: the Vulgate doesn't use the noun for "shepherd" there, but uses a verb, saying something like, "The Lord puts me out to graze." That drove me back to the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which the Vulgate often depends upon), and sure enough: they had it wrong, too, in just the same way. So at this point I started to wonder whether maybe I was the one who had it wrong!

And indeed, once I went straight to the source (which perhaps I should have done from the outset), I saw that the Hebrew noun for shepherd in that line is indistinguishable from the participle of a verb meaning to pasture, tend, or graze. You might well translate (though a bit clumsily) that first line as: "The Lord is my pasturer." Far from "getting it wrong," the Greek and Latin cleverly picked up the verbal heart of the idea.

In other words, just as it sounds a bit circular — almost comic — for us to say in English, "the shepherd herds the sheep," so it would sound slightly circular for a Hebrew speaker to say "the shepherd feeds the sheep." For me, this idea of feeding at the core of the word shepherd in Psalm 23 came truly as a revelation. It helps me now to see much better how the concept of provision, feeding, and nourishment (not just gathering and safety) enters into the whole psalm — and indeed into Jesus' teaching about himself as a shepherd. See, for example, Rev. 7:16-17:.

Even though I thought Psalm 23 was ground grazed clean, there was fresh food in that very first line.

first published May 11, 2004