Six Verses, Spare in the Hebrew

Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, is probably the most widely known religious poem in the world, and it is only six verses long. Its Hebrew is famously spare in a way that English translation tends to inflate; the poem moves through two governing images, God as a shepherd who leads the flock to water and rest, and God as a host who spreads a table, and asks little more than that goodness and mercy should follow the speaker through life. The phrase the King James Version renders the valley of the shadow of death translates a Hebrew word that means, more plainly, deep darkness, and the poem's restraint is part of its power: it makes its confidence in the presence of danger without dramatising the danger.

Ascribed by tradition to David, though the ascription is not historically established, the psalm belongs equally to Jewish and Christian usage. In Judaism it is associated with the Sabbath afternoon and with funerals and memorial; in Christianity it is among the most common texts at funerals and in pastoral care, its shepherd read in the light of the Gospel image of Christ as the good shepherd. That a text so short and so quiet should have become the one religious poem that vast numbers of people across two traditions know by heart is itself a fact worth noting about what consoles.