The LORD is my shepherd
Few images from the Bible are more well known than the poetic opening of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” Equally, few images are more widely . The problem is that shepherds, once common, are now rare.
We likewise find a problem with kings. The word “king” appears thousands of times in the Bible, usually in reference to human kings, sometimes refer to God. However, while we still have kings now—in Morocco and Sweden, for example, and potentially in England—the role of kings has changed.
In the last chapter, we saw the power of using a word symbolically. The Hebrew levav literally meant “heart,” but it did not represent the same constellation of concepts as the English “heart.” That’s why “heart” is a terrible translation for levav. In the case of “shepherd” and “king,” we see a slightly different problem.
The reader may remember from Chapter 2 that there are at least two ways to use a word nonliterally.
The first is general figurative usage, in which a speaker or writer spontaneously expands the meaning of a word. This is how the “stationary” of “stationary booths” came to mean what it does now. This is also what happens when a waiter says that “the corned-beef sandwich needs more milk.” And it’s what happens when someone says that the “president is the CEO of the country.”
The second way usually begins with the first, and it’s when a word acquires a second definition. This is what we see with “stationary” and “stationery” in modern English. Neither word has anything to do with the other. It’s what we see in “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” And it’s what we saw in the last chapter, with levav. The word levav has two meanings, “heart” (the organ) and “everything intangible about life.”
By comparison, we have a word in English, “pastor.” Originally that word, too, meant “shepherd.” The early expansion of the word was of the first variety. A spiritual leader was considered a shepherd over people, guiding people and tending to their needs the way a shepherd does for sheep. Over time, the word moved from the first category to the second. A “pastor” is now almost always a member of the clergy.
For that matter, we could go back even further, when shepherd—from the words “sheep” and “herd”—was a herder of sheep. The word progressed in meaning from “herder of sheep” to “herder of sheep and/or sheeplike animals,” such as goats, perhaps, or even cows.
Chapter 4 was concerned with one example of what goes wrong when we don’t recognize the second way the meaning of words can expand: There, translators failed to take into account the meanings that the words levav and nefesh had acquired. In this chapter, we return to the first way—that is, general figurative usage. The Hebrew word in Psalm 23, ro’i, does literally mean “my shepherd.” Unlike levav, it doesn’t have a second meaning. But the impact of the word is not the same as the English “shepherd.”
By way of example, we might consider Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” Like the Hebrew word for “shepherd,” the English word “sun” has only one meaning that we care about. Obviously, Juliet is not literally the sun. Rather, she is like the sun in some way that is both poetic and clear to people who know English.
The sun has a variety of qualities. For example, it’s too hot to support life. Its rays damage human tissue. It causes sunburns and skin cancer. It is the most massive object most humans will ever see. And so forth. Yet certainly Shakespeare does not mean that Juliet is dangerous, damages people, or is the fattest woman Romeo will ever see.
Rather, the poetry builds on a whole system of metaphors in English. Light is good. Darkness is evil. The sun represents the best qualities of light and the absence of the worst qualities of darkness. The famous song “You Are My Sunshine” works the same way, and it makes sense only through the same set of images.
It’s not difficult to imagine a society in which the “sun” is a symbol not of beauty but rather of destructive power. In fact, we see just this imagery in Psalm 121, where God is a “shadow” (usually translated “shade” or “protection”) so that the “sun will not kill you.” (In different contexts, the sun in the Bible is also a symbol of eternity.)
So “Juliet is the sun” really means that Juliet is like the sun only in the ways that our society uses the metaphor of “sun.”
Similarly, “the Lord is my shepherd” means that the Lord is like my shepherd in certain ways, this time determined not by our culture but by the culture of the Bible. Our task is to figure out what those ways are, and then figure out if we have a way of expressing them in English. As we look into “shepherd,” we will also look at other words used to describe God.
Before we get started we need a bit of Hebrew grammar to help us understand the words here. The Hebrew word for “shepherd” is ro’eh. In Hebrew, the suffix -i means “my,” and when the suffix attaches to a word that ends in a vowel sound, that sound frequently drops out. So “my shepherd” in Hebrew is the one word ro’i. The vowel sound at the end of ro’eh (-eh) drops out when the suffix -i is added to the word. In Psalm 23 we find the word ro’i.
Shepherds in the Bible
Shepherds used to be commonplace. Every community had livestock that lived in herds—primarily sheep and goats—and therefore had someone in charge of the herds. That person was the ro’eh.
Our first warning sign that something has gone wrong in the translation is that a common, familiar word like ro’eh has been translated as a rare, unfamiliar one. While “ro’eh” was common in Hebrew, “shepherd” is uncommon in English. We know that this is always a mistake. We also know that sometimes this sort of mismatch results in only a slightly wrong translation, but sometimes it misses the mark completely. Here we have the latter.
To understand why the mistake is so serious, we have to look at how ro’eh is used elsewhere in the Bible.
Exodus 2:16– 20 is a good place to start. The priest of Midian had seven daughters who were tasked with drawing water and filling troughs so that their father’s flock could drink. But they had a problem in the form of shepherds who would come and drive them away from their work. Moses rescues the daughters from the shepherds, helps provide water for the flock, and saves the daughters so much time that they return early to their father, who wonders how it is possible for his daughters to come home so quickly. Their father is so impressed with the man who helped them that he has Moses brought before him and, as a token of appreciation, offers Moses his daughter Zipporah.
Using a daughter as a thank-you gift violates American social customs, but perhaps even more jarring is the image of the shepherds. They are fierce troublemakers. Moses demonstrates his courage by standing up not to a king, not to an armed warrior, but to a shepherd. The daughters even use the language: “[Moses] saved us from the shepherds.” Why would shepherds be so fearsome?
Next we look at Jeremiah 25:35, one of three verses in a row that have shepherds in them. In 25:35, one effect of God’s wrath is that “the shepherds shall have no way to flee.” (The Hebrew is considerably more poetic.) Conquering the shepherds is a sign of God’s power. This can only be because, as in Exodus 2, the shepherds themselves were mighty. The image in Jeremiah here is not one of God stepping on ants but rather of overpowering a mighty adversary. And this is confirmed in the second half of the verse—“. . . nor will the mightiest of the flock be able to escape”—where “the mightiest of the flock” is in parallel with “shepherds.” (The KJV translates “mighty” as “principal” here.) As we learned in Chapter 3, this is a good indication that shepherds were considered mighty.
In Jeremiah 49:19, the prophet Jeremiah quotes God, and we again see that shepherds are mighty: “Like a lion coming up from the thickets of the Jordan against a perennial pasture, I will suddenly chase Edom away from it [the Jordan]; and I will appoint over it [again, the Jordan] whomever I choose. For who is like me? Who can summon me? Who is the shepherd who can stand before me?” (NRSV). The verse sets the stage with the image of a lion, among the most powerful of animals. God is more powerful even than the lion. The second half of the verse is even more telling, describing in three ways how God is more powerful than a lion: “Who is like Me?” “Who will challenge Me?” And third, “Who is the shepherd who can stand up to Me?” So one of the ways of being mightier than a lion is being able to stand up to a shepherd. (The same language is repeated in Jeremiah 50:44.) In other words, God is stronger than a lion, and the proof is that even shepherds can’t match God’s strength.
Jeremiah 51:23, again describing God’s power, also uses three images: “I will shatter shepherds and flocks, shatter farmers and oxen, shatter captains and rulers.” The English doesn’t do justice to the Hebrew, because the Hebrew is particularly poetic, and because a full understanding of the words “captains” and “rulers” is intertwined with the details of the various leadership positions in ancient societies. Still, the overall image is clear. Shepherds are powerful enough that shattering them is a sign of might.
Ezekiel 37:24 builds on what we just saw. There, David is destined to be “king” and “shepherd”: “My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd” (NRSV). It doesn’t look quite like a parallelism—“David” is not parallel with “all [of them]”—so we shouldn’t jump the gun and assume that “shepherd” is like “king,” but certainly the two are compatible.
Amos has a particularly gruesome and graphic image. In Amos 3:12, the prophet describes the eventual salvation of the Israelites with a comparison: “As a shepherd rescues two legs and a bit of ear from the mouth of a lion, that is how Israel will be saved. . . .” So shepherds, apparently, challenged lions, successfully retrieving food from the lions’ mouths!
So far we’ve seen two aspects of shepherds. They are mighty, and they are regal. We see both images reinforced in Micah 5:5, which addresses a potential invasion by Assyrians: “If the Assyrians come into our land and tread upon our soil, we will raise against them seven shepherds and eight . . . rulers” (NRSV). Here we clearly have parallel structure. “Seven” is not the same as “eight,” but it is almost the same. Perhaps, in this metaphor, rulers are just a bit higher than shepherds (just as eight is a bit higher than seven), but more likely they are essentially the same here. And in Nahum 3:18 (“Your shepherds are asleep, O king of Assyria; your nobles slumber” [NSRV]), we once again see shepherds compared to nobility.
Song of Songs makes another element of shepherds clear: The shepherd in the Bible was a romantic figure. One of the most often-cited verses from Song of Songs is 2:16, dodi li va’ani lo, “My lover is mine and I am his. . . .” (Translations commonly soften the language, turning it into the less overtly sexual “my beloved,” a topic we address in the next chapter.) The line ends with two Hebrew words that describe “my lover,” and they are haro’eh bashoshanim, “who is a shepherd among flowers.”
The flowers are probably lilies of some sort, but their exact genus isn’t the point. They are a romantic image, like “roses” in English. And, more importantly, ro’eh is equally romantic. Song of Songs 2:16 is mirrored in 6:3: “I am my lover’s, and he is mine,” again with the addendum, “[he] who is a shepherd among flowers.” The same image of “shepherd among flowers” becomes even more overt in Song of Songs 4:5, where the hero extols the heroine with the words, “Your two breasts are like two fawns . . . that are shepherds among flowers.”
The word for “shepherds” here—ro’eh, as before—is usually translated as the verb “feed,” so that the fawns are “feeding among flowers.” That translation matches the Greek Septuagint, though the Greek there is frequently unreliable. (Some additional information about the Septuagint appears on page 212.) The translators of the Septuagint may have tried to avoid translating, “. . . like fawns that are shepherds.” They may have instead tried to figure out what fawns were most likely to be doing among the flowers. In so doing, though, the Greek translators, and the English ones after them, missed the general point that poetry frequently mixes images that don’t usually appear together. And they missed the specific point that the Hebrew word ro’eh is a romantic image, not merely an occupation.
Finally, when the heroine of Songs of Songs wants to find her lover, she pleads, “Tell me, you whom I love so dearly, where you shepherd [your flocks].” It’s hardly a mainstream romantic image now, but it was then.
So far, a reasonably clear, if perhaps surprising, picture emerges. The picture has four parts. First: Shepherds were fierce and noble.
They were like kings and other royalty. They were powerful. Crushing a shepherd was a sign of great strength, and shepherds were used to stave off invasion. Second: The job of a shepherd was to provide sustenance, care, and defense. Third: Shepherds were romantic. And finally: Shepherds were common.
Shepherds in America
None of those things is true about shepherds today. Ignoring for the moment the nearly total lack of shepherds in modern countries, we find that shepherds are considered meek, humble, powerless, and, perhaps the most prevalent image in America, not a part of mainstream society. Though some farmers are essentially shepherds, at least in part, we use the word “farmer” to mean someone who has a job working with animals, perhaps caring for them. We use “shepherd” primarily figuratively or in jest. (Try to get a job or a bank loan by listing “shepherd” as your current occupation and see what happens.)
In short, the only thing that the English “shepherd” and the Hebrew ro’eh have in common is that the job descriptions overlap. Even here, though, they aren’t identical. The job of modern shepherds in the modern world—again, to the extent that there are any—is to make sure the flocks stay in the right place and get food. In antiquity, the shepherd had to protect the flock from wild animals, too. In I Samuel 17:34–35, David brags to King Samuel about his prowess as a shepherd (already something that hardly resonates with modern Americans), claiming that he was in charge of the sheep. When a lion or bear came and snatched a sheep, he claimed that he would run after the wild animal, kill it, and rescue the poor sheep.
So even if we are talking about the actual job, “shepherd” might not be the right word for ro’eh. If we are talking about anything metaphoric, it is certainly wrong.
Do we have anything similar to a ro’eh in America? Nothing is a perfect match, but a variety of options point in the right direction.
“Marine” is partly the right image. Marines, at least stereotypically—and that’s what we’re talking about here—are strong, and their job is defense. It would be a symbol of great power if someone, or a deity, could cause marines to flee, as we saw regarding shepherds in Jeremiah 25. Similarly, as in Micah 5, a country might use marines in defense against an invader. On the other hand, marines’ main mode of operation is military in nature, while the same is not true of the ro’eh. Not only is the ro’eh not a military figure, but, unlike the marine, the ro’eh’s main job doesn’t involve conflict at all. So we reject “marine” but still try to remember that ro’eh shares with “marine” the qualities of bravery and might.
“Fireman” is another wrong but close option. Like the duties of the ro’eh (and marine) firefighting calls for physical prowess and bravery, and, like the ro’eh and unlike the marine, people see firemen in the normal course of life, not just in combat. And again like the ro’eh and unlike marines, firemen have a job that does not involve conflict, seldom involves violence, and includes significant civilian responsibilities. Still, firemen are also not like royalty. While everyone appreciates them after they have saved people from a building, they are not generally exalted the way the ro’eh was. So we reject “fireman,” too.
What about “lawyer”? At first glance, it seems to miss the mark completely. Lawyers, after all, are not known for being particularly strong. On the other hand, violence in America has almost completely been replaced by lawsuits. What once would have resulted in physical violence now usually ends up in court. Even retribution for the rare bit of overt violence is handed over to the lawyers. People preparing to fight one another amass lawyers these days. And, if pay scale is any indication, lawyers seem to be more valued by society than marines or firefighters. Being a lawyer is even a reasonable stepping-stone to the presidency. Is that like being royalty?
In a different direction, what about “lumberjack”? Lumberjacks are typically strong, have a job that doesn’t involve violence (at least not toward people or animals), and, like the ro’eh, even work outdoors. What about “cowboy”? Or “pilot”?
In yet a third direction, perhaps “doctor” or “nurse” is the right idea. After all, their job, like that of the ro’eh and unlike marines, is primarily one of caretaking. Or, sticking to the theme of animals, maybe “veterinarian” is better. What about “zookeeper”? Or, for that matter, what about “farmer”? While these all have a little merit, they fall short in terms of the physical attributes that a ro’eh seems to have embodied.
None of these options is right, but every one is better than “shepherd,” which, as we have seen, is completely wrong. And the various wrong options—particularly marine, fireman, and lumberjack—show at least one side of ro’eh that most people never consider because the role of shepherds has changed so much.
In addition, we have so far had no luck coming up with anything in modern society that has the regal flavor of ro’eh, a topic we turn to next. Because the ro’eh is like a king, we have to better understand what “king” meant in the Bible. Only then can we return to ro’eh and understand Psalm 23.
Unlike shepherds, there are still kings in mainstream Western society. His Majesty the King of Sweden personally hands out Nobel Prizes, for example. England had a king until recently, and might again someday; for now it has a queen, who is at least in principle the same as the king. Morocco has a king. So does Spain.
The Bible, too, speaks of kings, melechs in Hebrew. And they are no small matter. Two books of the Bible (probably originally one big book) are called “Kings,” and considerable attention is given to ascension to the throne, continuity, and so forth.
So at first, based on tradition and near consensus, it looks like the English word for melech is “king.”
But a closer look reveals that the issue is more complicated.
The most obvious quality of the ancient melech was his unsurpassed power. The king was the most powerful figure in a certain region.
We first come across kings in Genesis 14, where we find a variety of them waging war. So one function of the king was warfare. And we learn something else. It’s not clear if the events in Genesis 14 are meant to be historical or not—the fact that Sodom has a king whose name means “with evil” and Gomorrah has a king whose name means “with wickedness” suggests an allegorical bent to the narrative—but either way we learn that Sodom and Gomorrah each have a king. But Sodom and Gomorrah are cities. Jericho, too, had its own king. So did many other cities.
Nowadays, only countries have kings. (In fantasy, “realms” have kings,” a topic we’ll turn to in a moment.) We should not be surprised, of course, that kings were not in charge of countries in the Bible, for until recently there were no countries as we understand them. But here we have our first major problem. Most people nowadays understand that kings wielded absolute power over a certain region, but they radically misunderstand the nature of the region over which the kings ruled.
Some people compare ancient kings to the modern American president (and though the comparison misses a lot, it also has a lot to recommend it). But in some cases, a more accurate comparison would be to a mayor. This is our first obstacle to understanding what kings are—and the first reason not to use the English “king” for the Hebrew melech. Everyone believes that kings are more powerful than mayors, but they might be wrong.
The Egyptian Pharaoh is called “king” in the Bible. (Frequently it seems that a “king” is what he is, and “Pharaoh” is his name.) Certainly Egypt was larger than a city, and there were cities under control of the Pharaoh. Similarly, King Ahasuerus—who according to the Book of Esther reigned over Persia, and who is frequently equated with the Persian ruler Artaxerxes—ruled a region that extended beyond just Persia to some 127 regions. Jerusalem never had a king, but Judah and Israel did. Not every city had a king, and some kings ruled more than one city. So the situation is complex. We don’t need to understand the details to realize the mismatch between melech and “king.”
Another fact is easy to miss because we tend to pay it so little attention. Stories in the Bible frequently begin, “It was in the days of King So-and-so.” Just for example, the book of Isaiah begins, “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” The book of Ezekiel begins similarly. After a vague reference in Ezekiel 1:1 to the “thirtieth year”—of what we don’t know—Ezekiel’s first oracle is dated in 1:2: “In the fifth day of the month, which was the fifth year of king Jehoiachin’s captivity” (KJV).
The reigns of kings were used to reckon years.
For more exact references, the number of years after an event regarding the king was used. For example, I Kings 6:1 notes that Solomon began building the temple in the “fourth year of Solomon’s reign.” Or II Kings 3:1: “In the eighteenth year of King Jehoshaphat of Judah, Jehoram son of Ahab became king over Israel . . .” (NRSV). Or Ezra 6:15: “And this house was finished . . . in the sixth year of the reign of King Darius. . . .” Or even Esther 1:3: “In the third year of [King Ahasuerus’s] reign, he gave a banquet for all his officials and ministers.” (It is reasonable to ask why the king waited until his third year to throw what seems like an inauguration party.)
For this system of counting years to have worked, the reign of a king had to have been widely known and of great importance. Yet how many English readers of this book can name the current king of Sweden or Morocco or Spain, let alone previous monarchs? Most readers will know the name of the Queen of England, but probably not the year she ascended to the throne. (If you’re curious, it was on February 6, 1952, putting the publication of this book almost seventy years to the day from the rule of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain.)
On the other hand, most Americans know who was president during important events. (Some are trivially easy: The Kennedy assassination took place while Kennedy was president.) People who remember the attack on Pearl Harbor usually also know that Franklin Roosevelt was president at the time. The 9/11 attacks took place under the second President Bush. And so forth.
This is one reason we might want to consider translating melech as “president,” at least in America. To the extent that people in America always know who is president and, in general, use presidents to reckon years, the equivalent of melech in at least one regard is “president.”
As we just saw, some melechs were in charge of great swaths of land—empires, even—while others ruled over areas no larger than a city. For the last group, perhaps “mayor” is the right translation? Taking all of these together, what about “elected official”? One obvious objection is that kings weren’t elected. Do we care? Is (non)electedness an important part of melechness?
To look at it another way, even though the president of America is in charge of a large country, some very small countries have presidents, too. Micronesia (“The Federated States of Micronesia”) has a president who, like the American president, is both the chief of state and the head of government. But Micronesia has just over a hundred thousand citizens. And some presidents aren’t elected at all. The widely mocked president of Turkmenistan was what most people would call a dictator. Maybe “president” is right after all, so long as we don’t let the president of America define the role.
Or maybe we’re looking at the issue too narrowly. What about “CEO” for melech? Many CEOs wield more power than presidents, and like melechs, CEOs aren’t elected. And again like melechs, some CEOs are vastly more powerful than others.
But all of these miss another element of melechs. One role of the melech in the Bible was to provide justice and ensure the safety of the people. We see this from I Samuel 8:20, when the people of Israel demand a king for themselves. They want a king so that they will be like the rest of the nations, having a king “to judge” them and “to fight [their] battles.”
We learn more about what makes a good melech by looking at the description of King David in I Samuel 16:18. David is a musician, a man of war, wise, handsome, and God is with him. The list contains another phrase, gibor chayil, which fits into the same constellation of ideas, but which is hard to translate accurately: The word gibor is associated with valor, might, and military prowess. The word chayil is similarly used for physical might and, sometimes, specifically for “soldier” or “warrior.” But the word also has connotations of worthiness, propriety, and, more generally, worth, as in Proverbs 12:4. There the phrase eshet chayil, a “woman of chayil”—often translated a “woman of valor” or a “virtuous woman”—begins a poem celebrating the merits of women or, perhaps, a specific woman.
Jewish husbands traditionally recite this poem to their wives on Friday night over dinner as they welcome the Sabbath together, so among traditionally observant Jews the phrase eshet chayil is among the best known of the Bible. Modern Hebrew has preserved only the military aspect of chayil, and in Israel the word now means simply “soldier.” This narrowing of the meaning of chayil created a phrase in Modern Hebrew that most naturally refers to a mighty woman, so when the television series Wonder Woman aired in Israel, the translators called the program eshet chayil. Unfortunately, thousands of ultrareligious Jews, recognizing the phrase from their Sabbath ritual, tuned in, only to find a woman in her underwear.
Inasmuch as David is regarded as the king par excellence, we learn from the list of qualities in I Samuel 16:18—and from the narrative that follows, in which the various kinglike traits of David’s are demonstrated—what a king ought to be. Some of this confirms what we have already seen. The king is supposed to command the army and provide physical security, so being a “man of war” is helpful. The king is supposed to ensure justice, so being wise is good.
These two qualities—military ingenuity and wisdom—match what people in America have generally wanted in a president, though the trend is changing. Whereas the military used to be a path to the presidency, because people wanted a “man of war,” increasingly a degree in law or business is required of presidents.
But the match is only partial. Presidents are not expected to be musicians. Though many of them have been, their musical skills are not seen as part of the job of president, while just the opposite was true for David. First on the list of job skills was his ability to play music. The king was supposed to be artistic.
Two more qualities of the Biblical king separate the role from almost anything we have in modern culture.
The final element on the list in I Samuel 16:18 is that God is with David. The king was supposed to have a connection to God beyond that of ordinary people. Obviously, we don’t have space here for a full discussion of the role of God in the Bible, but we can note generally that kings were supposed to have a closer relationship to God than other people. Kings were a special kind of human.
Numbers 23:21 reinforces this connection between godliness and king-worthiness. In the second half of the verse, when Balaam blesses the people of Israel a second time, he proclaims: “The Lord their God is with them, and the sound of a king is among them.” (Our translation here ignores some details, like the Hebrew tru’ah, “sound,” which is in fact probably a specific kind of sound associated with war.) These two parallel lines follow another set of parallel lines in the first part of the verse: “He has not beheld misfortune in Jacob; nor has he seen trouble in Israel” (NRSV). There, two words for “saw,” two words for “evil,” and two words for “Israel” set the stage for a classical Hebrew poetic parallelism. It is in this context that Numbers 23:21 demonstrates that a connection to God was part and parcel of being a king.
Other kings, too, have God with them—for example, King Hezekiah in II Kings 18:7. (On the other hand, this privileged status was not reserved for kings. Moses has God with him. Bezalel, the Biblical artist par excellence, similarly has a connection with God that others do not.)
So the melech was supposed to be a different sort of person than other people. He was supposed to be not just royalty but also inherently royal. This is one of the biggest differences between the roles of president (at least in the United States) and king. Kings, even today, come from “the royal family.” They are treated differently than “ordinary people” precisely because they are not ordinary.
We don’t have anything like that in modern America, but some roles come closer than “president.” “Superstar” is an example. Actors, rappers, sports figures, and some others have an aura of “otherness” to them, and they are treated as somewhat of a different class than ordinary people. One way to see the difference between superstars and presidents is to look at the people who are second best, or third, or even tenth. The person who loses the presidential election is just an ordinary person. It takes the actual office of the president to confer the distinction of presidentiality. But even the person who loses a musical competition, or almost gets an Emmy, etc., can still be a star. We expect more of stars than we do of other people, and they are held to a higher standard. We scrutinize their behavior. Many people even strive to emulate them. It is in these ways that superstars are more like royalty than anyone else in the United States.
Kings Today
Other countries, of course, have actual royalty. We might reasonably ask if the Queen of England, for example, plays the same role in England that royalty played in the Bible. The answer is that even though British kings and queens are closer to Biblical kings than are American superstars, they are different enough that translating melech as “king,” even in modern British English, is inaccurate. In addition, citizens of the British Empire are lulled into thinking that they know what’s going on when they see the English word “king” for melech. At least in America we know that we don’t have kings. In England, and in most other countries in which a king (or queen) reigns, they have no such warning flag. That’s because the British monarch is essentially a powerless figurehead, whereas the melech of antiquity was just the opposite—the most powerful person in the area.
Beyond currently reigning foreign kings, in America we have at least two other reference points for “king”—and, unfortunately, neither of them helps us understand the Biblical melech.
Most Americans are at least passingly familiar with medieval European history, and the kings, castles, knights, etc., that in retrospect formed the glorious larger-than-life picture of life in Europe. “King Arthur” is a well-known figure. So are the “Knights of the Round Table.” In many ways, in fact, we are still living in the aftermath of the culture of medieval Europe. Chivalry, for example, was an invention of that time, and to this day the custom of opening doors for women forms part of American culture.
This context also gives us a framework for (wrongly) imagining what a melech was. Kings in the Bible, it’s easy for Americans to think, were probably like King Arthur. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that there was no King Arthur, the kings of medieval Europe were different from the melechs of the Bible: Medieval kings were judged by standards of chivalry—they jousted, lived in castles, fought in the name of Jesus Christ, and so forth. (Some popular notions about medieval kings are inaccurate, but they nonetheless contribute to how people understand the word “king.”) These differences between famous figures like King Arthur and the Biblical kings lead those who read the word king in the Bible astray.
So trying to understand melechs by comparing them to medieval kings doesn’t help. That’s one false clue modern readers have.
Kings and Dragons
The second false clue is even worse. Most readers are familiar with mythic, fictitious kings from fables. These are the “rulers of the realm,” and they inhabit fantasy worlds where they slay dragons and save women stuck in towers, escape from dungeons, and so forth. Most people have no trouble keeping in mind that stories like these are not real. But it is more difficult to know that the word “king” in these stories is different than the word “king” in Bible translations.
So in the end, modern American readers have three reference points for “king”: currently reigning kings, who are powerless figureheads; medieval kings; and fictitious kings. Of the three, medieval kings come closest to the ancient melech, but only because “powerless figurehead” and “pretend” are so very far away from the ancient reality.
More About Biblical Kings
So we go back to I Samuel 16:18, which describes the king as “musician, man of war, wise, handsome, and with God.” Certainly, this was at least somewhat of an exaggeration. And we know from descriptions of other kings in the Bible that kings frequently fell short of the ideal. But we see what a king was supposed to be. The king was supposed to provide for security against internal threats (by administering justice) and external threats (by maintaining an army). And the king was supposed to ensure prosperity. In this regard, the king was more like an ancient pharaoh (whom the Bible even calls “king”) or like a Roman emperor than anyone we call “king” now.
The next line of I Samuel brings our discussion full circle. I Samuel 16:18, as we have seen, describes David’s qualities and why he would make a good king. In 16:19 we learn that David is “with the sheep.” That is, he is a shepherd.
This line further demonstrates the close connection between ro’eh and melech. They are both in charge of a group and, in particular, in charge of ensuring the safety of that group from within and from without. And they were both held in high esteem.
All of this brings us back to Psalm 23. We know that “The Lord is my shepherd” suggests all of the wrong images and none of the right ones. The modern “shepherd” conveys a marginalized loner who spends more time with sheep than with people. The original model was a brave, strong, valiant, regal protector of the weak, providing safety and food and ensuring tranquillity.
One very tempting translation is: “The Lord is my knight in shining armor.”
It’s a cliché, but the reference of the cliché is almost exactly what we need. (Though the imagery in the cliché is of knights, which no longer exist, the cliché itself is commonly used for real things, so it doesn’t suffer from the problems that we saw with “king.”)
The “knight in shining armor” is someone who comes in to save the day, someone who can be trusted, someone who is invincible. And it’s generally someone who has a certain romantic appeal, like David (who was handsome) and like the shepherds in Song of Songs.
“Knight in shining armor” is, unfortunately, completely the wrong register and also seems too fanciful, so we reject that translation, too.
Other words capture some of what a ro’eh was: “The Lord is my captain.” “The Lord is my teacher.” “The Lord is my parent.” And so forth. In the end, though, nothing matches everything we need. We don’t have anything like a ro’eh anymore. We don’t have any job or position or role that includes the crucial aspects of a ro’eh: might, bravery, romance, and exalted social position.
Nor does moving away from nouns toward other parts of speech help. (Remember from Chapter 3 that we don’t always need to translate nouns as nouns.) “The Lord is valiant.” “The Lord is brave.” “The Lord protects me.” “The Lord guides me.” Nothing conveys the package that was the ro’eh.
We shouldn’t be surprised by how hard it is to find an English word for ro’eh. Consider going the other way. How might we say “brain surgeon” in ancient Hebrew? How would we translate the phrase “It’s not brain surgery”? They had (almost) no surgery in ancient Israel, and they didn’t know that the brain was where thinking took place. So certainly the literal “brain surgeon,” even it were possible (there’s no ancient Hebrew word for “surgeon”), would be completely wrong. “Brain doctor” would be no better. “Doctors” back then were people who usually failed. “Magician”? “Miracle worker”? No one in antiquity could amass the amount of knowledge and training that brain surgery requires. (We’ll see in Chapter 8 that most ancient life spans were too short to allow for what we now consider a specialized medical education.)
The only way to convey “brain surgeon” would be to carefully spell out the relevant implications, perhaps with a background on the culture. That’s what we’ve done with ro’eh, carefully looking at the qualities of the ro’eh. But nothing in modern American English comes close.
So any translation we come up with will be deficient. But “shepherd” is nowhere near the top of the list of reasonable choices. It’s not just incomplete; it’s massively inaccurate.
If we choose a more general word, we can at least avoid some of the mistaken impressions. “Hero” is a word that comes to mind. It’s not as poetic as ro’eh was, because ro’eh is more specific than “hero.” But it’s also not as wrong as “shepherd” is, because shepherds, as we have seen, have only one relatively unimportant quality in common with ro’ehs: They both work with sheep.
If we use “hero,” we can at least try to make sense of the rest of the Psalm.
The second half of the opening line reads, “I will lack nothing” or “I will not lack.” It’s hard to choose between them, because what we really want is something in the middle. We want something not quite as chatty as “I will lack nothing” but not so formal as “I will not lack.” We arbitrarily pick “I will not lack,” giving us: “The Lord is my hero and I will not lack.” (Let’s be clear, though. This isn’t a very good translation. It’s just the best we have.)
In other words, God will give me protection, guidance, security, and safety—like a ro’eh—so I’ll have everything I need and I won’t have to worry about anything. The nuance of “my ro’eh,” not just any ro’eh, adds the refinement that even though we all have the same God, God’s work will be tailored to me.
The second line starts with a “shepherding” verb, hirbitz. The common translation “makes me lie down” misses the point that hirbitz is most naturally associated with shep herding. In Song of Songs 1:7, hirbitz is in parallel with the verbal form of ro’eh, as if hirbitz meant “to shepherd.” In Isaiah 13:20, the description of desolated land is that “ro’ehs won’t hirbitz there.” And Jeremiah’s vision (in 33:12) of the restoration of desolate land is that “ro’ehs will hirbitz the flock.” Ezekiel 34:15 puts the two words directly in parallel, “I [God] will shepherd my flock and I will hirbitz them.”
Just as the point of the first line has nothing to do with sheep, the point of the second line has nothing to do with the verb related to sheep. Sheep are incidental. (This is like “He’s no brain surgeon,” which has nothing to do with surgery.) Coming after ro’eh as it does, hirbitz is exactly the verb we would expect. It adds nothing new. Rather, the new information is “in pastures,” a concept that is refined in the second part of the line, which adds, “by tranquil water.” So while the first line sets the stage of God as “my valiant protector,” the second line explains what God will do: bring me to the tranquillity of a meadow, perhaps with a quiet bubbling brook. We can keep the metaphors of pastures and water—even though they are more closely related to ro’eh than to “hero”—using something like the KJV: “He lets me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.”
But even here we have a dilemma, because in the context of Psalm 23, a green pasture is a particularly poetic place. It’s a place of serenity but also a potentially dangerous one. It is only the ro’eh that keeps it tranquil.
Brilliantly, the psalm then seamlessly abandons the sheep metaphor while still keeping the metaphor of the ro’eh—that is, the hero. By the fourth line—“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil . . .” (NRSV) or “Even when I walk through a dark valley, I fear no harm . . .” (NAB), both reasonable translations—we find truly human emotions such as fear and the potent symbol of darkness. The symbolism is even more powerful in the original Hebrew, where “darkest valley” is literally (as in the KJV) the “valley of death.” Even better would be “the Valley of Death” or “Death Valley.” Yet the end of the fourth line—“. . . your rod and your staff comfort me”—maintains the image of the ro’eh.
At this point we realize the futility of translating the poem into English. By line four, we need a translation of ro’eh that covers everything we have seen—might, bravery, etc.—but that also works with a staff and a rod! This is why most translations are forced to stick with the terrible translation “shepherd.”
But the psalm is not about shepherds. It is about supreme might, protection from safety, gallant heroism, and the nearness of God even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The shepherd imagery is just the canvas upon which the poetry is painted.
In this regard, our investigations into ro’eh and melech show us something fundamental about looking at Bible translations. Biblical passages frequently have important parts and also less important parts that serve to bind the key points together. By way of comparison, we might once again imagine translating a modern English passage into ancient Hebrew. Something as simple as “I remember the first time I landed in a Communist country” is surely about Communism, culture clashes, etc. But to an ancient reader, all of that would be overshadowed by “landed.” A human landed? A human was flying? It must be a miracle!
Just as it would be hard for an ancient reader to ignore the “landed” bit and focus on the Communism, in Psalm 23 it’s hard for modern readers to ignore the shepherd bit and focus on the real point. More generally, when we read the Bible we have to be careful not to get caught up in the wrong details.
In the next chapter, we will see another glaring mistranslation that draws our attention away from a fundamental and timeless message.