Psalm 23

What Psalm 23 is actually about

It is a shepherding psalm written by someone who had done the job. That matters, because sheep are not a flattering metaphor. They are defenceless, they wander, and they will not lie down while they are frightened. The psalm isn't claiming the speaker is admirable. It's claiming he is looked after.

The rod and the staff in verse 4 are working tools, not comforting symbols. A rod was a club for driving off predators; a staff was the crook for hauling a sheep back out of a gully. The comfort on offer is active shepherding — someone doing something — rather than soothing words.

“The valley of the shadow of death”

This is the line people search for on its own, and it carries more weight than the rest of the psalm put together.

The Hebrew behind it, tsalmaveth, is a compound of shadow and death, and the standard Hebrew lexicon glosses it as “death-like shadow, deep shadow” — which is why it is often read as deep darkness as much as literally death's shadow. Both readings survive in English translations, and both are defensible. Either way the valley is a place you are passing through, and the psalm is unusually careful about that: through the valley. Not stuck in it. Not spared it.

The other thing worth noticing is a change in grammar. For the first three verses God is spoken about in the third person — he makes me lie down, he leads me, he restores. From verse 4 it switches to direct address: you are with me. The psalm gets more intimate at exactly the point it gets darkest. That's not an accident, and it's the strongest argument in six verses that the darkness is not evidence of absence.

The last verse has the covenant word in it

Open the King James toggle on verse 6 and read the two endings side by side. The older translation has goodness and mercy; the modern one has goodness and loving kindness. That is not two different nouns in the Hebrew. It is one word, chesed, and it is the same word our page on gratitude is built on — the one the King James renders “mercy” a couple of hundred times over because no single English word has ever held it. It means something closer to loyalty inside a commitment than to kindness in general.

Now put it beside the verb, which is the other thing people miss here. Radaph is not a gentle word: it is the verb for pursuing, the one used of armies. So the last line of the psalm is not goodness ambling along behind you. The thing chasing you down is the covenant word — and it is worth noticing that the psalm which opens with a shepherd ends with a pursuit.

One more thing in the same verse, and this one we cannot settle for you. Both translations here end with forever. The Hebrew is le'orek yamim, literally for length of days — a phrase built out of the ordinary word for day. Readers have taken it as an idiom for endless time and as a way of saying “as long as I live”, and both of our translations happen to take the same side of that, so this is one of the rare places on this site where printing both versions shows you nothing. The phrase is about days. What it is measuring is the open question.

Why it's read at funerals

Because of verse 4, mostly. But it's worth saying that Psalm 23 is not really a psalm about dying. One line of six mentions death's shadow; the rest is grass, water, food, oil and a house to live in. It is overwhelmingly a psalm about being kept alive and looked after.

That's probably why it works at a graveside better than passages actually written about death. It doesn't argue anyone out of their grief or explain the loss. It just describes being accompanied, and then keeps going.

If you're looking for something to read to someone rather than about someone, the verses for grief and loss page has more that make no demands of the person hearing them.

Using it

Both texts above are in the public domain — the King James by age, the modern rendering by the translators' choice. You can put either on an order of service, a card or a wall without asking anyone. That's deliberate on our part: most modern translations are licensed, which is why so many sites show you three verses and a permissions notice.

Where you've heard it

Very few Bible passages have leaked into general English the way this one has. The phrase the valley of the shadow of death is now used constantly by people who have no idea they are quoting a psalm, which is a decent measure of how far it has travelled.

Some of where it turns up:

• Coolio, “Gangsta's Paradise” (1995) — the song opens on verse 4 almost verbatim, then turns it to describe a neighbourhood rather than a graveside. It is probably how a whole generation first met the line.
• 2Pac, “So Many Tears” (1995) — the same verse in the same year, logged as a direct lift from the psalm.
• Kanye West, “Jesus Walks” (2004) — the valley line again, relocated to Chicago.
• Pale Rider (1985) — a girl recites the psalm after her dog is killed and argues with it as she goes: “I shall not want.” But I do want. “He restoreth my soul.” But they killed my dog. One of the more honest uses on film, and much closer to how the psalms actually behave than a reverent reading would be.

Worth noticing what almost all of these have in common: they take verse 4 and leave the sheep, the green pastures and the overflowing cup behind. The psalm's reputation rests on its darkest line, which is the opposite of how it is actually weighted.