The Lord Is My Shepherd (Touchstone Texts)

Psalm 23 for the Life of the Church

Briggs, Richard S., Chapman, Stephen B.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493432127
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Academy of Parish Clergy 2022 Top Five Reference Book There are few biblical texts more familiar to Christians than Psalm23: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want..." It is one of the Bible's most popular passages, retaining a special place in ministry and giving hope to the burdened. Internationally recognized Old Testament scholar Richard Briggs helps readers understand the power and vision of Psalm23. He offers a close word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase reading of this classic and beloved text, showing how it can speak afresh to the life of the church today. Briggs explores the reception of Psalm23 down through the ages, covers background issues, and examines the ways the psalm addresses practical issues such as stress, death, enemies, and hope. The book helps reconnect the Christian church to the Old Testament, making it perfect for sermon preparation and small group study. The Touchstone Texts series addresses key Bible passages, making high-quality biblical scholarship accessible to the church. The series editor is StephenB. Chapman, Duke Divinity School.

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Introduction

On Attending to Psalm 23

■ “The LORD Is My Shepherd; I Shall Not Want”

The opening verse of the Twenty-Third Psalm is a famous statement of confidence and trust. Cited here in its familiar King James idiom, the declaration resounds that the Lord God is concerned with me personally, as my shepherd, and that my needs will therefore be met. Questions of technical complexity—history, hermeneutics, scholarly commentary—take a back seat in the first flowering of the joy of a plain reading: the Lord is my shepherd. Only professional biblical scholars would have thought otherwise. For multitudes of readers and hearers over many centuries, it is the emotive uplift of this great opening verse that rings loud and clear. All is well and all shall be well. God is good . . . even specifically to me.

Students and ministers trained by long years of hard engagement with the works of biblical studies may be expecting a “but . . .” You may anticipate, dear reader, that after this heartwarming opening focus I shall immediately cut across your desires for spiritual edification and theological encouragement with some such statement as “But such simple reading fails to take into account all the interpretive complexities with which one must wrestle.” Then this deflationary moment would be followed by page after page of slowly removing the text from the realms of joy or reassurance and leaving it stranded millennia ago under layers of reconstructed history or learned discussions of shepherding practices in the ancient Near East. There would perhaps be opportunity, too, for those most disheartening of scholarly observations: that our familiar and much-loved translations are mistaken, that the text never really said that, and so forth.

As the apostle Paul might have said, By no means! The purpose of this book is not to lose that first joyful plain-sense reading. Instead I affirm: the basic contours of the traditional understanding of Psalm 23 have not led us astray. I have no new discoveries that will show that everyone before me was wrong about this text—which would in any case be a problematic thing to claim in many ways, including theologically. More to the point, I also have no new, grand theories of historical reconstruction that will not so much discover the text anew as invent a framework for reading it. One of the points I want to make in this book is that a great deal of scholarly reflection on Psalm 23, especially in the twentieth century, is best filed under “speculation” rather than “serious historical research.” Speculation can be useful, as when, for instance, it provokes us to look afresh for different kinds of supporting evidence that open up new lines of inquiry. But in my judgment, to be defended as we go, the multiple scholarly hypotheses about the setting and purpose of Psalm 23 have been supported by almost no evidence at all. Reflecting on these so-called advancements, I have felt that one purpose of this book is to set the study of Psalm 23 back about one hundred to one hundred fifty years, which is when it began to go off the rails. Of course there was insight and progress in that time. But as we will see, there was also a lot of unsupported conjecture, and I want to scrape much of that away.

By way of contrast, the purpose of the kind of biblical scholarship I pursue here is to allow the picture that Psalm 23 actually paints to shine forth more clearly and constructively. We will seek a full, imaginative, and serious engagement with the psalm’s words and phrases, its images and its own imaginative vision, in order that we might hear it in all its widescreen wonder.1 Let me introduce a spoiler of sorts: I will argue that Psalm 23 encourages us to rejoice that the Lord is our shepherd, who accompanies us both beside quiet waters and through the valley of the shadow of death. We will reflect on paths of righteousness, or perhaps rightness, and on goodness and mercy. In some cases, such as with the “valley of the shadow of death,” I will work hardest at the scholarship of what these words mean precisely because I think that the traditional understanding has merit in spite of what several scholars have said in the intervening centuries. Overall this book will provide encouragement to those who wonder if the interpretive paths on which readers have trodden over the centuries are the right ones. The short answer is yes, they are. A longer answer would add, “more or less.”

Perhaps, though, the paths have become so well worn that their full impact is sometimes missed. One aspect of our task is therefore to refresh our grasp of what Psalm 23 says and to hear it anew, and perhaps more clearly. This is not to hear it “as if for the first time,” since as with all good poetry a first hearing is rarely the most significant one. Nor is it necessarily to hear it as having a different intent, although obviously that will depend on how any given person has heard it before. Images that get close to what we are seeking here include the renewed freshness of hearing after one has had an ear blockage removed and the ears are syringed clean, the clarity of sight that follows a new prescription of correctly specified glasses, or the joy of hearing a remastered Beatles album that reveals notes and nuances missed on a scratched and much-loved old copy. Young readers may find all these examples mystifying. So it is also like seeing an Avengers film in the movie theater when you have only seen it previously on your phone or meeting a good friend face-to-face whom you have only been able to engage with online. In none of these cases is the project one of suddenly realizing that one had it all wrong, but in each case there is learning and recalibration of the insights that made the experience valuable in the first place and a deeper entry into the joy and wonder of the whole experience.

The process I have been describing is a hermeneutical engagement with Scripture that seeks a so-called second naivete—that sense of coming fresh (“naively”) to the text with eyes alert and with critical insight harnessed to know what to look for and what to appreciate in an imaginative and serious reading of what the text says. The contrast is with all those other fascinating approaches that major on what the text does not say, or why it says what it says, and so forth. Those approaches do indeed have their place, but I seek to prioritize this critically refreshed (“second”) naivete.2

If I labor the point, it is because modern biblical studies has often majored on critical reconstruction of much-loved texts with scant regard for its resultant trampling over much-loved understandings. Of course, this is sometimes necessary, and for some texts there have indeed been major shifts in knowledge and understanding that render former readings untenable. In my opinion, this has happened rather less than one might think from the tenor of a lot of academic biblical studies, and indeed a lot of teaching of biblical studies even in faith-based contexts. As a result, there is real work to be done in reconnecting the scholarly bricks and mortar of critical study with the living and breathing faith of thoughtful readers (Christian and Jewish) down through the ages.

Whether we are therefore engaging in “theological interpretation,” “spiritual reading,” or pursuing the “plain (or literal) sense of the text” is a matter of how useful such labels are for whatever purposes are at hand. What really does matter is that the integrative work is done that brings together critical attention to the details of the text, on the one hand, with thoughtful reflection on life and faith on the other. Theological preunderstanding need not trump exegesis, nor vice versa. Holding this balance in a productive dialogue turns out to be a challenging but life-giving task. As I have sometimes expressed it to students nearing the end of taking classes in Old Testament: the task is “simply” to pay attention to what the text says, but it turns out that few tasks are as difficult to do well as paying attention to what the text says. This is in part because of the wide range of questions that immediately rush in once one takes seriously the ancient horizon of the text, the present horizon of the reader, and the intervening centuries with all their own views of what the “simple/plain understanding” might be. But all of this is recognizably different from spending our time guessing about how and when and why our featured text came to be written.

Attending to Psalm 23 in this way, with intellectual-spiritual-theological-historical-critical seriousness, requires the best of us with regard to thinking about the psalm then and now, and also at times in between then and now. As a result, understandings of the psalm through history, and uses of it in liturgy and hymnody, can all make a positive contribution to our appreciation of the text and its function(s). All such receptions of the psalm need weighing, of course, and we will be doing that in the pages that follow. Likewise, detailed focus on the original context, meaning(s), and original function of the psalm are also important to weigh, even though the extent to which we can be sure about these proves to be rather limited.

There will be plenty of focus on the text itself in what follows. I have written the book to presuppose no knowledge of Hebrew. However, detailed study of a text originally written in Hebrew does require discussion of features of the language and how it works. I do try to explain what you need to know as we go along, and I am mindful, too, that readers with awareness of Hebrew will benefit from seeing the details explored. I even hope that readers with some dim and distant memory of studying Hebrew might be encouraged to refresh their skills. However, technical Hebrew classifications and issues are reserved in a brief appendix, for those with critically trained ears to hear.

Does detailed scholarly work turn any of our cherished readings of Psalm 23 upside down? Does it do so in practice, and could it do so in theory? My third chapter will engage in a careful critical reading of the text under the broad rubric sketched above—so this will be “critical” as in “attentive to detail.” But of course we read with awareness that traditional understandings may have been unhelpful or inadequate, and no matter how established a traditional reading might be, that should not exempt it from critical weighing. Now in theory I can conceive of a well-established reading being overturned, although it is worth reflecting on what such an overturning would say about centuries of earnest and already attentively critical reading.

Probably the clearest and least controversial example of such a scholarly shift has been with regard to authorship, since for reasons to be discussed in chapter 2 we should almost ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The World behind Psalm 23
• 3. The World in Psalm 23
• 4. The World in Front of Psalm 23
• 5. Conclusion
• Appendix: Notes: on Psalm 23 in Hebrew
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover