Late Night the Shepherd Psalm

In its own century

Put the translations side by side and the same verse arrives differently each time. One is soft, another is severe, and the original is a third thing that is neither. That difference is itself a way in.（歴代志上 24:19）

• How I finally made peace with a passage I avoided for years.
• Written out of a failed attempt to explain this passage to a child.
• A by-product of sermon preparation, reworked into something readable.
• A direct look at the part of this text that rarely gets preached.

Anticipating the objection

A short detour. There is a passage elsewhere with the same shape though no direct connection, and setting them next to each other makes the writers' different concerns visible.（列王紀下 15:33-38）

• One verse, read slowly, with one word held up to the light.
• I stopped here in the middle of a read-through, and wrote from the stopping.
• An attempt to read a famous passage all the way through without lifting it out of context.
• A by-product of sermon preparation, reworked into something readable.

Following the context

Pull a single verse out of its paragraph and you can make it say almost anything. This particular verse has been made to say a great deal. Which is precisely why it deserves to be read with what stands on either side of it.（箴言 19:15）