Psalm 23

“The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” (Psalm 23:1)

Psalm 23 is an individual psalm of trust (see the sidebar “Psalms of Trust” in the unit on Ps. 16).[1] Psalms of trust arise out of some trouble that the psalmist has experienced, although we cannot always determine specifically what it was. Yet through this experience the psalmist has learned to trust in the Lord. Sometimes these psalms include a petition (e.g., 4:1, 6) and a vow to praise God (e.g., 16:7), but Psalm 23 contains neither. As Goldingay says, it is “radically a psalm of trust.”2 While we do not want to contrive canonical associations among the psalms, we do want to recognize, even insist, that the psalmists and the editors of the book worked with word and phrase associations, and sometimes a word or phrase was enough to place two psalms next to each other and proclaim a message that the compiler of the book wanted to get across. This is illustrated in the relationship of Psalms 22 and 23.

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