1 Samuel 17:32-37 — The Shepherd Who Wrote It

FRANK EDWARDS: "The LORD is my shepherd." In Hebrew that is four short words, and today we find out where David learned them. Not in a temple, and not on a throne. In a field near Bethlehem, with a lion, and then in a king's tent in front of a frightened army, where a teenager explains to a king what a shepherd does. LINDA BROWN: Welcome to Dig Deeper. I'm Linda Brown, here with Frank Edwards, and this is step two of our sixteen steps through Psalm 23. Last time we read the whole psalm. Today we meet the man whose name sits at the top of it, years before he wrote a word of it. First Samuel chapter seventeen, verses thirty-two to thirty-seven. And David said to Saul, "Let no man's heart fail on account of this Philistine. Your servant will go and fight him!" But Saul replied, "You cannot go out against this Philistine to fight him. You are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth." David replied, "Your servant has been tending his father's sheep, and whenever a lion or a bear came and carried off a lamb from the flock, I went after it, struck it down, and delivered the lamb from its mouth. If it reared up against me, I would grab it by its fur, strike it down, and kill it. Your servant has killed lions and bears; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God." David added, "The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine." "Go," said Saul, "and may the LORD be with you." FRANK EDWARDS: Set the scene first. Two armies are camped on opposite slopes of the Valley of Elah. For forty days a Philistine champion named Goliath has walked out and shouted across the valley, "Why do you come out and array yourselves for battle?" Send one man to fight me, he says, and the loser's people serve the winner's. Nobody goes. First Samuel says, "Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and greatly afraid." David is not even a soldier. He is the youngest son, sent from Bethlehem with bread for his older brothers, and he ends up in front of the king. LINDA BROWN: David's first sentence to the king is not about fighting at all. It is about fear. "Let no man's heart fail on account of this Philistine." FRANK EDWARDS: Literally, let no man's heart fall. The Hebrew word for heart, lev, is the inner person, where courage is found or lost. A whole army has lost its nerve, and before David says anything about stones or swords he speaks to the fear. Hold on to that. In verse four of his psalm David will write, "I will fear no evil," and the reason he gives there is the same reason he gives here: who is with him. LINDA BROWN: Saul's objection has a sharp edge in Hebrew too, doesn't it? "You are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth." FRANK EDWARDS: The two words come from the same root. Boy is na'ar, a youth, and "from his youth" is built on the same word. A boy against a man who has been a soldier since he was a boy. The contest looks finished before it starts. Saul is measuring the two fighters. David is about to change what gets measured. LINDA BROWN: And he does it with his job description: "Your servant has been tending his father's sheep." FRANK EDWARDS: That answer is where today's line begins. "Tending" is ra'ah, to pasture, to feed a flock, and the word for shepherd in Psalm 23:1 is built on it. Ro'i, my shepherd, is literally "the one who pastures me." So David's reply to the king amounts to, I am a shepherd, and you do not know what that has involved. Years later he would turn the same word toward God. LINDA BROWN: Then he tells the king what it involved. "Whenever a lion or a bear came and carried off a lamb from the flock, I went after it." FRANK EDWARDS: Lions and bears lived in the land then. The prophet Amos could talk about a shepherd who "snatches from the mouth of the lion two legs or a piece of an ear," and expect every listener to know the scene. And look at what David risked his life for. One lamb. Most men would count the loss. This shepherd went after it, into the mouth of the animal that took it. "If it reared up against me, I would grab it by its fur." The Hebrew is literally its beard, the hair along the jaw. He took hold of it at the teeth. That is what "shepherd" meant to David when he wrote it: someone who goes after one lamb into the lion's mouth. LINDA BROWN: Then the same verb turns around. He "delivered the lamb from its mouth," and a verse later, "The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear." FRANK EDWARDS: The verb is natsal, to snatch away, to pull out of danger. David uses it for himself pulling a lamb from a lion, and then for God pulling him from the lion. In Hebrew "the claws" is literally the hand of the lion, and the very next phrase is "the hand of this Philistine," the same word. The rescuer had been rescued. The man who stood between his lamb and the lion had learned, out in that field, that someone stood between him and the lion. That is "The LORD is my shepherd," said in prose, in front of Saul. LINDA BROWN: Take the line apart, then. Four words, you said, and most people learned this line as children without ever hearing what sits underneath it. What are they? FRANK EDWARDS: The covenant name of God, which English Bibles print as LORD in capitals; then ro'i, my shepherd; then lo, not; then echsar, I lack. There is no word for "is." The line simply sets them side by side: the LORD, my-shepherd. Today is about the first half, and its first word is the name. God told Moses at the burning bush, "This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation." David does not say "a god is my shepherd." He says the God who rescued Israel from Egypt, the God who made a covenant with them, is his shepherd. LINDA BROWN: That is the name David uses in front of Saul, too. "The LORD, who delivered me." FRANK EDWARDS: And then he gives the LORD a title: "the living God." Goliath "has defied the armies of the living God." Israel's neighbors carved gods from wood and stone. Moses asked, "who of all flesh has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire, as we have, and survived?" The shepherd in Psalm 23 is not an idol on a shelf. He is alive, and he acts. LINDA BROWN: The other surprising word is "my." Is that unusual? FRANK EDWARDS: It is the smallest part of the line and does the most work. Most of the time the Old Testament calls God the shepherd of a whole people. Psalm 80 prays, "Hear us, O Shepherd of Israel, who leads Joseph like a flock." Psalm 100 says, "we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture." David says it in the singular. My shepherd. Only one man before him said anything like it. LINDA BROWN: Jacob, wasn't it? On step one we heard him tell Laban what twenty years of keeping flocks had cost him. He was a shepherd for a long time before he called God his shepherd. FRANK EDWARDS: Jacob, at the end of his life, blessing Joseph's sons in Genesis 48: "the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day." It is the first time the Bible calls God a shepherd at all, and it comes from an old shepherd looking back over a hard life and saying, God did for me what I did for those flocks. LINDA BROWN: Could "my" sound a little possessive, though? As if God belonged to David rather than to Israel? FRANK EDWARDS: The psalms hold both together. Psalm 95 says, "For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the sheep under His care." David's "my" does not take the shepherd away from the flock. It says the shepherd of the whole flock knows this one sheep. That is exactly what David had done in the field: a whole flock to watch, and he still went after one lamb. The "my" is learned from the inside. LINDA BROWN: Saul ends the scene with a blessing. "Go," said Saul, "and may the LORD be with you." From Saul, that line has an edge. FRANK EDWARDS: One chapter earlier the narrator says, "the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul." One chapter later, "Saul was afraid of David, because the LORD was with David but had departed from Saul." The Hebrew word "with" is the small preposition 'im. It is the same word in Psalm 23:4, "You are with me," and the whole story of these two kings turns on that one little word. Who is the LORD with? The king blesses the shepherd with the very presence he has lost. LINDA BROWN: One of Saul's own servants had already said it, the first time Saul heard David's name, long before anyone had heard of the giant. A mighty man of valor, "and the LORD is with him." FRANK EDWARDS: First Samuel 16. So "The LORD is my shepherd" was not a guess for David. It was the thing he had lived on since he was a boy in the field. Psalm 78 draws the line from that field to the throne: God "chose David His servant and took him from the sheepfolds; from tending the ewes He brought him to be shepherd of His people Jacob." And when the tribes made him king, they reminded him that the LORD had said, "You will shepherd My people Israel." LINDA BROWN: So the shepherd-king was only fit to shepherd others because he had a Shepherd himself. Isaiah 40 puts the two sides of that Shepherd together. "Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might," and then, "He tends His flock like a shepherd; He gathers the lambs in His arms." FRANK EDWARDS: Might and gentleness in one Shepherd, which is what David had been in that field: strong enough for the lion and gentle with the lamb. And your first sentence is the lesson of the passage. David did not walk out to Goliath trusting his sling. A few verses later he says it to the giant's face: "it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD's." The courage came from the four words. His oldest brother had mocked him for leaving "those few sheep in the wilderness," but those few sheep were where he learned them. LINDA BROWN: A shepherd who goes after one lamb, into the mouth of the thing that took it. That points beyond David. FRANK EDWARDS: It does, and the rest of this series follows it. A thousand years later a descendant of David said, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep." David went after his lamb and came back alive. The Son of David would go further for his flock. For today, David's reasoning rests on one sentence. The LORD who delivered him then is the LORD who delivers, and for everyone who belongs to him that is as true now as it was in Saul's camp. Hear David's words again, and then the line he would one day write. "The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine." The LORD is my shepherd. [long pause] LINDA BROWN: For a way to take this into an ordinary week, the Apply This Today section in the app picks it up. Next time we cross into the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus looks at a crowd and sees sheep without a shepherd, and the second half of the line: "I shall not want." FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is a free app, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I. LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening, and for reading David's story with us.