Psalm 23:4 — Through the Valley

FRANK EDWARDS: The center of Psalm 23 is in the dark. Not the green pastures, not the table, not the house of the LORD. The middle of the psalm is a valley, and the words spoken there. Psalm 23, verse four. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. LINDA BROWN: Welcome to Dig Deeper. I'm Linda Brown, here with Frank Edwards, and this is step six of our sixteen steps through Psalm 23. Middle in what sense, though? Verse four is the fourth of six verses, so it is close to the middle, but you mean something more exact than that. FRANK EDWARDS: Something more exact, yes. Counted one standard way, the Hebrew of Psalm 23 has twenty-six words before "for You are with me" and twenty-six after it. Counts like that depend on how you treat small joined words, so I hold it loosely, and we cannot know whether David counted. But whether by design or not, the shape of the poem and its message meet in the same place. The psalm's center of gravity is a sheep in a dark ravine, speaking to its Shepherd. LINDA BROWN: On step one we looked at the big turn in this verse, from "He" to "You," and at what a rod and a staff were. What is left to find in it? FRANK EDWARDS: Quite a lot, starting with the two words that open it. "Even though" is gam ki in Hebrew, something like "yes, even if" or "even when." It is a concession. The psalm admits something before it answers it. Up to this point we have had grass, water, restoration and right paths. Now the poem stops and says: and yes, there will also be this. LINDA BROWN: The order is striking when you read it straight through. Verse three ends with the Shepherd guiding me in the paths of righteousness. Verse four begins in the valley. Nothing comes in between. FRANK EDWARDS: The right path, and then the valley, with no break between them. Nothing in the psalm suggests the sheep took a wrong turn to end up there. The valley simply comes next on the road the Shepherd is guiding. In the hill country east of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the land drops steeply toward the Dead Sea, and the winter rains have cut deep, narrow gorges into the rock. A flock moving from one grazing area to another could have to pass through one. The walls block the sun for much of the day, the paths are narrow, and water can come down them suddenly in the rainy season. Some readers picture a particular gorge, the one called Wadi Qelt today, though the psalm never names a place. The point is that the valley lies on the way, between one pasture and the next. LINDA BROWN: The verb is walk, too. Not run, and not stop and stay. Is there anything more to that word than plain walking? FRANK EDWARDS: Walk is halak, the ordinary verb for going on foot, and its plainness is the point. Walking is slow. But walking also means you are still moving. The psalm does not picture the sheep stopping in the valley; it pictures someone walking. It is honest that the way goes through dark ground, and it never calls that ground home. Home comes in verse six. LINDA BROWN: Which brings up the phrase itself. The shadow of death. On step one you said the word means the deepest darkness. Is it really "death" in there, or is that a later reading? FRANK EDWARDS: Scholars genuinely debate it. The Hebrew is tsalmaveth. Read as a compound, it is tsel, shadow, and maveth, death: the shadow of death. Others think it comes from a word for darkness and simply means very deep gloom. Either way the sense is the same: a darkness so thick it feels like death's own shade. As we heard on step one, Job uses it for the land of the dead, "a land of darkness and gloom, to a land of utter darkness." But the word also turns up in places that answer it. Amos 5 describes the LORD as the one "who turns darkness into dawn," and the word for darkness there is tsalmaveth. The God who made the stars turns death's shadow into morning. LINDA BROWN: Isaiah 9 uses that word as well, doesn't it? "On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned." FRANK EDWARDS: The same word again, and that verse has a long reach. Matthew 4 quotes it when Jesus begins preaching in Galilee: "the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned." Matthew puts the light Isaiah promised on the shore of the very lake we have been on all week in Mark. And in John 8 Jesus says it of himself: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in the darkness, but will have the light of life." LINDA BROWN: Follows Him. Sheep language, again. The light walks in front, and the sheep come behind. FRANK EDWARDS: Follow is exactly the sheep's verb, and two chapters later, in John 10, Jesus says it outright: "My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me." There is something further still than the darkness ending, and Psalm 139 says it: "even the darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines like the day." The valley is dark to the sheep. It is not dark to the Shepherd. He sees the path in the place where the sheep cannot. LINDA BROWN: "I will fear no evil." Does that mean there is no evil in the valley? It does not sound like it. FRANK EDWARDS: The word is ra', evil, harm, whatever is bad. The psalm does not say evil is absent. It says the sheep will not fear it. Those are very different claims. The danger is real enough to be named; what changes is fear's grip on the one walking through. And the psalms do this repeatedly. They name the worst and then say "even so." LINDA BROWN: Psalm 46 might be the boldest example. "Therefore we will not fear, though the earth is transformed and the mountains are toppled into the depths of the seas." And Psalm 27 does it with soldiers: "Though an army encamps around me, my heart will not fear." FRANK EDWARDS: Earthquake and army, and in Psalm 3, which its heading sets in the days when David fled from his son Absalom, enemies at night: "I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the LORD sustains me. I will not fear the myriads set against me on every side." In every one of those psalms the danger is real. What is given is never a reason to think the danger is small. It is always the same reason, stated in Psalm 46 as "God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble." Psalm 23 puts it in its shortest form. Four words in English. You are with me. LINDA BROWN: "You" sounds like the heaviest word in that line. How does it sound in the Hebrew? FRANK EDWARDS: Even barer than in English. The line has no verb at all, just three words: ki atah 'immadi, for You with me. For three verses David has not once said "You" to God, and here it comes first, straight after "for." And with is a form of the little word 'im that we met on step two, the word the whole story of Saul and David turns on. Saul lost the LORD's presence; the LORD was with David. The shepherd boy who learned in the field that the LORD was with him writes it here as the center of his song. LINDA BROWN: That promise has a long history behind it. Moses said it to Joshua, in the presence of all Israel at the edge of the Promised Land, in Deuteronomy 31: "The LORD Himself goes before you; He will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid or discouraged." FRANK EDWARDS: Presence first, and then "do not be afraid." Isaiah 41 keeps the same order: "Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God." The reason not to fear is never that nothing will happen. It is who is there. And Matthew's Gospel ends on it. The last words Jesus speaks in Matthew 28 are, "And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age." The sheep in Psalm 23 says to the Shepherd, "You are with me," and the Shepherd himself answers, "I am with you." LINDA BROWN: Then the rod and the staff. We heard on step one that the rod was a club for defense and the staff something to lean on. Do those words turn up anywhere that changes how they sound? FRANK EDWARDS: Both do. Step one mentioned that the rod, shevet, is also the word for a ruler's scepter. Micah 7 joins the two pictures in one prayer, "Shepherd with Your staff Your people, the flock of Your inheritance," and the word behind "staff" there is shevet. The club that drives off wolves is the sign of a king's authority. And the staff, mish'enet, comes from the verb to lean, which makes one verse in Isaiah 36 very sharp. An Assyrian officer mocks Jerusalem for trusting in Egypt, "that splintered reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it." Same word. Some supports give way and wound the one who leans on them. LINDA BROWN: Lean on Egypt and it goes through your hand. Lean on this Shepherd's staff and it holds your whole weight. FRANK EDWARDS: The whole weight, and in the dark, where you cannot see what you are leaning on. Which leads to the last word of the verse. They comfort me. The verb is nacham, and the Bible uses it again and again for what God does. Isaiah 40 opens, "Comfort, comfort My people," says your God. Isaiah 51 has, "I, even I, am He who comforts you." And the very next words there are, "Who are you that you should fear mortal man?" Comfort and fear in one breath, exactly as in Psalm 23. LINDA BROWN: Isaiah 66 has one of the tenderest pictures in the Old Testament with that word. "As a mother comforts her son, so will I comfort you." FRANK EDWARDS: A shepherd with a club and a mother with her child, and the same verb for both. The comfort of verse four is not only protection; it is nearness. And the New Testament takes that further. On the night before he died, Jesus told his frightened disciples in John 14, "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate to be with you forever." Older English Bibles translated that word "Comforter," and the Greek describes someone called alongside to help. Then, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." Paul calls God "the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God." LINDA BROWN: Comfort that does not stop with the person who receives it. Whoever has been through a valley with the Shepherd knows something to say to the next person in one. FRANK EDWARDS: Comfort passed on, from one comforted person to the next, is how Paul sees it. And for those who belong to Jesus, there is one more thing the psalm could not yet say. The Shepherd did not only walk beside his sheep in the valley of the shadow of death. Later in this series we will watch him go into it himself, to the cross, and come out on the far side. The one who says "I am with you always" has been through that valley ahead of everyone who follows him. Hear the verse again. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. [long pause] LINDA BROWN: If you want to take this verse into the shape of an ordinary week, the Apply This Today section in the app picks it up from here. Next time, Mark chapter six again: the disciples straining at the oars on the lake at night, and Jesus coming to them across the water. 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 walking through verse four today.