Protective Services
The central metaphor at work in Psalm 23 is that which situates the Lord as a shepherd and His believers as a flock of sheep. Obviously, this metaphor is ripe for a negative connotation, but the poet’s focus is on the positive connotation of the shepherd as protective guardian of this flock keeping them safe from the danger and guiding them to where the food and water are. The speaker credits the Lord with being there to keep him from needing (wanting) of the necessities of life, allowing him to rest assured that God will be there to guide him to greener pastures when hungry and still waters when thirsty. In addition, he can feel safe and secure even when traveling through dangerous places where evil lurks in the shadows because God will be there at the ready for a staff and rod to keep the crafty wolves at bay.
Trust
A keynote of Psalm 23 is the subtext of a contractual obligation of mutual trust on the part of God and his believers. The famous imagery of the line “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” is inextricably linked to line which immediately precedes it about God leading the speaker to paths of righteousness “for his name’s sake.” That last part is of central significance because of its implication that God shines the way to righteousness at all times as part of His branding as a God of goodness.
If God is leading one through a valley in which evil is lurking in the shadows, then by definition that path has to lead to a righteous destination because for it to do otherwise would be a rejection of the implicit agreement signed in His name that all paths which follow God lead to a righteous place. Therefore, to follow the path laid out by God is to trust that that He is always good—at all times—and would never purposely lead one down an unrighteous path. So even though the path may lead through the valley of the shadow of death, one need not fear the evil which lurks if one trusts that the Lord will offer protection all the way through the darkness until exiting back into the light again.
Language Games
The wording of Psalm 23 engages in an important language game that is so subtle as to potentially be overlooked completely by many readers. It is not really game in the sense of being mere sport, but rather in the sense of being active exercise intended to stimulate critical understanding. For the first half of the Psalm up to and including the part about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, the speaker consistently refers to the Lord in pronoun form as “He.”
As if literally walking through a dark shadow and coming out into the light on the other side, a pronoun shift suddenly and without any obvious contextual reason takes place which lasts throughout the rest of the poem: the speaker now refers to God as “You/Your” (or “Thou/Thy” depending on the Bible version). Oddly enough, there seems to no definitive explanation for this shift, though there is an abundance of theories. Even stranger is the number of people who have admitted to having memorized this psalm for many years without even recognizing there is a pronoun shift until it has been pointed out to them.
