STORIES
STORIES
Count the times God is named in Psalm 6 and you get eight. Yet in the middle of the psalm, across its darkest stretch, the name vanishes completely. That gap isn't random.
One Sunday, as Psalm 13 was being taught, two things struck Jon: the psalmist's vow to sing in the midst of lament, and the observation that singing Psalm 13 today would feel foreign in modern churches. So he went home that night and started writing.
As a deaf student was signing Psalm 23, he reached verse 4 and shaped it the way most people have heard it all their lives. After discussing it with Mari, who worked on the psalm for Scriptura, he changed it.
Most English Bibles translate Ps 6:4[5] as "Return, O LORD." A few say something quite different: "Relent." It's one word, yet it potentially conveys two entirely different pictures of what has gone wrong.
Psalm 4 never once uses the word "blessing." And yet nearly every verse of it is stitched together from the two most famous blessings in the Hebrew Bible.
One of the musicians at the Yaoundé workshop came away with a finished song. Under normal circumstances, he said, a piece like this would take him months to create.
In 2004, translators in Chad were about to translate the Psalms, but they had an objection: "We don't have poetry." Not that it would be hard to translate, but that it didn't exist in their language.
Psalm 4:6 (7 in Hebrew) ends with a line every translation renders differently, and the disagreement comes down to a single Hebrew word: neseh (נְסֵה).
In Psalm 4:2, David turns to his opponents. Most English Bibles soften it to "how long will you love vain words?" But the Hebrew reaches for a very particular phrase: heavy of heart.
The King James Version says something startling in Psalm 88:5. Describing himself as good as dead, the psalmist writes that he is "free among the dead."
The church that hosted the Bantè workshop had made a decision at the start of 2026: every service, every gathering, every week of the year would return to Psalm 3:5.
In Psalm 4, the Hebrew word tsedeq is often translated as a legal term, "righteousness." But the scholars at Scriptura argue for something kinder.
At the center of Psalm 4 sits a single line where David uses three ordinary words to address the angry people around him. And then each of those three words comes back, later in the psalm, in exactly the order they first appeared.
The Bantè workshop didn't start with Scriptura knocking on a door. It started with a community knocking on Scriptura's.
In Psalm 16:10 God promises that he will not let his "loyal one" see corruption, the verse Peter later preaches in Acts 2. Yet nearly every English Bible translates this as "your holy one." Would Scriptura translate it that way? Would they recommend it to translators?
Psalm 4 opens with David remembering a rescue, and he describes it in two words that are, quite literally, opposite shapes.
At the end of the psalm's first movement, the enemies get the last word: they are "saying about me" (omerim lenafshi). But then the psalm turns, and David answers: "But you, YHWH, are a shield for me... (umerim roshi)"
Africa Sings was founded in 2019 by Dr. Daniel Dama with a mission that sounds immediately familiar to anyone who knows Scriptura's work: to promote peace, social cohesion, and the experience of living together through arts, culture, music, and Christian witness.
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