When the deaf student signed Psalm 23 for Mari Strube the first time, he reached verse 4 and shaped it the way most people have heard it all their lives: the valley of the shadow of death. He had chosen the psalm himself, and asked her to watch him practice.

The two of them barely shared a language. He was one of five deaf students Mari had met studying in Israel — three from Colombia, one from Brazil, one from a country in Africa — each arriving with a different sign language of his own, all of them there to learn Hebrew and also Hebrew sign language. Mari knew only a little of it; she had picked up some because she wanted to know them. What they did share was Spanish, which the student’s mother had taught him. So that became the bridge: she spoke to him in Spanish, and he read her lips.

Mari had worked on Psalm 23 only a few months earlier, using Scriptura’s material on the psalm, including its exegetical page on that very verse. She knew the Hebrew word behind “shadow of death” is contested — that many read it, more plainly, as darkness. She sat with him and explained it: the different ways the verse can be understood, and why darkness is likely the better sense.

On the day of the presentation, with everyone invited to watch the students sign, he came to verse 4 and changed it. Not death this time. Darkness.

“The way they can express the words,” Mari said, still turning it over, “it’s like — coming alive.” She had watched the meaning travel from a Hebrew word into a scholarly argument, into Spanish, onto a pair of lips, and finally into a pair of hands that reshaped it in the air in front of a room.

For more information on Psalm 23:4 → The Meaning of צלמות in Psalm 23:4