Psalm 1 opens by describing the happy person through what he does not do: he “has not walked in the counsel of wicked people.” It is a striking image in Hebrew — life as a road, and the choice of whose directions you follow along it. But “walk in the counsel” is not a phrase every language can simply carry over. Walk in someone’s counsel? In many tongues the words refuse to fit together that way.

One Hausa Bible found a route through. Where the Hebrew says “walk in the counsel of the wicked,” it renders the line “follow in the footprints.” The move is quietly brilliant: it keeps the psalm’s controlling picture — a person on a path, going somewhere, shaped by the road they take — while trading a construction that breaks for one that carries. To follow in someone’s footprints is to imitate them, to place your feet where theirs have been. The journey survives the crossing.

That is the whole discipline in miniature. Psalm 1 runs on a single sustained metaphor: the righteous set out on one way, the wicked on another, and where you end up depends on whose steps you walk in. A translator who flattens “walk in the counsel” into something abstract — “do not take bad advice” — has kept the meaning and lost the road. A translator who finds “footprints” has kept both. 

Scriptura’s notes press translators toward exactly this: retain the imagery of the journey wherever the local language will bear it, because the picture is concrete, memorable, and doing real work. The counsel of the wicked, the way of sinners, the dwelling place of mockers — verse 1 is already a map of a descent, a person slowing from walking to standing to settling down among them. Lose the movement and it is easy to lose the warning built into it.

The happy person, the psalm says, never takes those steps at all. The trick, in any language, is to keep him walking.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → Psalm 1 Translation