The Sign He Changed
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.
Return, or Relent? (Psalm 6)
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.
The Blessing Hidden in the Grammar
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.
In a Few Days, What Normally Takes Months
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.
“We Don’t Have Poetry”
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.
One Word, Three Directions (Psalm 4)
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).
Egypt, Never Named
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 Freed Man Among the Dead
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.”
A Verse for the Whole Year
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.
The God Who Makes Things Right
In Psalm 4, the Hebrew word tsedeq is often translated as a legal term, “righteousness.” But the scholars at Scriptura argue for something kinder.
