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STORIES/BLOGS
The beginning and the end of Psalm 6 are built to match. Each runs three verses, six lines, twenty-four words — the same length to the word — and the echoes between them are deliberate.
In counseling the grieving, Donna noted, "A lot of times, the widows don't have words." So when she sits with one of them, she brings a psalm and lets it do the speaking.
Open almost any English Bible to the first line of Psalm 119 and you will read that the blameless "walk in the law of the LORD." "Law" is the natural word, the expected word—and a growing number of translators think it is the wrong one.
Is the sufferer in Psalm 6 actually sick? The psalm never quite says. It gives you hints, but never names a disease. One detail tips the balance.
The exact middle of Psalm 6 is also its most extravagant stretch of language. The psalm's center is verse 7, which artfully depicts a man worn out with groaning.
At Pastor Abou Assifa's church, they were playing the tam-tam. A man arrived who had not come for the service. He had come for the sound.
Line up modern Bibles at Psalm 51:6 (Heb v. 8) and you will be pointed in different directions. The trouble is two Hebrew words: tukhot (טֻחוֹת) and satum (סָתֻם), which present translators with a double problem.
Open Psalm 6 and before the first line of the poem there's an instruction — a note to the music director. Part of it is a single Hebrew word that has defeated translators for two thousand years: sheminith (שְׁמִינִית).
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."
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