Southeast Asia · August 24 – September 4, 2026
OBT Consultant-in-Training Workshop, Psalms

Some song forms are built to be short. A line, an image, a refrain you can turn over and over — that is the whole shape of the genre, and it works because it does not try to carry much. Then you hand it Psalm 1.

Even in Hebrew, Psalm 1 is compact. But it moves: the counsel of the wicked, the path of sinners, the seat of scoffers, the tree, the streams of water, the chaff the wind drives off, the judgment that will not stand. One new thing after another, line after line. Pour that into a genre with no room for it and the song breaks under the load.

One of the teams hit that wall and did not flinch. They did not abandon the song, and they did not pad their own tradition to make it fit. Partway through, they stepped out of the sung form into a spoken, dramatic genre their community also knows, carried the dense stretch of the psalm there, and then stepped back into the song to finish. Two forms, stitched together, because one could not do it alone.

It is a small masterpiece of judgment, and it says something about what translation actually is. The receiving language does not just receive a psalm. Its forms decide how the psalm can be carried at all — and sometimes faithfulness means reaching for more than one of them.