STORIES
STORIES
Psalm 8 ends exactly where it began. The final line repeats the opening line word for word. It's the simplest kind of poetic device, a bookend, and it frames the meaning of the psalm.
A translation consultant is the last gate of Bible translation. Nothing gets published until they sign off. Fifty of them, responsible for oral Bible translation across francophone Africa, gathered in Cotonou in August.
Few verses in the Psalter pack as much textual difficulty into so few words as Psalm 8:3. And yet our preferred reading yields one of the most arresting images in the psalm.
Read Psalm 8 closely and you'll feel that you've heard it before. That's not an accident. One scholar calls Psalm 8 "Genesis 1:26–28 set to music."
At a Bible translation workshop in Benin, a translation consultant observed, "We want people to be impacted through the translation of the Bible... So we don't need speeches." What did he mean by that?
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." It is one of the most memorized lines in the English Bible. And the phrase at its center—"shadow of death"—may be beautiful but inaccurate.
Psalm 8 features one of the most contested single words in the Psalter. The King James Version says humanity is "a little lower than the angels." Other translations read "a little lower than God." Which is right?
Psalm 8 doesn't just talk about the created order — it traces it, moving the reader through space the way a camera might. It moves from the heights of heaven, down to the ground, and then outward across the earth.
The superscription of Psalm 100 can be translated "a psalm for giving thanks," or "a psalm for the thank-offering." One points to a state of the heart; the other points to an animal on an altar.
Psalm 8 opens with one of the most stubborn grammatical puzzles in the Psalter. Yet behind that interpretive headache lies a rich image.
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).
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