“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” It is one of the most memorized lines in the English language, carved on headstones, read at gravesides, learned by heart in childhood. And the phrase at its center — shadow of death — may be beautiful but inaccurate.

The Hebrew word is tsalmavet. It looks, to the eye, like two words fused: tsel, shadow, and mavet, death. The ancient translators read it exactly that way — the Septuagint, the Syriac, Jerome, the Targum all gave some form of “shadow of death,” and the King James, the ESV, and the NASB kept it. But most modern translations have quietly walked away from death: the NIV has “the darkest valley,” the NRSV the same, the JPS “a valley of deepest darkness,” the NEB “a valley dark as death.” The word behind all of them, the scholars increasingly agree, derives from a single root that simply means darkness — no death in it at all. The famous “shadow of death” appears to be an ancient folk etymology, the kind of plausible guess that hardens into tradition.

Here is where a translator’s dilemma sharpens into something almost painful. The accurate rendering may be “darkness.” But listen to what the more accurate word gives up. One scholar puts it exactly: “shadow of death” better captures how the pieces of the word sound in Hebrew — and in poetry, the sound of a word shapes how it is felt. The valley of deepest darkness is correct. The valley of the shadow of death is unforgettable.

So the choice is not simply right against wrong. It is fidelity to the root against fidelity to the resonance — the meaning the word carries against the weight it has gathered. A translator who writes “darkest valley” is arguably more faithful to the Hebrew and less faithful to three thousand years of how the line has been heard.

Most translators, asked to choose, have finally chosen the darkness. But almost none of them can bring themselves to do it without a footnote pointing back to the shadow.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org →
The Meaning of צלמות in Psalm 23:4