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.” The ESV says law. So do the KJV, NIV, NASB, NRSV, and most others. It is the natural word, the expected word — and a growing number of translators think it is the wrong one.

The Hebrew is torah (תּוֹרָה), and the ancient translators were unanimous about it: the Greek said nomos (νομος), the Latin lex, the Syriac and the Targum their own equivalents — all of them “law.” For a modern translator, that is a heavy weight of precedent. And yet the JPS and a handful of others break from it: “Happy are those whose way is blameless, who follow the teaching of the LORD.”

The problem is not that anyone has mistranslated. It is that the English word “law” arrives carrying freight the Hebrew may not. Say “law” to an English reader and you summon courtrooms, statutes, the machinery of rule and penalty — for a religious reader, specifically the legislation handed down at Sinai. But torah comes from a verb meaning to teach, to point the way, and across Psalm 119 it stretches far past legislation: the psalmist speaks of promises, of creation, of God’s spoken word, of comfort in affliction. The psalmist is meditating on and delighting in – and invites others to meditate on and delight in – all of YHWH’s acts of communicative instruction both written and spoken from creation to the time of, and including the psalm’s composition. Even the translations that render the noun “law” quietly render the matching verb, twice in the same psalm, as “teach.” One word, two coats of paint.

So the translator stands at a fork that the ancient versions do not resolve. Keep “law,” and you preserve the tradition but risk narrowing a wide word to a courtroom. Choose “instruction” or “teaching,” and you open the word back up but part company with Jerome and the Septuagint and the shelf of Bibles behind you.

And the fork does not close once. The Scriptura analysts note the quiet obligation buried in the whole debate: every translator carrying this psalm into a new language has to ask whether their word for “law” drags the same courtroom in behind it — or whether some other word in their tongue points, as torah does, down a road.

Read more on psalms.scriptura.org → The Meaning of תּוֹרָה in Psalm 119