In the exact middle of Psalm 23 stand three Hebrew words: For You are with me.

Psalm 23 Berean Standard Bible

Tap any word to see the Hebrew behind it.

Loading Psalm 23…

“Restores” and “I will dwell” are one Hebrew verb

The verb is shuv, turn back, return. In verse 3 God brings David’s soul back. In verse 6, as the Hebrew stands, David says “I will return” to the house of the LORD. The old Greek translation, the Septuagint, has “dwell” there, and the Berean Standard Bible and most English Bibles print the same.

Meaning: Brown, Driver and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), p. 996. Septuagint: Psalm 22:6 in its numbering.

The verb behind “follow me” is “pursue”

The Hebrew word in verse 6 is radaph. Brown, Driver and Briggs give its meaning as pursue, chase, persecute. One verse earlier David’s enemies are in sight. Here the ones coming after him are goodness and mercy, “all the days of my life”.

Brown, Driver and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), p. 922

How we made this page

Psalm 23, word by word

Every English word of Psalm 23 on this page, in the Berean Standard Bible, is joined to the Hebrew word it translates. Tap a word and you will see the Hebrew, what the dictionary says it means, how the same Bible translates it in other places, and the verses of the Old Testament that use it.

Hebrew fastens small words such as “and”, “in”, “my” and “your” to the front and back of a word, so one Hebrew word often takes two or three English words to translate: רֹעִי is “my shepherd”. We print the Hebrew with its vowel signs and leave out the marks that guide chanting.

In Hebrew, God’s name is written with four letters, יהוה, and we spell it YHWH. The Berean Standard Bible, like most English Bibles, prints it “the LORD”.

How we counted

Our Hebrew is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a digital transcription of the oldest complete Hebrew Bible we know of, which was copied in about AD 1008. The Berean Standard Bible publishes word tables that line up its English with this Hebrew.

To find the other places a word appears, we follow the reference number, called a Strong’s number, that the same tables give it, and we search only this Hebrew text. God’s name and the other commonest words appear too often to list in full, so for those we show the verses of Psalm 23 and the first 250 others, and the list tells you so.

Where the meanings come from

The dictionary meaning under each word is quoted exactly from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, published in 1906, and we checked every quotation against the printed page. The one-word meanings were written by scholars at Tyndale House and come from STEPBible. Where a word has several senses, the one-word meaning is the sense Brown, Driver and Briggs show for this psalm.

Sources and licences

  1. The English text and its word tables come from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible (BSB), dedicated to the public domain, at bereanbible.com. The Hebrew in those tables is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, also public domain, at tanach.us.
  2. The dictionary meanings come from F. Brown, S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Boston, 1906), public domain. You can read its pages at archive.org. We found each entry through the Open Scriptures transcription.
  3. The one-word meanings and dictionary forms, and nothing else on this page, come from STEPBible-Data, the Translators Brief lexicon of Extended Strongs for Hebrew (TBESH), by Tyndale House Cambridge and STEPBible.org, under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
  4. The Hebrew type is Noto Serif Hebrew by The Noto Project Authors, under the SIL Open Font License.
  5. In the Septuagint, the old Greek translation, this is Psalm 22, and verse 6 reads kai to katoikein me, “and my dwelling”.

More to see