Form and Meter
A "psalm" is not really a form, it's more of a genre. The psalms are considered "praise songs" (see "What's Up with the Title? for more), and they were probably meant to be sung as music. But this...
Speaker
The speaker is such a sheep. No, really. He's a lovable little lamb frolicking out in the hills. OK, not exactly, it's still just a metaphor. But comparing himself to a sheep is the speaker's way o...
Setting
The setting of Psalm 23 is, for the most part, pretty generic, and we don't mean that in a bad way. It follows the patterns of a certain genre: the pastoral poem. The classic pastoral poem is about...
Sound Check
The sounds of Psalm 23 is somewhere between poetry and prose – it's a lot like hip-hop lyrics, actually. Except for, you know, some slight differences in content. Some people think that hip-hop i...
What's Up With the Title?
The word "psalm" is derived from a Greek word meaning "song." But before these poems were translated into Greek, they were written in Hebrew. In Hebrew the Book of Psalms is called "Tehillim," whi...
Calling Card
The psalms are intensely personal prayers, or hymns. They were written as songs with harps and singers, and like a song the emphasis is on an emotional connection. The psalms are really like songs...
Tough-o-Meter
Psalm 23 is about a simple and straightforward as poetry gets, which is part of the reason why it's one of the most popular religious texts of all time. Even accounting for the somewhat archaic lan...
Trivia
In the past the authorship of the psalms has been so fiercely debated that some Christian theologians thought that saying King David wasn't the author of all the psalms was "heretical." The Catholi...
Steaminess Rating
Believe it or not, there are poems in the Bible that are highly erotic…but this isn't one of them.