“He makes me lie down in green pastures” (Ps 23:2). All languages have unique capabilities and limits. As a learner of Spanish and Arabic, it can be frustrating when I have a hard time succinctly communicating an idea that is attached to a particular English word. But I am often just as puzzled going the other direction. Until you begin to explore the capabilities of other languages, it’s difficult to see the limits of your own. For example, it sounds odd to say in English, “He lays me down in green pastures,” so we have to add another word like “makes” or “lets” – neither of which seem to fully convey the picture of a shepherd who “puts his sheep down to rest” in a way that a parent might lay a sleeping child in his bed.
David’s imagery of the Lord as our shepherd was obviously close to his heart and meaningful to listeners in his day. Until I moved to the Middle East, I had never met a shepherd, so the Biblical images were left up to my imaginative interpretation. Sure, I knew some people who raised sheep or goats, but they didn’t fit the bill I had in my mind of the shepherds who killed off lions or who kept watch over their flocks by night.
A couple of years ago, I had a language session with a shepherd. He told me about how he spent his nights all through school with the sheep. “Even when I was studying in university,” he told me, “I would sleep every night in the tent near the sheep, then every morning I would milk the sheep, go home, shower, put on clean clothes, and go to my classes.” After graduating and taking a full-time job as a language teacher he continued to maintain responsibilities with his flocks, including helping his mother make yogurt, butter, and jameed (a milk-based product used for the country’s national dish, mansef) to sell to their neighbors.
Where I live in the Middle East, it’s not uncommon to see shepherds with their flocks, especially in the spring as they walk with them from place to place – even in the city – letting them graze on the tufts of weeds that shrivel up with the early summer heat. Going on a drive anywhere out of town almost guarantees that you’ll see one or more shepherds with their flocks somewhere along the way – leading them through long stretches of dry land toward springs or wadis (valleys that have a stream) where they will find pasture. Middle Eastern “pasture” is not like the plains of North Dakota – it’s the well-watered nooks between dry hills that make for good grazing.
Psalm 23 isn’t the only place where David gives us this picture of our Shepherd leading us to rest and eat. “Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and feed on His faithfulness,” David tells us (Ps 37:3). The last phrase in this verse is translated more than a dozen different ways in various English translations. What I find especially interesting is that the word translated “feed” in the NKJV is from the same root word as “shepherd” in Psalm 23. Strong’s defines the word as “to pasture, tend, graze.”
If Middle Eastern sheep could reason (sheep haven’t been shown to be especially smart), I bet they would think their shepherd is crazy, leading them over the rocky, dry hills of the desert. But the shepherd knows where he is taking them. He knows where the green pastures are. And when he leads his sheep to those places, they feast on the foliage. And then, when they have eaten their full, he “lays them down” – not literally, of course, but he provides a protecting presence so they can rest in peace.
There are times in our lives when our Shepherd lays us down to rest, too. He brings us to a place where we can eat our fill of His provision, then lay down and rest, knowing that He is keeping watch. Perhaps we will graze in this wadi for days, or maybe we’ll get up and move tomorrow. We don’t know how long we will be here. But we do know that wherever we go, we can trust in Him, we can dwell in the land He’s brought us to, and we can securely feed on His faithfulness. We can have confidence that He will always pasture us.