3. He will refresh my soul, lead me in the ways of justice in His name.

4. Even if I walk through the valley of darkness, I will not fear evil, for you are with me, your staff and your reed will be my comfort.

5. You have set a table for me in full view of my enemies, you have generously anointed my head with oil, my cup is full to the brim.

6. Only goodness and mercy will be my companions all the days of my life, and I will live in the house of God for a long time.

The difficulties of understanding (and translating) begin with the fact that the verb tense system in the language of the Bible is either not fully clarified or does not lend itself to final clarification at all. One way or another, it is very often impossible to decide whether we are talking about the present, about the future, or about a special continuum covering both the present and the future. In our case, two authoritative translations of modern times, Latin and French, give preference to the present, one, English, to the future. Our own choice is determined not so much by the famous name and scientific fame of the English translator Mitchell Duhud (his work, in three volumes, was published in 1966-1971), as by the direct perception of the heirs and living speakers of Hebrew, educated Israelis, thoroughly read in biblical and post-biblical sources.

Title: its exact meaning is unknown. In the absence of punctuation marks in manuscripts, nothing prevents you from putting a full stop after the first word: "Song". The second word can mean both "belonging to David", i.e. composed by him, and "connected with David" in one way or another: telling about him, dedicated to him, written in his manner, set to his melody, etc. As already mentioned, a very ancient tradition interprets the ledovid in the first of two senses.

There are so many discrepancies in the interpretation of the text itself that we will have to limit ourselves to examples.

Verse 2. "Still waters", i.e. calm, not turbulent, can be understood as "waters of rest, rest", i.e. the source near which the flock rests.

Verse 3. "He will lead in the ways of justice" conveys a phrase that occurs only once in the Bible (hapax legomenon). Duhud understands it quite differently: "he will bring to rich pastures" in order to relate it to the "grassy place" in the previous verse (why he should make such a reference will be explained later).

Verse 4. "Valley of darkness" — "in the midst of complete darkness." "They will be my comfort" — "behold, they will lead me."

And any of the various interpretations is in no way a whim or fantasy, but the result of philological analysis, often deep and sophisticated, and a stepping stone to conclusions, sometimes far-reaching. Just one example. In verse 6, the weight of the original can be derived from two roots: YSHB with the meaning "to sit", "to stay" or SHBB with the meaning "to return". In the commentary to the Psalms, which was published in Zhytomyr in 1902 (in Hebrew) and belonged to the famous Orientalist Zvi-Peretz Hayes, possible variants of writing (conjecture) and, accordingly, understanding are considered; among other things, Hayes points out that if we take the meaning of "I will return to the house of God", then we must talk about returning to the Temple, from which the singer (or his ancestors) were expelled by enemies, and then, according to the commentator, the psalm should be attributed to the era of the Hasmoneans and the struggle with the Seleucids (II century BC). ».). For modern biblical studies, as already mentioned, this date is unacceptable – too late.

The most important question for translation – the stylistic level of the text – is inseparable from the much broader problem of biblical poetry as a whole. Its dissimilarity with European poetry and the features that characterize it were really discovered only in the eighteenth century, and only the present century has included it in the system of related poetry of the Near East, mainly more ancient and, apparently, directly influencing it. The glorious rhythm-forming element in it (repeated, opposed, correlated) are units of meaning, not forms — "segments" of thought, and not moans or (and) icts, stresses. "Segments" – they are called in different ways, the generally accepted terminology, as far as we can judge, has not yet developed – are formed into various kinds of parallel constructions. Parallelism can be synonymous:

The Lord is my light and my salvation: whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the fortress of my life: whom shall I fear?