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?

(Psalm 26, verse 1)

There can also be an antithetical parallelism:

They will stagger and fall, but we will rise and stand firm.

(Psalm 19, verse 9)

Other options are also possible, but these two are the most illustrative. Parallelism can be complete (as in the above examples) or partial, when the number of elements in the "segments" is not the same, or, if they are equal, not all have their parallel. It can be straight, as in the first of the above examples, or inverted, chiastic, as in the second.

As for the system of versification in the European sense, the metrical organization of verse, it stubbornly defies definition. It can only be argued that the biblical verse was accentuated, that equal-sized "segments" were quite often and equally stressed, with the number of iqts from 2 to 4, depending on the length of the "segment", and that three-stressed "segments" predominated. But the main fact remains the metrical instability of biblical poetry.

And finally, the phonetic organization of the Bible verse. It was developed to a high degree – from simple alliterations and assonances to complex, sophisticated, effective sound writing and even consonances in the endings of "segments", although there is no need to talk about rhyme in the poetry of ancient Jewry. (It should be noted, by the way, that the use of the concept of a stanza is also unfounded, so to speak, anachronistic.)