My Shepherd will supply my need,
Jehovah is His name;
In pastures fresh He makes me feed,
Beside the living stream.
He brings my wandering spirit back
When I forsake His ways,
And leads me, for His mercy’s sake,
In paths of truth and grace.
When I walk through the shades of death
Thy presence is my stay;
One word of Thy supporting breath
Drives all my fears away.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1719). Words by Isaac Watts.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Isaac Watts wrote this hymn's text in 1719 as a paraphrase of Psalm 23, part of the same 'Psalms of David Imitated' collection already discussed elsewhere in this collection in connection with 'Jesus Shall Reign' (hymn 97) and 'O God, Our Help in Ages Past' (hymn 119), and it stands as Watts's own reworking of what is very likely the single most widely known and beloved psalm in the entire Hebrew Bible.
Rather than translating the psalm's Hebrew text literally, Watts deliberately reinterpreted several of its details through an explicitly Christian lens, most notably replacing the psalm's original Hebrew name for God, YHWH, with the English rendering 'Jehovah,' the specific transliteration favored by English biblical scholarship of Watts's own era, giving his paraphrase a slightly different register from more literal translations while preserving the psalm's overall pastoral imagery of a shepherd caring for sheep in green pastures beside still waters.
The hymn's tune, known as 'Resignation,' was not composed until considerably later and comes not from England but from the American shape-note singing tradition, a distinctive early American approach to congregational singing using simplified musical notation to teach hymn singing to rural communities with little formal music education, a tradition already discussed elsewhere in this collection in connection with the tune of 'Amazing Grace' (hymn 1).
That pairing of Watts's formal eighteenth-century English paraphrase with a considerably later, distinctly American folk-hymn melody gives this particular setting of Psalm 23 a musical character quite different from many other, more formally composed settings of the same beloved psalm found in other hymnals, reflecting the way a single ancient text — itself already a paraphrase of an even older Hebrew original — continued to be reshaped and reset to new music across successive generations and across the Atlantic Ocean.
