On “A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23” by Phillip Keller ****

 

My wife was somewhat surprised to find me reading this. It seemed a bit too inspirational and touchy-feely. Indeed, the book is that. I would say that Keller probably could have written something that was about half or a quarter of its length and made his point. He fills the text out to book-length by giving readers nice-sounding discussions about faith and God and stuff like that.

But the meat of the book is extremely useful, which is why I decided to read it this second time (the first time being well more than a decade ago). Not having been a shepherd, I have no way of otherwise gleaning the various subtleties of this most famous of Psalms. Keller, with his extensive experience with sheep keeping, has much info to provide about what each line of the Psalm actually goes much deeper than we might otherwise expect. Indeed, I usually think of the last portions of the Psalm as moving away from the sheep metaphors, but Keller shows how even such acts as the spreading of oil on the head is a shepherding act—meant to keep male sheep from butting each other too hard, meant to keep insects and flies from alighting on the sheep and laying their eggs. I'll likely return to this book again at some point.