THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD: A THEOLOGICAL-EXEGETICAL STUDY OF PSALM 23:1 AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE LIVES OF BELIEVERS TODAY
Kata Kunci:
Psalm 23:1, covenantal sufficiency, shepherd metaphor, biblical exegesis, reception historyAbstrak
The opening clause of Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," circulates widely in devotional and pastoral settings yet remains largely insulated from sustained critical scrutiny. Scholarship has bifurcated between historical-critical analysis and applicative pastoral reading, leaving no structured model that specifies how the verse's historical-grammatical sense governs its contemporary appropriation. This study addresses that gap through a qualitative biblical exegesis design combining historical-grammatical analysis of the Masoretic Text, canonical-intertextual reading, and reception-history analysis of a purposively sampled corpus of scholarly commentaries and theological monographs published between 1970 and 2023. No human informants were involved and no empirical field data were collected, so findings are interpretive rather than generalizable in a social-scientific sense. The analysis yields three thematic findings: the shepherd metaphor is embedded in a royal-covenantal semantic field carrying connotations beyond pastoral care; "I shall not want" functions grammatically as a statement of relational confidence rather than a promise of material abundance; and reception history reveals persistent tension between pastoral comfort and prophetic critique, with prosperity-oriented readings forming a minority but influential trajectory. The study's novelty is the Covenantal Sufficiency Hermeneutic (CSH), a three-layered framework moving from historical-grammatical analysis through canonical-intertextual reading to contextual-pastoral application. The CSH contributes to Old Testament ethics, pastoral theology, and contextual hermeneutics by offering a transferable model for integrating exegesis and application in psalmic interpretation.
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