August 17–23, 2026 · Come, Follow Me
"The Lord Is My Shepherd" · the Church's lesson page
Our panel opens the week with the sentence the manual buries and the chapter headings contradict — nobody knows who wrote these poems — and follows it into a smudged letter on a Dead Sea scroll, a Canaanite thunder hymn, and a queen in Persia saying "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me."
Twenty psalms is a strange unit of study — not a book, not a genre, but a sampler pulled from the front of a collection that took centuries to assemble and whose editors never bothered to hide the joins. The lesson manual opens by admitting that "we don't know for certain who wrote the Psalms," and that admission is the doorway to almost everything hard and interesting this week: contested authorship, a contested letter in Psalm 22:16, a hymn to a storm god repurposed for Yahweh, a superscription that puts a building on a poem about getting over an illness, and a Restoration prophet who read these poems and started editing them. The five sessions below split the twenty chapters along the Psalter's own seams rather than by chapter count: the double gateway and the two witnesses of creation and Torah; the king's psalms and the great lament; the walk from pasture to temple gate; the laments and the confession; and the hymns of thunder, recovery, and a city that will not be moved. Each session runs 20–30 minutes and assumes you are actually reading the chapters — the briefing works alongside the text, not instead of it, and the questions are written to be argued with rather than answered. Read the sessions in order; the arc matters. By the end of session 5 you will have read every one of the twenty chapters exactly once.
Before you read. The manual's opening concession — that we do not know who wrote these poems — sits uneasily above chapter headings in our own edition that call Psalms 8, 21, 22, and 40 "a messianic psalm of David." Those headings are twentieth-century editorial apparatus, not translated Hebrew. What is ancient is the italic superscription underneath, and fourteen of this week's twenty chapters carry the Hebrew phrase le-David — a preposition plus a name, where the preposition can mean "by," "for," "belonging to," or "concerning." The Great Psalms Scroll from Qumran closes with a colophon crediting David with 3,600 psalms and 450 songs, a figure that is not a historical claim in any modern sense but a statement about his status as the fountainhead of Israel's prayer language, the way Moses became the fountainhead of law (the LDS scholar on David's 3,600 compositions).
Psalms 1 and 2 are the front door, and they were built as one. Both are untitled — unusual in Book I — and they bracket each other with ashrei, "blessed": Psalm 1 opens with it, Psalm 2 closes with it. Ancient readers noticed. The Talmud at Berakhot 9b treats them as a single chapter, and Codex Bezae cites Psalm 2:7 at Acts 13:33 as coming from "the first psalm" (our academic scholar on the bracket). Read as one poem, the pairing snaps into focus: the man who refuses to stand in the counsel of the wicked, and then the wicked nations taking counsel together against the Lord and his anointed. One subject at two scales — the righteous life and the anointed king. Notice also where Psalm 1 lands in the curriculum. Last week was Job, whose entire argument is that the righteous do not reliably prosper. Psalm 1:3 promises that whatsoever the righteous man does shall prosper. Nobody flagged the collision (our honest questioner on Psalm 1 after Job).
Psalm 2:7 — Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee — is the sharpest doctrinal collision in the block. In its original setting this is coronation language, the decree read at an enthronement, cognate with 2 Samuel 7:14. Jewish tradition reads it messianically too, but Rashi, writing in eleventh-century France under real pressure, said openly on 2:1 that he takes the plain sense partly li-teshuvat ha-minim, as an answer to the sectarians — he tells you in the text why he chooses the reading he chooses (our rabbi on Rashi showing his work). For creedal Christians the verse looks adoptionist: a sonship conferred on a date rather than eternally possessed (our honest questioner on "this day") — and Acts 13:33 makes it stranger by applying "this day" to the Resurrection. Latter-day Saints have a different problem and a possible advantage here, since D&C 93:12–14 already describes a Son who "received not of the fulness at the first." Whether that is a genuine fit or two unrelated ideas landing in the same words is genuinely unsettled (the same essay, on grace to grace).
Psalm 8 and Psalm 19 are the week's two witnesses — creation and revelation — and both hide a translation problem. At 8:5 the KJV reads "a little lower than the angels," following the Septuagint and Hebrews 2:7; the Hebrew says me'elohim, and the footnote in our own edition says so plainly: "HEB less than the gods." That footnote preserves, inside an official Latter-day Saint study text, the divine-council reading the Greek tradition softened (the LDS scholar on the footnote). Read it against Moses 1:10 — "man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed" — and Moses 1:39, and you get the psalm's two halves at full volume: smallness and crowning held in one frame, neither cancelling the other (our doctrinal connector on Moses 1). The rabbis heard verse 4 differently again: in Shabbat 88b the ministering angels quote "What is man?" against humanity, arguing the Torah should stay in heaven, and Moses wins the argument (our rabbi on the angels' objection). Psalm 19 breaks in half at verse 7 — a cosmic sun hymn, then a Torah meditation in a different register, with the divine name shifting from El to YHWH. Composite or deliberate two-panel design, the debate is live; what is not disputed is that the sun in verses 4–6 has been demoted from deity to object in Yahweh's sky, exactly the adjustment an adapting poet makes (our academic scholar on the seam). End with 19:12–13, which asks for two different things and deserves not to have them blurred: secret faults you cannot find by introspection, and presumptuous sins you can see perfectly well and have built a justification around (our practical disciple on running two audits).
Think deeply.
As you read, watch the block move from public liturgy to private catastrophe and back into public thanksgiving — because that is the actual shape of Israel's worship. Psalms 20 and 21 are royal psalms in the strict sense: 20 prays for the king before battle ("Some trust in chariots, and some in horses"), 21 thanks God after. Jewish practice still uses Psalm 20 as the continuation of Tachanun, the weekday penitential prayers, and drops it on joyous days precisely because it belongs to that mournful register (our rabbi on Psalm 20 after Tachanun). And Jewish tradition reads Psalm 21 messianically too: Sukkah 52a puts Psalm 2:8 in God's mouth addressing Messiah son of David and applies "He asked life of thee, and thou gavest it him" to the same figure (our rabbi on Sukkah 52a). Note also 21:10 — "their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men." That is a prayer for the extinction of an enemy's children, and it is in the hymnbook.
Then Psalm 22, and the first honest thing to do is to read the whole poem before arguing about one line of it. Its structure is a textbook individual lament: complaint (1–2), remembered deliverance (3–5), renewed complaint and physical catalogue (6–18), petition (19–21), and then a hard pivot at verse 22 into a vow of public praise, ending with the nations turning to the Lord and a generation yet unborn told "that he hath done this." The fight over verse 16 obscures the architecture: this psalm does not end in abandonment (the LDS scholar on the shape of the whole psalm). Before you get to the crux, know that Hebrew Bibles count the superscription as verse 1, so what the KJV calls 22:16 is 22:17 in a Jewish edition — true of Psalms 8, 19, 20, 21, 22, 30, 31, 40, and 46 in this block, and not of the rest (our rabbi on the numbering offset).
Now the crux. The Masoretic Text reads ka'ari yadai v'raglai, "like a lion, my hands and my feet" — a clause with no verb, which is the actual problem. The Septuagint has a verb, "they dug/pierced," and the KJV follows it. A first-century fragment from Nahal Hever appears to read the consonants with a final waw rather than yod, yielding a verb; in Herodian script those two letters are nearly identical strokes, and the ink at the decisive point is faint. The defensible summary is that the "pierced" reading is ancient and predates Jewish–Christian polemic, so it is not a Christian invention — and that it is also not certain, and a smudged letter on a decayed scroll proves nothing on its own (our honest questioner on the crux). Your Jewish neighbor's Hebrew says lion, and Rashi glosses it as bones crushed in a lion's mouth, citing Hezekiah's identical idiom in Isaiah 38:13 — no late evasion but simply what the consonants say (our rabbi on what the consonants say). And Jewish tradition has its own long-standing owner of verse 1: the Talmud at Megillah 15b gives the cry to Esther, entering the inner court unsummoned as the Divine Presence departs from her — the interior monologue of a woman for whom arriving uninvited is a capital offense (our rabbi on Esther's psalm).
Which raises the question the lesson's list of seven psalm-to-Gospel pairs does not ask: which direction does the connection run? The strongest critical case is that early Christians began with a crucified and risen Messiah and then combed Israel's scriptures for language adequate to him — that Matthew did not find the Crucifixion in Psalm 22 but found Psalm 22 in the Crucifixion (our honest questioner on the direction of the arrow). Our six-outlooks essay walks Psalm 22:1 through all six of Donald Parry's interpretive stances, and the payoff is the grinding point between the first two: in the near view, verse 24 is the resolution — God did not hide his face, and the man lived to pay his vows in the sanctuary. In the distant view, verse 1 is the truth, and the Man on the cross did not live (the six-outlooks walk-through on the collision). What the "likening" outlook adds is not a claim that your week is Gethsemane but a claim about grammar: you may address God directly, in the second person, with an accusation, and it counts as worship — the complaint is not a lapse the psalm later repairs, it is the opening line of the liturgy (the same essay, on complaint as worship). Close with Psalm 40, which is two poems welded together: thanksgiving in 1–12, lament in 13–17 — and verses 13–17 reappear as Psalm 70 with the divine name swapped. Nobody publishes the same poem twice under two numbers by accident; an editor compiling from separate sources does (our academic scholar on the doublet). At 40:6 the Hebrew says "ears hast thou digged for me"; the Septuagint generalized the part to the whole and produced "a body hast thou prepared me," which is what Hebrews 10:5 quotes and applies to the Incarnation (the LDS scholar on ears and bodies).
Think deeply.
Before you read, notice the destination. Psalm 23 does not end in a meadow; it ends "in the house of the Lord for ever" — which is exactly where Psalm 24 picks up, and where Psalms 26 and 27 stay ("I have loved the habitation of thy house"; "that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life"). Pasture leads to house (our doctrinal connector on the sequence). And these four poems say two apparently opposite things: Psalm 23 says the Lord takes you where you need to go and asks nothing but that you follow; Psalm 24 posts a standard at the door that most of us fail on any given Tuesday.
Latter-day Saints arrive at Psalm 23 with John 10 already in mind, and the psalm becomes a portrait of Jesus. Jews arrive with no such figure, and get something starker. Psalm 23 has no fixed place in Jewish liturgy at all — it lives at the edges, sung at the third Shabbat meal in the deepening dark and said at funerals (our rabbi, quoting Samuel Barth). Read without the Good Shepherd supplied in advance, verse 5 is not pastoral: there is a table, and there are enemies watching you eat at it — provision happens inside the danger, not after it is removed (our rabbi on the table among enemies). Alma reads the psalm as an interrogation rather than a consolation: everyone is in somebody's fold, and the comfort of Psalm 23 belongs to those who have learned a particular voice, tested behaviorally rather than emotionally (Alma 5:38–41) (our doctrinal connector on Alma 5).
Psalm 24 is the clearest liturgical script in the block. Since Gunkel it has been classed as an entrance liturgy: a question at the sanctuary gate, an answer specifying moral qualifications, then an antiphonal gate-opening in verses 7–10. The repetition of verse 7 in verse 9, the questions and answers, the Selah markers — this reads as a script for a procession with two voices, one outside the gate and one within (our academic scholar on the procession script). The Mishnah preserves its Temple job: it was the Levites' psalm for Sunday, and it is still the Sunday psalm in the siddur (our rabbi on the Levites' daily psalms). Then read the Joseph Smith Translation of verses 7–10 in the Bible appendix, which most readers never see. Where the Hebrew addresses architecture — "Lift up your heads, O ye gates" — the JST addresses people: "Lift up your heads, O ye generations of Jacob," and the King comes down. The direction of travel flips: the psalm asks who is worthy to ascend the hill, and the JST answers that before anyone ascends, He descends (our doctrinal connector on the JST reversal).
Psalm 26 is where this session gets uncomfortable. "I have walked in mine integrity" is sung, on the traditional ascription, in the voice of the man of 2 Samuel 11 — and D&C 132:39 says David "hath fallen from his exaltation" because of Uriah. The block asks you to sing the self-vindication of a man our own scripture says was not vindicated (our honest questioner on Psalm 26). One honest reading is that 26 is a liturgical oath of innocence about a specific accusation, not a claim of general sinlessness. Either way, 26:2 is a stranger prayer than it looks — "Examine me, O Lord, and prove me" — and the practical test is to pray it, mean it, and see what surfaces in forty-eight hours you would rather not have thought about (our practical disciple on requesting the audit). The same essay finds the diagnostic hiding inside Psalm 24:4: clean hands with an unpurified heart is a real, unfinished condition — the behavior gone and the appetite intact — which is not hypocrisy but a stage, and knowing which stage you are in is the point (our practical disciple on what you still miss). Finally, Psalm 27. You are reading it during Elul: Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786 fell on 13–14 August 2026, and Jews worldwide are saying this psalm twice a day through the High Holy Days. Read as literature its lurch at verse 7 looks like two psalms stitched together; read liturgically the seam is the point — this is the psalm of someone walking toward judgment, confident and terrified at once, out loud, every morning for forty days (our rabbi on Psalm 27 in Elul). One ministering note before you close: someone near you is in Psalm 22 this week, and the strongest temptation is to move them to Psalm 23. Jewish law on comforting mourners forbids the visitor to open the conversation — the grieving person sets the subject, the timing, and the silence (our practical disciple on letting the mourner open first).
Think deeply.
As you read, keep in mind that you are now in the Psalter's largest single category. The individual lament is the default form of Israel's hymnbook, not the exception (our practical disciple, citing Westermann) — and these four chapters give you the form in four different states: an acrostic prayer for guidance, a petition with teeth, a lament of total collapse, and the thanksgiving of a man who finally said the thing out loud.
Psalm 25 is an alphabetic acrostic — twenty-two verses, one per letter — except that it is not, quite. The waw line is missing, a second resh stands where qoph should be, and verse 22 is appended after the alphabet has closed, beginning with a letter already used. The identical three-part deviation appears in Psalm 34, which is two too many coincidences for scribal accident, so many treatments read the irregularity as designed. What the added verse does is visible even in English: it breaks the psalm's first-person singular to pray for the whole nation — a private lament acquiring a congregational ending, which is what happens when a poem enters a liturgy (our academic scholar on the damaged alphabet).
Psalm 28 is where devotional reading usually flinches. "Give them according to their deeds… render to them their desert" (28:4) is a petition for harm, and it is not a lapse from the lament form but a structural part of it (our academic scholar on the imprecatory edge). C. S. Lewis, in "The Cursings," refused to soften such passages — he called them diabolical — while arguing that the vindictiveness is itself evidence of a moral seriousness about evil that indifference lacks. You need not accept his solution to notice that he did not pretend the verses were not there (our honest questioner on Lewis). Psalm 31 gives you the other feature liturgy tends to sand off: sheer physical specificity. An eye consumed with grief, strength failing, bones consumed, "I am like a broken vessel" (31:12). Whatever else the Psalter is, it is a body of literature unusually willing to specify what suffering feels like (our academic scholar on the physicality). Read 2 Nephi 4:16–35 immediately after Psalm 31 and the architecture matches point for point — declaration, collapse, recollection, self-rebuke, vow of trust. The Restoration did not soften the psalmists' despair; it reproduced it in a prophet's own voice on the small plates (our doctrinal connector on lament as canonical). Psalm 31:5 is also the sentence Jesus died saying (Luke 23:46) — a verse that, in context, is the prayer of a man expecting to live.
Psalm 32 is the most physically specific text in the block: silence that ages the bones, a hand heavy day and night, moisture turned to the drought of summer. The nearest real research on putting hard things into words — Pennebaker's expressive-writing paradigm — reports an average effect around d = .16 across a hundred-plus studies, which is modest and contested. The poem is testimony, not a clinical finding, and it is worth stating both honestly (our practical disciple on the evidence). What the psalm actually asks for is not a feeling but verse 5, acknowledgement — and most of what we owe has a return address: a corrected figure, a conversation with the person you told the shaded story to, a sentence beginning "I need to correct something I said" (our practical disciple on confession's return address). Then look at the Joseph Smith Translation of 32:1, which turns "whose sin is covered" into "who have no sins to be covered" — Joseph Smith declining the language of merely imputed righteousness that Paul had built on this very verse at Romans 4:7 (the LDS scholar on the JST reversal). Whether the JST here restores an ancient text or supplies inspired commentary is genuinely disputed; Kevin Barney's sample found no ancient manuscript support for most JST readings and proposed reading it as commentary rather than restoration (our honest questioner on the JST question). And notice what Psalm 32 never does: it never names the sin (our honest questioner on the unnamed confession). Close the session with the practice that surrounds all of this in Jewish life — dividing the 150 chapters among a group and saying them for someone who is sick. The Talmud is formally against using scripture as a technology on a body, and the practice survived anyway, because the psalms are not being applied to the illness; they are said in its presence, by people who are afraid, in the words David was afraid in (our rabbi on saying Tehillim for the sick).
Think deeply.
Before you read, know that Psalm 29 is the clearest case in the Hebrew Bible of a poem built out of Canaanite material. The phrase qol YHWH, "the voice of the Lord," runs seven times; the storm rolls in off the Mediterranean, snaps the cedars of Lebanon, and shakes the wilderness; verse 6 names Sirion, which Deuteronomy 3:9 identifies as the Sidonian name for Hermon; verse 10's "flood" is mabbul, the Genesis deluge word. Ginsberg proposed in 1935 that it was a Phoenician hymn and Cross developed the philological case. Not everyone accepts wholesale borrowing, but that the poem speaks the storm-god idiom is not seriously disputed (our academic scholar on Psalm 29). For a tradition that believes truth exists outside its own borders and is meant to be gathered, that ought to be a comfortable fact rather than an awkward one (the LDS scholar on gathered truth). Verse 1's "O ye mighty" is bene elim, "sons of gods" — the same divine-council vocabulary as Psalm 8:5 — and here a caution is in order: Latter-day Saints reach for this material as vindication more confidently than the evidence supports, which is the substance of Michael Heiser's critique and David Bokovoy's answer (our honest questioner on confidence and evidence). The rabbis counted something else in this psalm: eighteen divine names, which Berakhot 28b gives as the reason the Amidah has eighteen blessings. The central prayer of Judaism is built to the measure of Psalm 29 (our rabbi on the eighteen names). Psalm 29:5 is also the best place in the block to feel how Hebrew verse actually works: "the voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon" is not repetition but escalation — Kugel's "A, and what's more, B" (our academic scholar on parallelism).
Psalm 30 arrives with a heading that does not fit its body: "at the dedication of the house," attached to a poem that is a personal thanksgiving for recovery from illness, with no building mentioned anywhere in it. Situational superscriptions like this work as early midrash — an editor matching poem to occasion after the fact (our academic scholar on the headings). Which is exactly what makes it work as the opening psalm of the Ashkenazi daily morning service: somebody put a national, architectural, public heading on a private recovery, and every ordinary morning becomes a small resurrection (our rabbi on Psalm 30). Worth knowing that this daily use is not ancient — it entered the rite through the circle of the Ari in sixteenth-century Safed. Jewish liturgy was still growing four hundred years ago. Psalm 33 has no superscription at all in the Hebrew, unusual for Book I; it is a straight hymn of praise with the imperative call and the "for" clauses that give the grounds, and it introduces the "new song" (33:3). Our own footnote at 33:20, "he is our help and our shield," sends you to 2 Nephi 4:34 — and Nephi's lament follows Gunkel's individual-lament pattern point for point. He was not imitating a genre he had read about; he had the brass plates and prayed in their idiom (the LDS scholar on Nephi's psalm).
Psalm 46 sits on the other side of an editorial seam from everything else you have read this week. It belongs to Book II, inside the Elohistic Psalter (Psalms 42–83), where Elohim displaces YHWH so consistently that the doublets give it away — which is how we know an ancient editor handled the divine name of an inspired text with a free hand and the result is still scripture (the LDS scholar on the Elohistic seam). Notice the river in 46:4. Jerusalem had a spring, not a river; the river is mythic geography, the stream of Eden relocated to the temple mount and set against the roaring sea of verse 3 (the LDS scholar on the river Zion does not have). And then verse 10. Harpu is the imperative of a root meaning to slacken, let drop, release your grip; the new JPS renders it "Desist!" Following verse 9, where God breaks the bow and burns the chariot, this is not an invitation to contemplative quiet but an order shouted at warring nations to put their weapons down (our rabbi on what "be still" says in Hebrew). That does not cancel the devotional use — but the devotional use is hard in its own right: Wilson's studies found unstructured stillness genuinely aversive, with people preferring an electric shock to sitting with their thoughts, which is why "be still" is better treated as a scheduling problem than a mood (our practical disciple on scheduling stillness). When the Saints were driven out of Jackson County in 1833, the revelation now printed as D&C 101:16–17 picked up both of the psalm's hinges — "be still and know that I am God" and "Zion shall not be moved" — and issued them to refugees who had just lost their homes, holding the psalm's confidence in a situation where that confidence looked absurd (our doctrinal connector on D&C 101).
End the week by going back to Psalm 22 with the six-outlooks essay in hand, because its final move is what the whole block has been building toward: verse 1 is not corrected by verse 24 the way an error is corrected — it is outlived, and the psalm demonstrates that God's answer can arrive after the verse that says it didn't (the six-outlooks capstone on the doctrine the six views produce together). That is why the shepherd psalm and the forsaken psalm are in the same week, in the same book, with the dawn in the title of the darker one (the six-outlooks essay's closing paragraph).
Think deeply.