主は 私の羊飼い shu wa watashi no hitsujikai Psalm 23:1 The Lord Is My Shepherd

主 (read shu) is the line's word for the Lord, as in the title's English. 私 (read watashi) is I, and with の (read no), my. A Japanese dictionary gives 羊飼い (read hitsujikai) as one who keeps sheep, or who watches sheep at pasture. The line's wa is its grammar.

The title's English is the King James Version's opening clause of the verse, as the English Revised and New International Versions also read it. It is the Japanese line's sense too, and the line stops before I shall not want.

The Hebrew's second word is a form of the verb pasture, tend, graze, used as a noun with my. The Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs lists it at this verse as an epithet of God, my shepherd. The Latin Bible reads Dominus regit me, the Lord rules me, with a verb in place of the noun.

A Jesuit book printed at Nagasaki in 1599, an abridged Japanese Guía de pecadores of Luis de Granada, gives the verse twice. For the Latin Bible's Dominus regit me, it writes 導き給ふ, guides. Then, in the reading the book gives to さんぜろうにも, which our history reads as Saint Jerome, the Latin pastor stands in kana, as ぱすとる.

The Orthodox psalter of 1885 wrote 主, the Lord. A hymnal of April 1888 set the psalm twice, singing 主 in one setting and Jehovah in the other. The Old Testament of 1888 named God here ヱホバ, Jehovah. Among the Bible societies' Bibles our history read, 主 at this verse begins with the colloquial Bible of 1955.

By the index's snippets, other books name God here: 天主 in a book of 1939, ヤヴェ in 1940, ヤーウェ in a Franciscan psalter of 1968. In snippets of the National Diet Library's full-text index, the Catholic liturgical psalter of 1972, in a printing of 1996, writes 神, God. The psalter's translation notes, in that printing and by the snippets, say the name Yahweh is not one Christians today feel very close to. Beside the Epistles, they add, telling the Lord Jesus Christ from God the Father matters more than telling apart the Old Testament's names for God.

The Bibles of 1888 and 1955 write 牧者, which a Japanese dictionary also gives as 牧師, a church's pastor. In a snippet of the index, a 1978 Japanese translation of Jay E. Adams's counselling book offers 牧師, pastor, as another way to translate 羊飼い.

The common translation of 1987 printed 主は羊飼い, without my. In snippets of his collected works of 1993, 左近淑 writes that the translation's draft read my shepherd at the outset, and asks how my fell away. 大野恵正 reports, as something said, that my shepherd was judged to suggest a shepherd one owns. No snippet our history read says who dropped it.

By the index's snippets, a book of 1961 describes Japanese Christians' gravestones carved with the words of the Old Testament of 1888, in modern kana. A magazine of 1967, also by snippet, describes a grave whose stone screen carries the same words. By the index's snippets too, funeral-sermon collections of 1984 and 1989 take the verse in the colloquial Bible's words.

Our history reads 羊飼い and my as the nearer of the Japanese Bibles' words to the Hebrew. It reads 主 as an old Japanese reading of the divine name, not a new one. It calls the Catholic psalter's reason for 神 a liturgy's reason, and a sound one.

The first clause of Psalm 23:1, a psalm headed of David, in the words of the 新改訳, in its Bible of 1970, the earliest printing of it read here, and of the Japan Bible Society's 聖書協会共同訳 of 2018; the earliest known book in the National Diet Library's full-text index to print these words is a Japanese translation, of 1954, of the Old Testament part of Goodspeed and Smith's The Short Bible.