The Lord’s My Shepherd, I’ll Not Want

In the early 1640s, Francis Rouse, an English Puritan, rendered all 150 Psalms from the Hebrew into metrical English. The General Assembly of the church of Scotland, meeting in Edinburgh, took Rouse’s translation and submitted it to revision committees. These committees spent six years comparing the metered Psalms with the original Hebrew, seeking to develop a singable translation that was accurate to the original Hebrew. They worked as painstakingly as if creating a new translation of the Bible.

Finally, in 1650, the Scottish Psalter was released and approved for congregations of the Church of Scotland. Its full title was: The Psalms of David in Meeter: Newly translated, and diligently compared with the original Text, and former Translations: More plain, smooth, and agreeable to the Text, than any heretofore.

Though the Scottish Psalter of 1650 is one of the great treasures of hymnody, the only portion widely sung beyond Scotland is its beautiful rendition of Psalm 23.