Psalms 23:1

Six words in Hebrew, and the whole psalm is contained in them. Everything that follows — the green pastures, the dark valley, the table set in front of enemies — is just the unfolding of what it means that he is a shepherd and I am not.

The possessive is the part to notice. *My* shepherd. David does not open with a doctrine about God's general care for the world; he opens with a relationship narrow enough to hold one person. That is a bold thing for a king to write, since kings in the ancient Near East were themselves called shepherds of their people. David, who held that title, puts himself back in the flock.

And he would have known that the job is not sentimental. Shepherds moved sheep off exhausted ground whether or not the sheep wanted to move. They used a rod on predators and a staff to hook an animal out of a crevice it had wandered into, and neither was gentle in the moment. The comfort of verse 4 is a rod and staff — instruments of correction and rescue, not of indulgence.

“I shall lack nothing” is therefore not a promise of abundance. It is a promise of sufficiency, guaranteed by competence. Sheep are not good at knowing what they need. The claim is that someone is making that assessment who is better at it than you are.