Hymns based on Psalm 23

Psalm 23 has given hymn writers words for 5 hymns in this library, by writers including J. H. Gilmore, Clement of Alexandria; Henry Martyn Dexter and Francis Bottome. Each is listed below with the lines that echo the chapter and the verses they draw on, quoted from the World English Bible, a public-domain modern translation.

The verse these hymns return to most is Psalm 23:1: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall lack nothing.”

Hymn writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew their Bibles almost by heart, and they wove its phrases into their lines — sometimes as a close paraphrase, as in the metrical psalms, and sometimes as a single image carried into a new setting. Reading the verse beside the line shows what the writer had in mind, and often why a hymn was chosen to be sung alongside a particular reading.