“FADUEL MOABGHAB,” said our guest, laughing as he leaned over the tea-table towards two little maids, vainly trying to beguile their willing and sweetly-pursed lips into pronouncing his name. “Faduel Moghabghab,” he repeated in syllables, pointing to the card he had passed to them. “Accent the u and drop the g’s, which your little throats cannot manage,” he went on kindly, while the merriment sparkled in his lustrous dark eyes, and his milk-white teeth, seen through his black moustache as he laughed, added beauty to his delicate and vivacious face.
He was a man of winsome mind, this Syrian guest of ours, and the spirituality of his culture was as marked as the refinement of his manners. We shall long remember him for the tales told that evening of his home in Ainzehalta, on the slope of the Syrian mountains, but longest of all for what he said out of the memories of his youth about a shepherd song.
“It was out of the shepherd life of my country,” he remarked, “that there came long ago that sweetest religious song ever written―the ‘Twenty-third Psalm.’”
After the ripple of his merriment with the children had passed, he turned to me with a face now serious and pensive, and said: ―
“Ah, so many things familiar to us are strange to you.”
“Yes,” I answered, “and no doubt because of this we often make mistakes which are more serious than mispronunciation of your modern names.”
He smiled pleasantly, then with earnestness said: “So many things in the life of my people, the same now as in the days of old, have been woven into the words of the Bible, and into the conceptions of religious ideas as expressed there. You of the western world, not knowing these things as they are, often misunderstand what is written, or at least fail to get a correct impression from it.”
“Tell us about some of these,” I ventured, with a parental glance at two listening faces.
After mentioning several instances, he went on: “And there is the shepherd psalm: I find that it is taken among you as having two parts, the first under the figure of shepherd life, the second turning to the figure of a banquet with the host and the guest.”
“Oh, we have talked about that,” said my lady of the tea-cups, “and we have even said that we wished the wonderful little psalm could have been finished in the one figure of shepherd life.”
“It seems to us,” I added, wishing to give suitable support to my lady’s rather brave declaration of our sense of a literary flaw in the matchless psalm, “it seems to us to lose the sweet, simple melody, and to close with strange heavy chords when it changes to a scene of banquet hospitality. Do you mean that it actually keeps the shepherd figure to the end?”
“Certainly, good friends.”
With keen personal interest I asked him to tell us how we might see it as a shepherd psalm throughout. So we listened and he talked, over the cooling tea-cups.
“It is all, all a simple shepherd psalm,” he began. “See how it runs through the round of shepherd life from first word to last.”
With softly modulated voice, that had the rhythm of music and the hush of veneration in it, he quoted:
“ ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.’ There is the opening strain of music: in that chord is sounded the keynote which is never lost till the plaintive melody dies away at the song’s end. All that follows is that thought put in varying light.”
I wish it were possible to reproduce here the light in his face, and the interchange of tones in his mellow voice as he went on.
Finding Still Waters.
“ ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures’; nourishment, rest. ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters’; refreshment. You think here of quietly flowing streams, and get only another picture of rest. But streams are few in that shepherd country, and the shepherds do not rely on them. To the shepherd the still waters are wells and cisterns, and he leads his sheep to these still waters, not for rest, but to bring up water to quench their thirst.”
Then he talked of how the varied needs of the sheep and the many-sided care of the shepherd are pictured with consummate skill in the short sentences of the psalm.
“Each is distinct, and adds something too precious to be merged and lost,” he said.
“ ‘He restoreth my soul’; you know,” he said, turning to me, “that ‘soul’ means the life of one’s self in the Hebrew writings.”
Then, addressing all, he went on:
“There are private fields and gardens and vineyards in the shepherd country, and if a sheep stray into them and is caught there, it is forfeited to the owner of the land. So, ‘He restoreth my soul,’ means ‘the shepherd brings me Back, and rescues my life from forbidden and fatal places.’”
‘‘‘Restores me when wandering,’ is the way it is put in one of our hymns,” I interposed.
“Ah, sir, that is it exactly,” he answered. “‘Restores me when wandering!’
“‘He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness, for His name’s sake’; often have I roamed through the shepherd country in my youth, and watched how hard it is to choose the right path for the sheep; one leads to a precipice, another to a place where the sheep cannot find the way back; and the shepherd was always going ahead, ‘leading’ them in the right paths, proud of his good name as a shepherd.
“Some paths that are right paths lead through places that have deadly perils; ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ is the way the psalm touches this fact in shepherd life. This way of naming the valley is very true to our country. I remember one near my home called the ‘valley of robbers,’ and another ‘the ravine of the raven.’ You see ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ is a name drawn from my country’s old custom. And so is the phrase, ‘Thy rod and Thy staff,’ for the shepherds carry a weapon for defense, and one for guidance. Ah, madam, you should see the sheep cuddle near the shepherd to understand the word, ‘They comfort me.’ The shepherd’s call, ‘Ta-a-a-a, He-o-o,’ and the answering patter of feet as the sheep hurry to him, are fit sounds to be chosen out of the noisy world to show what comfort God gives to souls that heed His voice; and those sounds have been heard in my country this day as they were the day this shepherd psalm was written!”
He sat in silence a moment, musing, as if the sound was in his ear.
With quiet animation he lifted his thin hand and continued: “Now, here is where you drop the shepherd figure and put in a banquet, and so lose.
The Climax of Completeness
in the shepherd’s care.”
It need not be said that we were eager listeners now, for our guest was all aglow with memories of his far-off home, and we felt that we were about to see new rays of light flash from this rarest gem in the song treasury of the world.
“ ‘Thou preparest a table before me—in the presence of mine enemies.’”
In the same hushed voice in which he quoted these words he added:
“Ah, to think that the shepherd’s highest skill and heroism should be lost from view as the psalm begins to sing of it, and only an indoor banquet thought of!”
Again he sat in silence a moment. Then he said: “There is no higher task of the shepherd in my country than to go from time to time to study places and examine the grass, and find a good and safe feeding-place for his sheep. All his skill, and often great heroism, are called for. There are many poisonous plants in the grass, and the shepherd must find and avoid them. A cousin of mine once lost three hundred sheep by a mistake in this hard task.
“Then there are vipers’ holes, and the reptiles bite the noses of the sheep if they be not driven away. The shepherd must burn the fat of hogs at the holes to do this. And round the feeding-ground which the shepherd thus prepares, in holes and caves in the hillsides, there are jackals, wolves, hyenas, and tigers, too, and the bravery and skill of the shepherd are at the highest point in closing up these dens with stones, or slaying the wild beasts with his long-bladed knife. Of nothing do you hear shepherds boasting more proudly than of their achievements in this part of their care of flocks. And now!” he exclaimed with a beaming countenance, and suppressed feeling, as if pleading for recognition of the lone shepherd’s bravest action of devotion to his sheep, “and now do you see the shepherd figure in that quaint line, ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies?’”
“Yes,” I answered, “and I see that God’s care of a man out in the world is a grander thought than that of seating him at an indoor banquet table.
“But what about anointing the head with oil, and the cup running over? Go on, my friend.”
Oh, there begins the beautiful picture at the end of the day.
“The psalm has sung of the whole round of the day’s wanderings, all the needs of the sheep, all the care of the shepherd. Now the psalm closes with the last scene of the day. At the door of the sheepfold the shepherd stands, and the ‘rodding of the sheep’ takes place. The shepherd stands turning his body to let the sheep pass; he is the door, as Christ said of Himself. With his rod he holds back the sheep while he inspects them one by one as they pass into the fold. He has the horn filled with olive oil, and he has cedar-tar, and he anoints a knee bruised on the rocks, or a side scratched by thorns. And here comes one that is not bruised, but is simply worn and exhausted; he bathes its face and head with the refreshing olive oil, and he takes the large two-handled cup and dips it brimming full from the vessel of water prided for that purpose, and he lets the weary sheep drink. There is nothing finer in the psalm than this. God’s care is not for the wounded only, but for the worn and weary also.
‘He anointeth my head with oil, my cup runneth over.’
“And then, when the day is gone, and the sheep are snug within the fold, what contentment, what rest under the starry sky! Then comes the thought of deepest repose and comfort: ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,’ as they have through all the wanderings of the day now ended.”
“The song dies away as the heart that God has watched and tended breathes this grateful vow before the roaming of the day is forgotten in sleep. ‘I will’ ―not shall, but will; for it is a decision, a settled purpose, a holy vow— ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ And the song ends, and the sheep are at rest, safe in the Good Shepherd’s fold.”
Do you wonder that ever since that night we have called this psalm, “The Song of our Syrian Guest”?
W. A. KNIGHT.
Published by the Drummond Tract Depot, Stirling.