Psalm 23

I use the Forward website to pray the daily office—it's a little more user friendly than the BCP—and they include the Latin titles, which is typically just the first few words but in Latin. Today's daily office had Psalms 23 and 27 for the evening prayer, and the title of Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd") is given as Dominus regit me ("The Lord rules me"), with the metaphor of shepherding entirely absent.

This made me wonder, where does the metaphor of shepherding enter and/or exit the text of the Psalm?

The best place to start would be the Hebrew text of the Psalms. I don't know Hebrew, but I do know how to use Sefaria, a site recommended to me by my good friend Tell which does lovely things like provide the Hebrew text of Psalm 23 and then gloss words for you when you cannot read them. Thus I can tell you (via Sefaria and a quick cross-reference with Wiktionary) that yes, the shepherding metaphor is very present in the original Hebrew, in that the line reads something like (shockingly) "The Lord is my shepherd".^[1] So wherever regit, with its generic rulership, is coming from, it isn't the Hebrew.

Next place to look is the Latin Vulgate, which actually has two versions of Psalms: one from the Greek, and one from the Hebrew. In the version from the Hebrew, Psalm 22^[2] begins thus:

Dominus pascit me nihil mihi deerit

The Lord puts me to pasture; nothing will be lacking for me

Shepherding metaphor very much intact! But in the version from the Greek, Psalm 22 begins:

Dominus reget me et nihil mihi deerit

The Lord will rule me and nothing will be lacking for me.

Rego means "to guide, lead straight" and through that, "to govern, rule over". (This must be the version from which the Forward site took their titles.)

But then, go back to the Greek of the Septuagint, and we find:

Κύριος ποιμαίνει με, καὶ οὐδέν με ὑστερήσει.

The Lord shepherds me, and nothing will be wanting for me.

Ποιμαίνω is, if anything, even more specifically shepherd-y than pasco: ποιμήν means "shepherd" so this verb really does just read as "to shepherd, be a shepherd" in its most etymological sense.

This means that the failure of the shepherding metaphor is a specific glitch in the Latin version of the Greek version of the Hebrew original of the text. Which, when you think about it, is pretty neat.