Follow
I read Psalm 23:6 for years before I heard it.
KING JAMES VERSION
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow (רָדַף · radaph) me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
PSALM 23 : 6
There are days when it feels like something is chasing me.
Some days it's the bills. Some days it's a doctor's appointment I don't want to go to. Some days it's a thing I said twenty years ago that I wish I could pull back. You don't always know what it is. You just feel it back there, gaining.
I sat down with my coffee one morning and I was in Psalm 23. More than forty years of reading the Bible, and this is the psalm I have read more than any other. Read it at funerals. Heard it over hospital beds. Prayed it at bedtime. I know it the way you know a song.
And I came to the last verse:
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
Now I'll tell you, follow is a gentle word in English. A puppy follows. A child follows her mother around the kitchen. Follow keeps a polite distance. Follow does not crowd. The verse goes soft on us. A nice little blessing keeping us company.
But the Hebrew word David wrote is not follow.
The word is radaph. It is the hunter's verb. Pharaoh's chariots used this word at the Red Sea, going after the Israelites. Saul used it in the wilderness when he was trying to kill David. When a soldier in the Hebrew Bible closes the distance on his enemy, this is the verb. Radaph does not trail. Radaph goes after with intent. When the Hebrew Bible wants to say follow in the gentle sense, it has other words for that. David did not write one of those gentle words.
He wrote radaph.
And here is what stopped me cold that morning. Two verses earlier, David said yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He knew what it was to be hunted. Saul had hunted him for years. His own son Absalom had hunted him later. There has been pursuit in this psalm. The man wrote it knowing what radaph meant.
Then in the last verse he picks up that same verb. The verb of his enemies. And he hands it to goodness and mercy.
Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me, all the days of my life.
Not trail behind. Not keep up. Hunt me down.
I'll be honest with you. I sat there with my coffee and I looked back at sixty years. All the things I thought were chasing me. All the days I tried to outrun what I could not name. And I had to ask myself something.
What if I had it backwards the whole time?
What if the thing at my back was never the enemy?
Look at your own years a minute. The hard thing that came when you didn't expect it. The bend in the road you didn't want to take. The trouble that found you anyway. You have been running from something your whole life. We all have. And David is telling us, plain, in the verb of the hunt, that the thing on our heels was never what we thought.
Goodness was at your back the whole time. Mercy was too.
And the Good Shepherd has been hunting you down.
MEDITATE ON THIS
Goodness and mercy are not behind me. They are hunting me down.
A PRAYER
Lord, I have run from a lot of things in my life, and I was wrong about most of them. Forgive me for the years I spent looking over my shoulder. Help me see today that what is at my back is You. Let me stop running. In Jesus' name, amen.
The Work Behind This Entry
The Word. Radaph (רָדַף) is one of the standard Hebrew verbs for hostile pursuit. Strong's H7291. BDB and HALOT both give to pursue, chase, hunt as the primary meaning, with the semantic range extending to persecute and harass. The word appears roughly 144 times in the Hebrew Bible, and in the great majority of those occurrences it carries an aggressive or determined valence, not a gentle one. There is no Hebrew word in the Bible that means follow in the soft English sense (a puppy following, a shadow following). When the Hebrew Bible wants to describe gentle accompaniment, it reaches for other verbs, like halak im (to walk with) or davaq (to cleave to). David in Psalm 23:6 reached past those gentler verbs and used radaph.
How the Translations Render It. The KJV, ESV, NIV, and NASB all soften radaph to follow at Psalm 23:6. Three translations done from the Hebrew preserve the harder reading. The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh has Only goodness and steadfast love shall pursue me. Robert Alter's literary translation gives Let but goodness and kindness pursue me. Young's Literal Translation, true to its name, gives Only — goodness and kindness pursue me. The NET Bible also renders pursue and includes a translator's note flagging radaph as the verb most commonly used in the Hebrew Bible for hostile pursuit. The softening to follow is a tradition inherited from the medieval English translations. It is not a necessity of the Hebrew.
The Word Elsewhere in Scripture. Radaph shows up most often as the verb of threat. Pharaoh's chariots pursued the Israelites at the Red Sea (Exodus 14:9). The enemy in the Song of the Sea boasted I will pursue, I will overtake (Exodus 15:9). Saul pursued David in the wilderness of Maon (1 Samuel 23:25). Lamentations 1:6 describes Israel's princes fleeing without strength before the pursuer. But the word turns positive in a few key places. Psalm 34:14 commands the believer to seek peace, and pursue it. Peace is not to be politely sought; it is to be hunted. Hosea 6:3 says let us follow on to know the LORD, the same verb applied to our pursuit of God. Proverbs 21:21 says he that followeth after righteousness and mercy findeth life. The verb is the same in all of these. The valence shifts with the object. When the object is the believer fleeing the enemy, radaph is threat. When the object is goodness and mercy and God himself, the verb is reassigned to the side of the believer.
Going Deeper. BibleHub on Psalm 23:6 · Blue Letter Bible lexicon entry for radaph (H7291) · BibleGateway parallel translations of Psalm 23:6
A Note on the Reading. That radaph primarily means pursue in the sense of hostile or determined chase, not gentle following, is the consensus reading of the standard Hebrew dictionaries. That David at Psalm 23:6 reassigns the verb of threat to what is on his side, after walking through the valley of death and sitting at the table in the presence of his enemies, is my reading. A careful reader could accept the lexicon and still hear the verse as simpler than I am hearing it. They might hear David saying only that goodness and mercy will re