The Lord’s My Shepherd

No single person wrote 'The Lord's My Shepherd.' The words come from the Scottish Psalter of 1650 — the Church of Scotland's official book of psalms set in meter — and they were the work of generations. The text passed through the hands of English translators of the 1560s, the Puritan parliamentarian Francis Rous, the Westminster Assembly's revisers, and finally a Scottish committee that polished it for three more years. Of Rous's own draft, scholars estimate only about a tenth survived; even the famous opening line came from another writer, Zachary Boyd.

The goal of all that committee work was simple: to be faithful to the Hebrew of Psalm 23 and easy for ordinary people to sing. That's why the word order sometimes bends — 'me comfort still' rhymes where 'comfort me still' would not.

For centuries afterward, Scottish congregations sang nothing but psalms — and of the hundred and fifty in their psalter, this became the best loved of them all.

The tune Latter-day Saints sing has one of the most unusual composers in the hymnal. James Leith Macbeth Bain (c. 1860–1925), known simply as 'Brother James,' was a Scottish mystic who lost his faith, found it again, and founded a Brotherhood of Healers whose members sang to their patients. He wrote a whole treatise on the joys of walking barefoot, and he spent his final years serving the poor in the slums of Liverpool.

He published this melody in 1915, in the depths of the First World War — the Church's hymn resource notes he wanted to comfort those who were suffering. He originally called the tune MAROSA; after his death, the English composer Gordon Jacob arranged it for choir and renamed it in the gentle healer's honor: BROTHER JAMES'S AIR.

Most of the world knows these words to a different melody: CRIMOND, a Victorian tune whose authorship is still disputed between Jessie Seymour Irvine, a minister's daughter, and David Grant, who may only have harmonized it. CRIMOND was sung at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth in 1947 — and seventy-five years later at Queen Elizabeth II's state funeral in 2022, bookending the longest reign in British history.

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints added the psalm to its hymnbook, it chose Brother James's quieter air instead — a healer's melody for a healer's psalm.

Latter-day Saints have long sung a Psalm 23 hymn — but a different one. 'The Lord Is My Shepherd' (#108 in the 1985 hymnal) is James Montgomery's paraphrase. The Scottish Psalter text, the one most of Christianity reaches for, had never been published by the Church until June 12, 2025, when it arrived as hymn #1038 in the fourth batch of Hymns—For Home and Church.

It joins a shepherd tradition that runs straight through Restoration scripture: the Good Shepherd of John 10, and the promise of 1 Nephi 22 that the Lord 'numbereth his sheep, and they know him' — three thousand years of believers singing David's confidence that goodness and mercy will follow them still.