Pastyr' (what is the Hebrew original?)

[Loren Billings]

I apologize for not writing directly to Frank; I can't reach bitnet
addresses from this one (or so I'm told).  The following summarizes the
discussion so far:

I posted a comment that in the Russian psalm for "the Lord is my Shepherd"
the word _pastyr'_ is used instead of _pastux_.  Frank then added the
following:

>Which translation were you talking about; Russian or Church Slavonic?
>The ChSl (modern, Russian recension) does not include any noun for
>'shepherd,' but instead reads:  Gospod' paset" mja. (' = jer', " = jer").
>I don't have any Russian translation at hand, but if it uses a noun for
>'shepherd,' and chooses _pastyr'_ over _pastux_, this could be because
>_pastyr'_ has an exclusively spiritual connotation, while a _pastux_ is
>merely someone who watches sheep.  A bad editorial choice, in my view,
>because it extracts the poetic image of the relationship between God and
>the psalmist as one of a shepherd to his flock from the psalm.  Still, I
>can see how someone could come to the (erroneous, in my view) conclusion
>that it was a better translation.
>
>Frank McLellan <ST403231 at BROWNVM.BITNET>

I was unaware that OCS uses the verb (_paset"_).  Would anyone know the
original Hebrew?  It seems that the verb (Russian _paset_) is a convenient
way around the thorny choice between solely spriritual _pastyr'_ and solely
secular _pastux_.

I tell my translation students not to become bound to the same part of
speech in translation.  The OCS solution seems to be a nice example of what
to do.  --LAB

Loren A. Billings
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
Florida State University
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