Hymn #247: My Shepherd Is the Living God | First Congregational Church

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) created three metrical paraphrases of the beloved Psalm 23. This version includes most of the stanzas from the one that originally began “My Shepherd will supply my need” but substitutes the first two lines from Thomas Sternhold’s paraphrase of 1549 in the first stanza.

Isaac Watts published the fourth and final collection of his hymn texts in 1719, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament. It provided metered versions of the psalms that went far beyond the bounds of paraphrase, many of them reinterpreted from a Christian perspective.

This tune, CONSOLATION, first appeared in the shape-note tunebook, The Beauties of Harmony, published by Freeman Lewis in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There it was called HOPEWELL and was the setting for “Come Humble Sinner in Whose Breast.” Other early sources called it RESIGNATION.

In William Walker’s Southern Harmony (1854), a Baptist hymnbook used primarily in the Southeastern United States, this tune was matched with Isaac Watts’s text and bore the present name, CONSOLATION.