Psalm 23 Research Paper

Sheep are some of the densest creatures God created. They cannot find a food source on their own unlike deer and many other animals God created. In fact, they will stay on the same food plot and eat the green grasses down to the roots thus killing the food source. They are timid creatures with few survival skills and if it were put into a simple equation it would look like this ~ Danger + Sheep = Death. The mere sound of running, life giving, water is frightening to them so a good shepherd must dam up a small section of the stream to create standing or "still" water for the sheep to be able to approach the stream and drink. The shepherd's tools were his rod and staff. The rod was a straight wooden stick with a knob at the end and was carried in the shepherd's belt.
The staff was also wooden and had that familiar hook like crook at the top. Sheep would quite often wander off the path of safety and become entangled in dense brush or slip into small gulleys and the crook enabled the shepherd to reach out for the sheep and draw it out of harm and back to the safety of the flock.
Psalm 23 can be regarded as a psalm of high praise of God. It is one of the shortest psalms, but it gets its point across very directly and clearly. It makes use of the extended metaphor which is a metaphor that develops at length and includes several points of comparison. This psalm also uses the idea of parallelism that gives an idea in the first lines and keeps on repeating and elaborating in the later