The Shepherd (Blake) of The Shepherd as Christ is initially found in another Song, The Little Black Boy. Psalm 23 depicts God as a shepherd of mankind, and the capitalization of the word 'Shepherd' in the first and last lines furthers the idea that the Shepherd is a symbol of God. In the bible, a shepherd's presence is representative of guidance. In this poem, the Shepherd can be viewed as the spiritual guide or a savior of the herd, rejoicing in their numbers. Jesus is also referred to in the bible as the Lamb of God. Since the poem depicts The Shepherd as
Psalm 151 text of this psalm to be in places “desiccated”, “meaningless”, “truncated”, “ridiculous”, “absurd”, “jumbled”, and “disappointingly different”, all this the result of its having been “made from a truncated amalgamation of the two Hebrew psalms”. On details of translation, structure, and meaning of this psalm see especially the works of Skehan, Brownlee, Carmignac, Strugnell, Rabinowitz, Dupont-Sommer, and Flint. The title of the psalm states that it was written by David after his battle with Goliath. The psalm assumes familiarity with and draws ideas and phraseology from elsewhere in the Bible. <poem> I was small among my brothers, I tended my