I watched the Don’t Look Up (2021) fictional aka fake movie, though it did have a real Bible verse around the 1-hour mark at the “Launch Day” segment spoke out loud which said
“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the quiet waters. He restores my soul.”.
Who’s soul will be restored? All people. All humans are in a state of sin, being corrupted by it. How does one become restored to good? Only God is good. Therefore, God, Jesus died on the cross and thus His blood makes us good, we believe in Him and become good, restored, aka reconciled with God.
This verse is proof that God restores at least this soul. Since Jesus is the savior of all mankind, He therefore must not only save this one soul, but save all souls.
Now, let’s get the specific verse. With audio, you can’t tell if they spoke “Lord” or “LORD” since they sound identical. So with subtitles, it shows as “Lord” and not LORD used in this translation
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2023&version=KJV
Searching this verse online reveals it’s from Psalm 23 1-3. Which version? Definitely not the King James Version, since that uses the word “maketh” rather than makes. We can compare on Bible Hub
The ESV was close, however it’s “Lord” used and not “LORD” further, it uses “to lie down” however the ESV omits the “to” word
https://biblehub.com/psalms/23-1.htm ESV: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
https://biblehub.com/psalms/23-2.htm ESV: He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
https://biblehub.com/psalms/23-3.htm ESV: He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Some versions like the Berean Standard Bible have the beginning “A Psalm of David” part. Since it gets cut off during the 3rd verse around the “soul” part, it could have also started halfway through the first verse. Hmmm… let’s test that theory
New King James Version test
https://biblehub.com/psalms/23-1.htm NKJV: A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
https://www.biblehub.com/psalms/23-2.htm NKJV: He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.
https://www.biblehub.com/psalms/23-3.htm NKJV: He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
This version has the “to” word in front of the “lie down” section. So the movie version skips the “A Psalm of David” part and jumps straight to “The LORD”
Wait hold on. Looking at all the different verse versions, on BibleHub many of them shows that the LORD part is capitalized, however the subtitles in has only the first letter L capitalized and the rest of the 3 letters lowercase. This does not make sense considering that the proper name for the God of Israel is used here, not merely a title of “Lord” but rather the LORD God, the Yahweh God (translated as Jehovah God like in Young’s Literal Translation. That’s the thing with the false denomination of the Jehovah Witness’ which only believe that 144,000 will be saved even though all people will be saved. To the common masses, they’ve taken the term “Jehovah” for themselves.”
The LORD
יְהוָ֥ה (Yah·weh)
Noun - proper - masculine singular
Strong's 3068: LORD --
the proper name of the God of Israel
https://biblehub.com/parallel/psalms/23-1.htm
Using the Ctrl + F trick here to find the instances of non-all-capital LORD does not work, since even typing it in lowercase still detects the uppercase ones. So this search is not case sensitive.
Let’s see what
instances of the Bible use the lowercase name of “Lord”
https://dailynamesofgod.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/lord-in-lower-case-letters/
Isaiah 6:1 ESV In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.
the Lord
אֲדֹנָ֛י
(’ă·ḏō·nāy)
Noun - proper - masculine singular
Strong's 136: The Lord
https://www.biblehub.com/hebrew/strongs_136.htm
This tells us that the English version of “Lord” meaning Adonay cannot be used in Psalm 23-1 as a replacement for “LORD” Yahweh. However, where does this distinction between Lord vs LORD come from in the first place?
https://urbanareas.net/info/the-differences-between-lord-lord-and-lord-in-the-bible/
This website states that “In the Old Testament, all capital “LORD” is used when the English translators were translating the Tetragrammaton (the most holy name of God that was not spelled out entirely, but only using the four letters “YHWH”). That is the reason for the all caps emphasis (such as Genesis 18:1).”. So this site speculates that the reason for the LORD 4 letters being all capital letters is because of the YHWH 4 letters being all capital.
But here’s the thing, Hebrew does not have uppercase nor does it have lowercase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet
Wikipedia tells us that “The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case.”
However, as we know the Hebrew Bible was not written in English, but rather in Hebrew, hence the name “Hebrew Bible”. Not all of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew of course, like how Daniel 2:4 - 7:28 were written in Aramaic,
So what should these movie subtitles do to improve their biblical accuracy? Well, you may be wondering what the point of this is, I just figured it would be a fun article to write lol. But, even though this movie is fictional aka fake, the Bible is nonfiction aka real, so it should be represented with the most accuracy possible. Still, if there was an order of priority, I believe it would be good for the movie to
1) Have the Book Name Chapter Number: Verse Section that they are quoting
2) The Translation Version that they are using
With the existence of so many human made Bible translations, some of them are bound to have mistakes. Even though I believe that the Bible itself is true, human translators to English are mere sinners after all and are suspetible to making mistakes in grammar. So when you see a verse, it’s best to consult the original Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek that scriptures was written in.