It only takes a generation of ease for a people to forget that the world is perilous.
Men and women who know what a rocking chair is are ill equipped to imagine wolves. We are capable of doing so, of course, when pressed by adversity into action. Yet that observation confirms the point that pressure is required for us to imagine threat, let alone to rise against it at the risk of life, limb, and torn bodies.
In his brilliant work, Shepherds After my Own Heart: pastoral traditions and leadership in the Bible, Timothy S. Laniak argues that the ancient shepherd’s role is something other than we moderns suppose. Its quintessence, Laniak persuades, was to protect and provide for the flock in a context rich of scarcity and danger.
The romance quickly fades from the vocation and leads us back to the Aaronic blessing. When the priest speaks aloud over the people, hoping that YHWH is listening in and amenable to suggestion, he fleshes out what it means for the deity to bless his covenanted people by urging …
May the Lord keep you …
In many contexts, the more robust and perhaps precise English translation would not produce ‘keep’ but rather ‘guard’ or ‘ protect’. That the rather soft English word ‘keep’ has become conventional owes perhaps rather more to its recitation in safe liturgical environs than to the linguistic dynamic of the Hebrew word itself and the decidedly unsafe wilderness environment in which the Torah’s literary craftsmen have placed its establishment.
If one chooses to live within the biblical story as the most competently contextualizing story of all those available to us in our time, then one ought to be clear-eyed about such self-insertion. It is a dangerous world to choose, with a most perilous story line. Death and calamity erupt with unsettling regularity, sometimes by the sword of one’s enemy, sometimes by the perfidy of one’s brother, and occasionally by fire that emanates from the very God whom one has covenanted to follow into the wilderness.
The priest was no fool when he intoned daily over his people …
May the Lord bless you … and protect you …
He may in that moment have stood as Israel’s greatest warrior.
Though admittedly such divine blessing would have been rich, its alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
Canter Bridge 
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