ποιμήν (poimēn) is the plain Greek word for a shepherd — the man who keeps sheep. There’s nothing exotic in the term itself. But when Jesus takes it up in John 10 — egō eimi ho poimēn ho kalos, “I am the good shepherd” — the ordinary word lands in a world where “shepherd” was one of the most loaded images in all of Scripture, because of who had worn the role before.

In the Hebrew Bible, the shepherd of Israel is, again and again, God himself. “The LORD is my shepherd,” begins the most beloved psalm ever written, “I shall not want.” Isaiah pictures God coming in power and then, tenderly, tending “his flock like a shepherd,” gathering the lambs in his arms. Jeremiah thunders against the shepherds who scatter the flock and promises that God will gather it. Wherever you turn, the shepherd of the people is the LORD. So for a man to stand up and say “I am the shepherd” was to step into a role the Scriptures had assigned, over and over, to God.

The strongest case for that reading sits in one chapter: Ezekiel 34. There God indicts the “shepherds of Israel” — the leaders who fed themselves while the flock scattered — and then says something staggering. Since the shepherds have failed, I will do it myself. “Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out… I will rescue them… I will feed them.” Over and over: I myself. The true shepherd, the one who would come and do what the failed leaders wouldn’t, is ποιμήν in the person of Yahweh. To say “I am the good shepherd” into a world that knew Ezekiel 34 by heart was to claim the slot the prophet reserved for the LORD — the place where God said I myself. This is the saying where the divine reading stands at its full height across all the “I am” pictures.

And yet Ezekiel 34 holds the other reading inside the very same chapter, which is what makes the word so rich. Keep reading past “I myself will shepherd them,” and God adds: “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them.” So the prophet gives two shepherds in one breath — God, who will shepherd the flock himself, and a coming “David,” the promised Messianic king God will raise up to shepherd them. The chapter doesn’t tell you how to keep them apart; it holds God-the-shepherd and David-the-shepherd together, almost as if the one would come through the other. So a reader can stand before “I am the good shepherd” and hear, with equal warrant, I am the God who said I myself would come, or I am the David God promised to send — and Ezekiel won’t settle it, because Ezekiel didn’t. One ordinary word, ποιμήν, reaching back toward God and toward the Messiah at once.