Zachary Boyd (1585–1653) was a Scottish minister and university administrator who wrote many sermons, scriptural versifications and other devotional works.

[7] Boyd sought to have his rhymed psalter (printed in 1644) and scriptural songs (1645) accepted as the standard text for use in England and Scotland.

Boyd's autograph manuscripts, which are held at Glasgow University Library, include Zions Flowers (or 'Christian Poems for Spiritual Edification'), the didactic set of exercises The English Academie and versified Gospels entitled The Four Evangels.

[10] Known collectively as 'Boyd's Bible' – though Boyd never did versify the entire Bible – these poems' critical estimation has never been high: representative is the nineteenth-century writer John Marshall Lang's opinion that Boyd 'was not a poet, yet he was something more than a mere doggerel rhymer [....] the commendable features are often marred not merely by rugged verse, but also by hard and unsympathetic thought.

[13] However, the bibliographer Gabriel Neil did print four poems from Zion's Flowers in 1855, and David Atkinson produced an edition of Boyd's Selected Sermons for the Scottish Text Society in 1989.