Ps. 22:16: Digging Through the Problem
The following excerpts are taken from The Psalms as Christian Worship: An Historical Commentary, co-authored by Bruce K. Waltke and James M. Houston with Erika Moore, published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. in 2010, Chapter 12. Psalm 22: Prophetic Psalm of Christ’s Passion, pp. 376 ff. All emphasis will be mine.
III. Polemical Interpretation of Psalm 22 in the Third to Sixth Centuries
The official adoption of Christianity by Constantine, following the previous fierce persecution of its martyrs, generated internal dissension in the churches.
Why should compromisers prosper in church offices, when “the faithful” had suffered so much by martyrdom? And where are the sufferings of Christ more poignantly expressed than in Psalm 22?
Psalm 22 now became a battleground not between Christians and Jews or heretics, but between purists and inclusivists. Nevertheless, the orthodox agreed that Psalm 22 prophesied Christ’s Passion and Cross.
For Eusebius of Caesarea (260-340) it is a prophecy of the Passion of Christ and of the vocation of all Gentiles.22 Writing on Psalm 22, Jerome asserts that the entire psalm sets forth Christ in all his sufferings.
Athanasius (260-340) argues that when the psalm “speaks of the piercing of the hands and feet, what else than a cross does it signify? After teaching us all these things, it adds that the Lord suffers these things not for his own sake, but for ours.”23
We have only fragments of references to Psalm 22 until Novatian’s (c. third century) commentary on Psalm 22,24 which links the prophecy of the suffering Servant of Isaiah with the prophecy of Psalm 22: “For divine Scripture, which foresees all, speaks of things which it knows will take place in the future, as already done. And it speaks of things as already accomplished which it regards as future, because they shall undoubtedly come to pass.”
The predictive element of prophecy, however, is not the focus of the early fathers.
Rather, the unity of the Old and New Testaments is found in the division between the “literal” or historical in the Old Testament and its “spiritual” or further application in the New Testament. They see “two economies,” or “two covenants.”
In the former the present has a future perspective, while in the latter the present also has a past significance. The latter does not destroy the first, but gives it a fuller meaning; the “spiritual” may be said to give the “literal” a greater depth.
The Cross of Christ is this hinge, and thus Psalm 22 is critical for this “double meaning” of the “literal” and the “spiritual.”
From Augustine of Hippo we have two expository sermons on Psalm 22. The fuller version was preached on Good Friday, March 23, 395. Among other complaints against the Donatists, he preaches:
It is amazing, brothers and sisters, to think that this psalm is also being sung today by the Donatists. Well, I ask you, brothers and sisters, what do you make of it? I confess I don’t know, but Christ in his mercy knows that I am astonished that they are no more capable of hearing it than if they were stone-deaf. Could anything be put more plainly to such deaf people? The passion of Christ is recounted in this psalm as clearly as in the gospel, yet the psalm was composed goodness knows how many years before the Lord was born of the virgin Mary. It was a herald, giving advance notice of the coming of the judge.25
Augustine preaches again on Psalm 22 in an Easter sermon, and notes that this annual liturgical commemoration “in a sense makes present what took place in time past, and in this way it moves us as if we were actually watching our Lord hanging on the cross, but watching as believers, not mockers.”26
Augustine also implies that it is our cry with which Christ identifies, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is sin that alienates us from God. So argues Augustine, “This psalm is written about me.” Christ has interceded on my behalf, “and has made my sins his own, in order to make his righteousness ours.”27
As a test case of orthodoxy (i.e., that the Psalm refers to Christ), Theodore of Mopsuestia’s exposition of Psalm 22 was used to condemn him of heresy. Rarely have commentators been condemned for heresy on the basis of their interpretation of psalms. But part of the case against Theodore of Mopsuestia at the fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 553 was his commentary on Psalm 22.
Theodore argued that “it behooves all pious people to recite something of this kind…. [T]he Jews crucified him on the grounds that he was undermining the law. This was the reason, then, that he quoted this verse, not that an oracle was given him about himself in prophecy, and certainly not that this psalm was composed in reference to him.”28
With such statements that seemed to associate him with Sabellianism, Theodore of Mopsuestia was condemned a century after his death. (Later, in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas again cited the error of Theodore of Mopsuestia – that of interpreting the psalm with reference only to David, and not to Christ.)
In sharp contrast to Theodore of Mopsuestia, his scholarly contemporary Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus (393460), opens his commentary with the clear statement:
“This psalm foretells the events of Christ the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, the calling of the nations and the salvation of the world…. [M]ore faith is to be placed in the sacred apostles’ and the Savior’s own clear adoption of the psalm’s opening than on those essaying a contrary interpretation.”29
Prophecy played a vital role within an oracular, popular culture, as a source of divine power, so the identification of the Old Testament prophets was crucial.30 Oracular power was long associated with the Greek Delphic culture, and the Chaldean oracles also still persisted.
Hence the roles of the Biblical prophets, with David in the Psalter as the great archetype of Christ, were all factors in favor of such psalm commentaries, as that of Theodoret. At the same time, Theodoret seeks a balance between the strongly allegorical bent of the Latin fathers, and the more “literal” or historical bias of the Antiochene school of Eusebius,31 to sustain his “prophetic interpretation.”
Unlike the earlier preference for “the spiritual meaning;” Cassiodorus (c. 490-c. 583) interprets the centrality of prophecy in the Psalms as “the divine breath which proclaims with unshakeable truth the outcome of events through the deeds or words of certain persons.”
By this, he means a conjunction of divine inspiration, the almost unrestrained use of allegory, free interpretation of the psalm-headings, the central role of Christology in the psalms, and the praise of the church. Cassiodorus begins by affirming: “Though many of the psalms briefly recall the Lord’s passion, none has described it in such apt terms, so that it appears not so much as prophecy, but as history.”32
“Why hast Thou forsaken Me?” This is surely the crucial theological question of the church, which even Ambrose answered somewhat shakily when he stated: “The Man Christ thus exclaims when about to die by the separation of the Divinity.”
More carefully, Cassiodorus ascribes his abandonment to “the undertaking of the passion assigned to him.”33
In nearly every paragraph, he identifies a figure of speech both to define it grammatically and to explain its meaning. For example, he observes that in verse 6 [7] “I am a worm and no man” is “to embody the figure of tapeinosis which in Latin is called humiliatio, employed whenever wondrous greatness is compared with the most lowly things”
In verse 8 [9], “`he hoped in the Lord, let Him deliver him’ – this he says is spoken by the Jews as ironia and in Latin irrisio, its surface-meaning being at variance with what it seeks to say.”34
Since so much of the text is incorporated into the detailed events of Christ on the Cross, Cassiodorus comments: “We surely seem to be reviewing the gospel here rather than a psalm, since these things were fulfilled so authentically that they seem already enacted rather than still to come.”35
22. Like Origen, Eusebius created a vast library, and under the patronage of Constantine, promoted a new style of scholarship that was essentially the creation of an anthology of other writers. He also consulted Hebrew scholars, so that his knowledge of Biblical authorities was uniquely wide-ranging for his time.
23. Athanasius, The Life of Anthony and the Letter to Marcellinus, Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York, Ramsey, Toronto: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 105.
24. Novatian (Novatus) had been a Stoic philosopher, remained a prolific writer, and was heavily influenced by Tertullian. As a “rigorist” he eventually separated his churches from the see of Rome; they survived until the end of the seventh century. (See Novatian, the Writings, Russell J. de Simone, O.S.A., trans., The Fathers of the Church [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1974], p. 9.) He created his great work On the Trinity as a Rule of Faith; in this he was a hundred years ahead of his contemporaries.
25. Expositions on the Psalms, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), pp. 228-29.
26. Rotelle, ed., Expositions on the Psalms, p. 227.
27. Rotelle, ed., Expositions on the Psalms, p. 229.
28. Robert C. Hill, trans., Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on Psalms 1-81 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), p. 243.
29. Thomas Aquinas, Stephen Loughlin, The Aquinas Translation Project, p. 145.
30. It appears a Messianic movement adopting a “Zerubbabel;’ who would restore the temple once more in the re-establishment of Jerusalem, was current in the early fifth century. C. Thomas McCullough, “Theodoret of Cyrus as Biblical Interpreter and the Presence of Judaism in the Later Roman Empire;’ Studia Patristica 1 (1983): 331-32.
31. Jean-Noel Guinot, “Les Sources de l’Exegese de Theodoret de Cyr,” Studia Patristica 25 (1993): 72-94.
32. Guinot, “Les Sources de l’Exegese de Theodoret;’ p. 217. 36. Based on a calculation I have made in the annotated text, Bernard of Clairvaux, Ser.
33. Guinot, “Les Sources de 1’Exegese de Theodoret, p. 216.
34. Guinot, “Les Sources de 1’Exegese de Theodoret;’ p. 219.
35. Guinot, “Les Sources de 1’Exegese de Theodoret;’ p. 221.
And:
16 Surely, dogs65 surrounded me, A band of evil men encircle me; They bore holes66 in my hands and my feet.
65. Aquila, Symmachus (Jerome) read teratai (“hunters”); LXX adds polloi (“many”).
66. Gregory Vall (“Psalm 22:17B: `The Old Guess; ” JBL n6, no. 1 [1997]: 45-56), to whom along with Delitzsch I am indebted in this footnote, comments: “In terms of textual criticism, few verses in the Hebrew Bible have been more hotly contested down through the centuries than Ps 22:17” (p. 45). The MT, normally the most reliable textual tradition, vocalizes the first word of 22:16Bb as ka’ari (= “like the lion”), giving the improbable sense: “my hands and my feet are like a lion.” ‘ry is not used elsewhere in the Psalter for “lion;’ casting more suspicion on the text. JPS tries to salvage MT by “they are at my hands and my feet;’ but an adverbial accusative is not possible in a nominal clause. By revising the received accents and making higgipuni the predicate, one could make some sense of. “they surround me like a lion as to my hands and feet.” But as the translation shows, the grammar is awkward and unlikely. The Greek version (c. 2nd cent. BCE) reads oruxan (“they dug [my hands and my feet]);’ which makes excellent sense with scavenger dogs as the subject. The retroverted Hebrew text for that reading would probably be karu from krh or its bi-form, though otherwise unattested, kwr. This retroverted reading is actually found in several Hebrew manuscripts, which read kak’aru and ko’are (“diggers of”).
The reading is also found in the Masora – textual traditions that accompanied the received text – of Numbers 24:9 and in Jacob ben Chayim’s Masora finalis. The LXX reading is now attested in the 5/6 HevPsalms scroll (c. 50 to 68 CE) (see The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible, trans. Martin Abegg, Peter Flint, Eugene Ulrich [San Francisco: Harper, 1999], p. 509).
The Jewish translators, Aquila and Symmachus, also probably read k’rw, but invested it with the meaning of the Arabic root krr, “they bound [in a ball].” In the Gallican Psalter (c. 387) Jerome rendered k’rw by “foderunt” (“they dug”), but seems to have followed Aquila in his Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos (c. 391), where he renders vinxerunt (“they have bound”). In much later printed additions of Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, vinxerunt was changed to fixerunt (“they fixed my hands and my feet [to the cross]”).
But if the original meaning was “to bind;’ why did the poet use an Arabic word “to bind up a ball” instead of one of the common Hebrew words meaning “to bind”? The reading k’ry is first attested in a sixth-century CE Cairo Geniza palimpsest of the Hexapla. H. Lestre (Le Livre des Psaumes [Paris: Lethielleux, 1897], p. 99) argues that, since Justin was in the habit of reproaching the Jews for introducing textual changes but makes no such mention of Psalm 22:16, the reading k’rw must have been encore intacte et reconnue de tons in the middle of the second century.
Assuming the root is kur, a bi-form of krh, Delitzsch (Psalms, p. 200) documents medial ‘aleph in so-called hollow roots like km– in Zechariah 14:10 (rwm) and Daniel 7:16 (qwm). In Psalm 40:7 krh “dug” is used to describe forming the ear, so the figure of scavenging dogs boring holes in hands and feet is not farfetched. Syriac-speaking Christians read “they pierced.”
Some scholars have sought to find a meaning for kr’y other than “like a lion’ ; e.g., Dahood revocalized the text as ki ‘ar`yu (“because they picked clean”). Vall, however, rightly opines that as these proposed conjectural emendations “compound various textual, syntactic, orthographical, and contextual improbabilities, they have little to recommend them” (p. 51).
Other scholars, reading k’rw, have conjectured several different roots for k’r; e.g., P. Cappelle sought the root in Akkadian karu (the D-stem kurru means “to cut short, shorten”), leading to “as if to hack off my hands and my feet” (NEB, NJB) and the non-sensible “they shriveled my hands and my feet” (NRSV). These suggestions likewise rest on shaky philological ground and so none has won a consensus.
Vall thinks the original reading was ‘srw “they bound,” but his explanation that ‘srw was corrupted into s’rw and that in turn into k’rw strains credulity, for there is no root s’r, and scribes do not normally confuse Is/ and W. We are left then with the LXX as the best text and interpretation of this crux interpretum. While interpreting the psalm in the light of Christ’s crucifixion, the apostles do not appeal to this verse, even though Jesus’ piercing is integral to john’s hermeneutic (John 19:32-37; 20:25-27; Rev. i:7; cf. Isa. 53). But the piercing occurred in his side after his death, not in his hands and feet before his death. Beginning as early as Justin Martyr (c. 100-165), however, Christian writers commonly appealed to “dug/pierced” for a Christian interpretation.
Further Reading
PSALM 22:16: LIONS ON THE PROWL OR A PIERCED MESSIAH?
JUSTIN MARTYR ON PSALM 22 & ISAIAH 53