Monday, April 09, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 22: Devoured
Reading 7: Psalm 22-23
Psalm 22 focal phrase: “My hands and feet have shrivelled.” focal word: devoured Psalm 22 may be a more gruesome description of Christ’s crucifixion than anything in the gospels. The image here is not so much of a person being slowly bled to death, but a person being devoured, ripped to shreds by hungry beasts. In Psalm 22, those aren’t nails in his hands; those are fangs. With this in mind, we can accept the rather odd original wording of the phrase “my hands and feet have shrivelled.” In Hebrew it reads, “Like a lion, my hands and feet.” Translators were balking at this phrase even before the time of Christ; the Septuagint changed it to “they dug into my hands and feet,” reading the Hebrew text not as ka’ariy, “like a lion,” but ka’arî, “dig.” Other translations have experimented with the wording here, some using similar Semitic roots to the kry root word here—including “bound,” “shrivelled,” and “mangled”—and others relying mostly on the context—including “pinned” or “pierced.” (“Pierced,” the translation of the King James Version, the NIV—with a footnote—and other English translations, comes partly from the Septuagint’s “dig” but mostly from the crucifixion narrative in the gospels—a case of translators trying to force a Messianic prophecy into this verse.) But as Brent Strawn and others have argued, there’s good reason to keep the original Hebrew phrase “like a lion.” For one thing, it fits the overall imagery of the psalm, with the victim being devoured by wild animals, including lions in verses 13 and 21. (I was struck to realize how many first-century Christians died in the mouths of lions—which to me is one of the worst imaginable ways to die, right next to crucifixion and being burned, and is arguably the most terrorizing. Maybe they took comfort in Psalm 22’s promise that God is with us even under a lion’s mouth. Daniel certainly could.) More specifically, the image matches up eerily with crucifixion: the victim stretched out under a pouncing lion that has pinned down his hands and feet, preventing defense against its awful teeth. Eugene Peterson captures this imagery, if not the lion itself, in his paraphrase The Message: “Thugs gang up on me. They pin me down hand and foot.” Less directly, Strawn suggests the image here might be of the leftovers of a lion’s feast; lions eat the muscles but leave the extremities of their prey. Or maybe it’s related to Isaiah 38; the medieval rabbi Rashi noticed that when Hezekiah remembers his illness, he says in verse 13, “like a lion he breaks all my bones.” In any case, the picture is chilling. Tim Keller says that one reason Jesus couldn’t have been killed in a more efficient way is that crucifixion made a person about as vulnerable as he could be—body completely exposed, opened, pinned, frozen in a helpless embrace of death. The omnipotent was rendered powerless. The crucifixion is so familiar to us. It almost seems normal, even a little holy, to see a figure of Christ nailed to a cross. It almost seems like a Christly pose, rather than the criminal’s pose. Mel Gibson’s The Passion had to shock us into the awfulness of the crucifixion by making it more pulverizing and bloody. But Psalm 22 shows us that we’ve just begun to imagine what the suffering of Christ on the cross was really like. It was like being eaten alive. Devoured, inch by inch. But Psalm 22 also shows us something we tend to forget, something that puzzles theologians who say that Christ was rejected, abandoned on the cross. It’s in verse 24, the verse early Christians might have whispered before being ripped into by lions’ teeth: “He did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” Christ on the cross, and Christians in the Colosseum, ended up looking like roadkill. But God had not abandoned them. God hears our cries of terror just as loudly as God hears our shouts of praise. With Christ’s resurrection comes the promise of a day when the lion will peacefully lie down with the lamb, when all cries of terror are turned to shouts of praise. Some of those shouts might come right from Psalm 22: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord ... For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.”
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources for Psalm 22
-“Psalm 22:17b: More Guessing,” by Brent A. Strawn. Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 119, No. 3. (Autumn, 2000), pp. 439-451.
-”Psalm 22 as the Interpreter of the Suffering Messiah” by Victor Smadja
Resources for the Psalms
Psalms for Holy Week
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
* Note: Psalm 22 is Psalm 21 in the Vulgate and some early English translations, and verse 16 is verse 17 in some translations. (See this page from Treat, and p. 1191 of Bratcher.)
Heb
kî səḇāḇûnî kəlāḇîm ‘ăḏaṯ mərē‘îm hiqqîfûnî kā’ărî yāḏay wəraḡəlāy
KY SBB-NY KL BM D’T MY’R-M HQYP-NY K’R'Y YDY-Y WRGL-Y
for-around-dogs-group-evil-surround-like+lion-hands-feet
LXX
periesxon me wrucan xeirav mou kai podav
“dug into my hands and feet”
Vulgate
vinxerunt manus meas et pedes meos
“they have dug my hands and feet”
Wycliffe
Thei delueden [delve/dig] myn hondis and my feet;
Coverdale
the coucell of ye wicked hath layed sege agaynst me
Geneva
they perced mine hands and my feete
D-R
the council of the malignant hath besieged me
KJV
they pierced my hands and my feet.
YLT
A company of evil doers have compassed me, Piercing my hands and my feet.
ASV
They pierced my hands and my feet
JPS
like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet.
NJV
like lions [they maul] my hands and feet.
RSV
they have pierced my hands and feet
NRSV
My hands and feet have shrivelled*
*Meaning of Heb uncertain
NJB
A gang of villains is closing in on me, as if to hack off my hands and feet
NIV
they have pierced* my hands and my feet.
*most Hebrew manuscripts: ‘like the lion’
ESV
they have pierced my hands and feet*
*most Hebrew manuscripts like a lion [they are at] my hands and feet
WEB
They have pierced my hands and feet*
* So Dead Sea Scrolls. Masoretic Text reads, “Like a lion, they pin my hands and feet.”
NET
like a lion they pin my hands and feet*
CEV
tearing at* my hands and my feet.
* One possible meaning for the difficult Hebrew text.
Msg
Thugs gang up on me. They pin me down hand and foot
* NET note:
tn Heb “like a lion, my hands and my feet.” This reading is often emended because it is grammatically awkward, but perhaps its awkwardness is by rhetorical design. Its broken syntax may be intended to convey the panic and terror felt by the psalmist. The psalmist may envision a lion pinning the hands and feet of its victim to the ground with its paws (a scene depicted in ancient Near Eastern art), or a lion biting the hands and feet. The line has been traditionally translated, “they pierce my hands and feet,” and then taken as foreshadowing the crucifixion of Christ. Though Jesus does appropriate the language of this psalm while on the cross (compare v. 1 with Matt 27:46 and Mark 15:34), the NT does not cite this verse in describing the death of Jesus. (It does refer to vv. 7-8 and 18, however. See Matt 27:35, 39, 43; Mark 15:24, 29; Luke 23:34; John 19:23-24.) If one were to insist on an emendation of כָּאֲרִי (ka’ariy, “like a lion”) to a verb, the most likely verbal root would be כָּרָה (karah, “dig”; see the LXX). In this context this verb could refer to the gnawing and tearing of wild dogs (cf. NCV, TEV, CEV). The ancient Greek version produced by Symmachus reads “bind” here, perhaps understanding a verbal root כרך, which is attested in later Hebrew and Aramaic and means “to encircle, entwine, embrace” (see HALOT 497-98 s.v. כרך and Jastrow 668 s.v. כָּרַךְ ). Neither one of these proposed verbs can yield a meaning “bore, pierce.”
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