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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
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