Psalm 22 – K’ari, K’aru, and the Aleph

The Nahal Hever manuscript

Does Psalm 22:16 actually say “they pierced my hands and my feet” as most Christian translations portray?  This verse is a major Messianic prophecy.  It’s probably the most quoted prophecy after Isaiah 53.  If it doesn’t say “they pierced my hands and my feet”, does it say “like a lion” as the Jews claim?  Let’s look at this verse.

Modern Hebrew manuscripts have k’ari which translates the verse “like a lion” and nothing to do with piercing.  The word “ari” in Hebrew means lion.  The Jewish translation on chabad.org gives the verse like this:

For dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me, like a lion, my hands and feet.

However, this translation is based off the modern manuscripts.  The oldest Hebrew manuscript of Psalm 22 is the Nahal Hever manuscript.  It dates to the first or second century AD depending on which scholar is asked.  It doesn’t read k’ari but instead k’aru.

Christians claim that k’aru can be translated as dug, bore through or pierced.  However, this could simply be a variant, not a separate reading like us Christians would want.  There’s one other problem as well and that is the fact that there is an extra letter in the word.  The manuscript reads k’aru and to have it translated as us Christians want, there would need to be one less letter.  There is an aleph and the word that we would like doesn’t have an aleph.  Aleph is the Hebrew equivalent of the letter A.  To put it simply, we need k’ru and not k’aru.

If k’ru means dug or pierced, what does k’aru mean?  No one knows what the word k’aru means.  It matches no word that we are familiar with in Hebrew.  At least this is the case in the modern world.  Did they understand this word differently thousands of years ago?  Did they view k’aru as dug or pierced?  There is actually a way of figuring this out.

We need to look at how this word was translated.  Thankfully we have a pre-Christian translation called the Greek Septuagint which predates Jesus and the Gospels.  The Greek in this manuscript tradition reads:

ὤρυξαν χεῖράς μου καὶ πόδας

The word ὤρυξαν is the word in question.  It means to dig, gouge, or bore through.  In this context with respect to hands and feet, it obviously means pierced.

However, could the Septuagint be wrong in its translation?  Maybe the translator of Psalm 22 in the Septuagint had k’ari in his Hebrew source text and he made a mistake?  It’s possible since translators make mistakes all the time.  What is interesting is that the word ari appears two other times in Psalm 22.  Verse 13 reads:

They open wide their mouth at me,
As a ravening and a roaring lion.

Verse 21 reads:

Save me from the lion’s mouth;
From the horns of the wild oxen You answer me.

In Hebrew, the word in these two verses is ari; the Hebrew word for lion.  The Septuagint translates these both as the Greek word for lion –  λέων.  The translator of Pslam 22 obviously knows what the Hebrew word ari means.  If Psalm 22:16 read as ari, then he would have translated it correctly as lion, just like the two other verses in this chapter.

The only reasonable conclusion is that the translator of Psalm 22 had the same reading in front of him as the Nahal Hever manuscript gives us.  He also had no problem with the aleph.  He translated it as ὤρυξαν knowing full well that the aleph was there.  This shows that in the ancient world, this word in Hebrew wasn’t seen any differently whether it had the aleph or not.  If it’s good enough for the best Hebrew scholars before the time of Jesus, it’s good enough for me.

We can conclude with much confidence that Psalm 22:16 is properly translated from the Hebrew as:

They pierced my hands and my feet.

It’s a beautiful prophecy.  Today is Good Friday which is the anniversary of the fulfillment of this wonderful verse.  In fact, on that Friday almost 2000 years ago, the Lord himself quoted the first verse of this chapter to draw attention to the prophecy that he was fulfilling.  In Matthew 27:46 the we read:

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

May all of my readers have a happy and blessed Easter!