"Hands and feet," yet again? Some recent updates on Psalm 22.16/17
So this was actually a comment I started making on r/Christianity, but got entirely carried away with. I had originally oversimplified a few things starting out because of that; but when I realized I wasn't going to be able to fit everything within the character limit, I kinda just went into full academic mode and figured I'd post it here instead. So that might explain the unevenness in detail, and some of the formality/informality in language.
If you've been around for a while, you've almost certainly seen me outline my own theory about the original text of Psalm 22:16 before. (It's 22:17 in Hebrew, but I refer to at as 22:16 in this post.)
This is probably the most detailed "walkthrough" of my theory, though, and I kinda did this alongside Michael Flowers' "What Did the Psalmist Say about His Hands and Feet in Psalm 22:17?" — published in a 2020 issue of Vetus Testamentum. Flowers' article doesn't itself offer any new proposals, but is an overview of the other major proposals and an assessment of their relative plausibility.
You may be surprised to learn that the very idea of translating "they pierced my hands and my feet" is a fairly recent one, historically speaking. Unlike words like דָּקַר, it's not at clear that the (presumed) Hebrew word that "pierce" is used to translate, כָּרָה, ever really means this. Although a late Aramaic cognate of the Hebrew term can occasionally mean "pierce," the overwhelming meaning of the Biblical Hebrew term is "excavate": to dig up ground or whatever in order to make something else. Even another Biblical Hebrew word like נָקַר has much more ambiguity in terms of vacillating between the meanings of digging and piercing.
This meaning is reflected in virtually all translations for most of the Psalm's history, too. The Septuagint translates the word using the verb ὀρύσσω, which is an extremely close semantic match to the Hebrew as "dig"; and similarly the Latin Vulgate, as foderunt. Even the Middle English Wycliffe Bible, right at the turn of the 15th century, still understood it as delueden (delven), meaning "dig," and similarly Luther in the next century, as durchgraben. Very shortly after Luther, the Coverdale Bible was the first to translate it instead as pearsed.
While this isn't absolutely decisive against the idea that it could have indeed meant "bore through" or whatever, though, there's another problem. Even for Christians who ascribe to the idea of "dual" messianic fulfillment — that a Psalm can have both an original non-messianic meaning as well as a deeper prophetic significance, too — this is still premised on the idea that the Psalms use imagery and concepts that would have been comprehensible to their original audiences in their contexts.
The problem, though, is that unlike other things even in the very same Psalm — like "they divide my clothes among themselves," which does have very close ancient parallels — there isn't anything even close to the idea or imagery of "hands and feet" being pierced in any ancient Near Eastern or Biblical text that I'm aware of; or that anyone is aware of, AFAIK. Gunnar Samuelsson's Crucifixion in Antiquity: An Inquiry Into the Background and Significance of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion thoroughly surveys crucifixion or crucifixion-like practices in the ancient world, and comes up with nothing even remotely resembling the later Roman practice and/or Jesus' own crucifixion, where both hands and feet are nailed into. (In fact, the only real relevant thing here is a practice where bodies were hung up after their hands and feet were cut off entirely, after death.)
These two considerations together make it highly unlikely that Psalm 22:16 ever intended to portray the speaker's hands and feet being pierced or bore through; and so we should look for an alternate understanding and translation.
Of course, there's an infamous alternate translation, popular among Jewish interpreters and translators: this reads the word in question not even as a verb at all, but as a comparative particular and a noun, כארי, subsequently translated "like a lion." I won't spend too time on this one, because in many ways it's even more problematic than the "pierced" proposal. The earliest manuscripts and versions read a verb here. Ultimately, "like a lion" simply can't be fit into the passage's logic and syntax in any meaningful way, and attempts to vindicate this interpretation/translation are highly flawed or implausible (e.g. Swenson's "Psalm 22:17: Circling around the Problem Again").
This all leaves us with "hands and feet," but an uncertain verb as to what's done to them. So where to go from here? There have been any number of other proposals about what the original text might have said. Most are highly speculative and have any number of problems, but it might be worth talking about a couple of them.
The one that's seemingly the strongest is "they bound my hands and feet." This is eminently sensible in its context, and such language and imagery is paralleled any number of times elsewhere in Biblical Hebrew. For that matter, three early translations of Psalm 22:16 actually understood it this way, too: Flowers, summarizing Gregory Vall's proposal of this, notes that
Vall cites as an ancient and independent witness the Greek verb ἐπέδησαν (“they have bound”), which appears in Aquila’s revised – though not his original – translation [of Psalm 22:16]. Vall also cites Symmachus’ ὡς ζητοῦντες δῆσαι (“like those seeking to bind”) and Jerome’s vinxerunt (“they have bound”), which appears in his Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos.
The problem here, though, is finding an actual original Hebrew term that could be understood with this meaning. The most common and logical Hebrew word for "bind" is אָסַר; but this isn't really similar at all to the attested verb כארו in our verse. Vall suggests that an original reading אסרו was accidentally corrupted to סארו, and then corrupted even further to כארו. But there are a number of serious, even fatal problems with this.
Others also like the translation "bound," and attempt to find this meaning not by hypothesizing some unattested word or proposing some process of corruption, but by proposing that this can actually be a meaning of the same word כארו itself. Two people have different variants of this proposal. John Kaltner compared this meaning with that of the Arabic word kwr, purportedly meaning "bind, tie." G. R. Driver appealed to Akkadian and another Arabic root. But neither of these can be supported (Flowers, 63-65).
How did the early Greek translations come to translate it as "bind," then? Driver actually also noted that the Septuagint's translation of a clause in Ezekiel 16:4 may be relevant here, too. The Hebrew of this verse uses a verb כָּרַת, "cut," which is very similar to Psalm 22's presumed verb כָּרָה. Most modern translations of the full phrase in Ezekiel, לֹֽא־כָרַּת שָׁרֵּךְ, render this as "your (umbilical) cord was not cut." But the Septuagint unusually renders it as οὐκ ἔδησαν τοὺς μαστούς, "they did not bind your breasts."
So the fact that some early translators of Psalm 22, along with the Septuagint translator of Ezekiel, apparently independently thought that a verb like כָּרָה or כָּרַת could denote "bind" is somewhat compelling evidence that there was such a now-lost meaning for one of the terms. (Surely it's too much to suggest that the LXX translator might have had before him a metathesis of רָתַק. Perhaps a better option would be a misreading based on presuming כפת, "bind," attested in postbiblical Hebrew; cf. Biblical Aramaic כְּפַת.) But the fact that I'm not sure if there's an plausible path toward understanding כָּרָה itself as "bind" in terms of the Hebrew evidence itself and Semitic cognates might still be a problem. כָּרַר might suggest some sort of circular motion, but may be even more abstract.
There's no telling exactly what the translator of LXX Ezekiel thought; but it's also possible that those early "bind" translations of Psalm 22:16 by Aquila and Symmachus were just blind guesses, simply inferring what sort of verb would make the most contextual sense. Still, though, overall it remains one of the better guesses.
But there's another set of related proposals, which understand the verb quite differently. These render the phrase as something like "my hands and my feet are wasted away/exhausted," or "my hands and my feet are (a) shriveled up, (b) gone lame, (c) contracted." The first, by Kissane (1953; followed by Craigie 2004), understands the original verb to have been כלו, from כָּלָה: "waste away." Kissane also suggested that this last clause in Psalm 22:16 and the first phrase in 22:17 would work together nicely on this proposal, with Job 33:21 as a parallel to this: "His flesh wastes away from sight and his bones, which were not seen, stick out." However, in addition to the fact that this relies on a hypothetical emendation, Flowers rightly asks "should we not have expected him [=the Psalmist] to speak of his entire body or at least some other part of it?" (66).
The other related proposal here, "my hands and my feet are (a) shriveled up, (b) gone lame, (c) contracted," was made by J. J. M. Roberts, closely echoed more recently by Michael L. Barré. Barré's proposal (relying on Roberts') is quite detailed and complex, and I think there are several things to commend it. However, there are several strong criticisms, too. Flowers writes
Roberts’ interpretation invites the same objection that was raised against Kissane’s: if the psalmist were describing his emaciated condition it seems odd for him to focus only on the visibility of the bones in his hands and feet, given that these are normally visible in a healthy body. Doubts can also be raised as to whether Roberts’ conjectured Hebrew cognate would have meant, “to shrivel up”. Roberts alleges that in Akkadian and Syriac there is a matching triconsonantal root which could, “in certain contexts”, be used “to indicate physical or mental infirmities”. But Vall observes that Roberts has inadvertently conflated two different Syriac roots: krʾ (third-weak), “to be short, sorry”, and krh (third strong), “to suffer, be sick”. “A Hebrew cognate for the latter”, Vall notes, “would require the consonantal ה”.
Further, Kissane, Roberts, and Barré's proposals all might be weakened by the fact that after v. 15, things are no long "passively" happening to the Psalmist; rather, now external subjects are acting on the Psalmist: dogs surround him; the band of men encircles him; people glare or scowl at him.
Which brings us back around to another proposal. All the way back in 1867, Franz Delitzsch had noted that before revising his translation to "bind," Aquila's early Greek translation of the phrase had instead taken the verb to mean (to) shame: ᾐσχύναν; and Delitzsch connected this with Aramaic כַּאֵר (sic), "to disfigure, mar."
Here, with "shame" or "disfigure," we're on much better comparative Semitic ground than with the cognates proposed for "bind" earlier. And not only do we have an early translation along those lines in Aquila's ᾐσχύναν (even though he later changed his mind), but we have evidence of other translations along these lines, too. The translators of LXX Isaiah 3:9 and LXX Proverbs 28:21 also rendered verbs like כָּרָה as "shame" — and similarly elsewhere in the early non-LXX Greek translations, IIRC. Even more than this, another Biblical Hebrew verb חָפַר also has two main meanings, precisely paralleling the two that might be reconstructed for כָּרָה here: first, "to dig," and then "to be ashamed" (HALOT, 3095).
However, whereas those like Bernard Duhm, relying on this meaning for Psalm 22:16, have sought to understand the phrase thus as "my hands and feet are disfigured," Flowers notes in response that
A more literal translation would be: “they rendered as repugnant/disgusting my hands and feet”. No explanation is given as to how or why the psalmist’s “hands and feet” had been rendered thus by his enemies. . . . [this] would be a more convincing reading here if a Semitic parallel could be adduced showing an individual’s hands and feet being “rendered repugnant, disgusting, etc.” in a context similar to what we have in Ps 22:17. No such parallel has so far been adduced.
I'll pick back up on Flowers' last comment here in a second; but all together, it seems like something of a stalemate. "They bind my hands and my feet" makes perfect logical sense and similar language attested abundantly, but doesn't seem like it can be sustained at all on linguistic/lexicographical grounds. On the other hand, the other explanations I've covered don't seem like they can convincingly explain why these specific appendages were singled out.
In my view, there are several missing pieces of the puzzle that put it all together.
I've strongly suggested that there really is nothing wrong with the reading כארו. Earlier in response to the "like a lion" reading, I noted that the Septuagint and other early versions clearly read a verb here, not a noun. Similarly, Flowers expands on this that
Several medieval manuscripts attest [the verb] כארו. Even more significantly, this reading is now attested in 5/6ḤevPs XI 9, which the editors have assigned “a late Herodian date (c. 50–68 CE)”.
This fragment, 5/6ḤevPs, from Naḥal Ḥever, is part of a collection often grouped with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and is by far our earliest fragment of this phrase in Psalm 22, by some centuries.
Here's a picture of it, with the phrase in question highlighted: https://i.imgur.com/3Chjx43.jpg
And while it's almost certain that it indeed has the verb כארו here, almost everyone missed the significance of the fact that there's something highly anomalous about its reading elsewhere. Instead of saying ידי, "my hands," this fragment says either ידיה or perhaps ידיח. It's hard to tell which, in the state of the fragment. While the latter word is technically/arguably meaningless, the former would mean "her hands." (There are other possible readings, I suppose, too: perhaps ידוה or ידוח.)
No one has ever attempted to explain what this could mean here, or why it differs at all. We know it's not an accident, though. The normal Psalm's reading "my hands" is spelled with the three letter ידי. Even the worst Hebrew student or scribe would never misspell this word, any more than that an English writer would misspell "(my) hands." And this fragment, 5/6ḤevPs, actually does contain those same first three letters which mean "my hands." But then it adds an additional letter after that, which changes the meaning entirely — again, either to "her hands," or to something else. So with the scribe deliberately continuing on and adding another letter after "hands" (instead of just stopping), it's not like it was just a mundane spelling error.
This, in my view, is the ultimate key that finally allows us to understand why it's been such a problem for scholars to find a verb, any verb, that fits with "hands and feet" being the object, and which allows us to put all the pieces together that I've laid out.
The dozens of proposals that have tried but failed to convincingly explain the phrase have all been premised on the assumption — a justified one before the discovery of 5/6ḤevPs — that the passage must say "[something] my hands and my feet." But they haven't realized that with the discovery of this extremely early fragment, this assumption no longer holds in the same way.
So to summarize: again, this fragment's addition of this suffix (or however we describe this additional letter) at the end of the normal word can't be an accident. But it can't be the original reading, either, as not even "her hands" makes sense in context. If both of these things are true, then, there's only one way to explain this: the scribe of 5/6ḤevPs was transcribing an earlier manuscript that also didn't read the same as all the other manuscripts with "my hands" that we have — one that presumably had the additional letter, but in another spelling or context where this word did make sense (viz. not "her hands" or whatever).
When I first looked at this fragment 5/6ḤevPs and saw its different reading, I actually read this word not as ידיה, "her hands," but as ידיח. I've noted that in and of itself, this may be meaningless. But its form immediately raised a possibility for me that I had never considered before: that this wasn't necessarily a noun at all, but could be understood as pointing toward a verb.
There were two interrelated verbs that I immediately turned to: דָּחָה and its derivative דְּחִי, "stumbling." Fascinatingly, the latter appears only twice in the entire Hebrew Bible, in the same phrase attested to in two different Psalms: חלצת . . . רגלי מדחי, "you have saved my feet from stumbling" (56:14; 116:8). Similarly, the main verb דָּחָה is attested to in Psalmic phrases like לדחות פעמי, where the Psalmist asks God to protect him from the wicked who might seek "to trip up my steps" (Psalm 140:4).
The fact that the visible part of 5/6ḤevPs's reading of Psalm 22:16 includes a word that can easily be understood to have ultimately derived from this verb, sitting right next to what can only be presumed to be the typical reading with "feet," then, is extremely highly suggestive that this points us in the direction of the original reading.
Of course, the Psalm as we know it doesn't just say "my feet," but "and my feet," with the single letter vav as the conjunctive particle prefacing it. On analogy with the prior verb, כארו, though — whether to be understood as "they dig" or whatever it might be — I realized that if my reconstructed word (from 5/6ḤevPs's ידיח) were a third-person plural, too, it needs precisely this letter vav as its suffix. In other words, the letter that represents the third-person plural suffix is the exact same letter used for the conjunction "and." This means that without a word division, these readings/spellings would be identical.
"Borrowing" the vav that normally prefaces "my feet" so that it can instead be the suffix of this word prefacing it, then, "they trip up" would be ידחו — again, inferring "backwards" from what I read as 5/6ḤevPs's ידיח and the single letter ו. To illustrate using scripta continua, as a whole the difference between these two readings would actually only be a single letter, with ח instead of the yod:
ידחורגלי
and
ידיורגלי
(Not to say that scriptio continuo was solely responsible for the original proposed parsing error; though there are well-known textual corruptions caused by improper word division, e.g. Isa 2:20; Jer 2:21.)
After realizing the significance of this reading in 5/6ḤevPs, but before I turned to the question of how the meaning of the first verb כארו would fit into this new reading, my first thought was actually somewhat different: that if it were a series of two successive third-person plural verbs with a first-person object (being the Psalmist or representative of the Psalmist), then — unlike any other proposal for Psalm 22:16 — this would make this part of 22:16 virtually identical to the syntax in the very next verse:
כארו ידחו רגלי
and
יביטו יראו בי
How exactly to translate this latter phrase and its verbs is a matter of preference — a la "they glare, they scowl at me." Its meaning is uncontroversial, though: a kind of contemptuous scrutiny.
Flowers had said that the proposed translation "they have made my hands and feet repugnant" for 22:16 would have been more convincing "if a Semitic parallel could be adduced showing an individual’s hands and feet being 'rendered repugnant, disgusting, etc.' in a context similar to what we have." But if we look toward Aquila's early Greek translation ᾐσχύναν, along with other relevant evidence here, and follow the idea of taking the first verb as "they ridicule" — along with the additional move of taking "my hands" out of the equation entirely and assuming a verb in its place, too — we have a clearer path toward exactly that: viz. we only need to explain the feet, not hands.
If "they trip up my feet" is not only eminently sensible, contextually sound, and paralleled by other known Psalmic turns of phrase (again, cf. 56:14; 116:8; 140:4), the final piece of the puzzle is finding where כארו as "they ridicule" might fit into this.
To be honest, I'm not sure if the syntax permits or makes plausible that there's an implicit "me" as the object of "they ridicule" here, such that it could be understood as "they ridicule (me); they trip up my feet" — that is, with feet only as the object of the second verb, and not the first as well. While other verbs like "they mock" can stand alone with no explicit object, like in Psalm 89:50's ימיקו (and see also Psalm 22:7?), I just don't know about this particular construction here in 22:16. But in another sense, we don't even necessarily need to make this differentiation, and could very well satisfy ourselves with "they ridicule (my feet) and trip up my feet," with "feet" here being a metonym for the Psalmist's righteous path and/or lifestyle. Psalm 89:51, for example, reads precisely חרפו עקבות משיחך, "they mock the footsteps of your anointed." Similarly, the enemies of the Psalmist in Psalm 56:6 עקבי ישמרו, "they scrutinize my steps."
Edit: Postscript
This post elicited a few helpful discussions.
1) This one in particular was good. Zanillamilla is obviously one of the all-time r/AcademicBiblical greats, and I hate to ever see myself on the opposite side of their opinion; but I find their alternative suggestion of an original כראי — so yielding the sense of "my hands and feet [are] as a spectacle" — quite clever, but also highly unlikely for a few different reasons. In my reply, I also offhandedly mentioned something that I had intended to spend a bit more time on in my OP: the possibility of an original meaning "they bind, they trip up my feet."
2) Here I also critically addressed a claim about the Naḥal Ḥever fragment that's actually been floating around on the internet for a long time: the idea that the anomalous suffix in ידיה actually isn't anomalous at all, but that it's also semantically meaningless.
3) Finally, in terms of reconstructing the process by which ידחו became corrupted, this is somewhat difficult to do. Perhaps the easiest path to understanding how the reading of proto-MT itself ended up as it did is to first assume a shortening of ידחו to ידו. The weakening/elision of ח is not especially common, but certainly not unattested (cf. Reymond, Qumran Hebrew: An Overview of Orthography, Phonology, and Morphology, 107f.) A scribe, then, seeing ידו, parsed this as יד ו; and the resulting grouping with "feet" naturally elicited a pluralizing of יד, too.
The path from ידחו to Naḥal Ḥever's ידיה is either easier or more difficult than that of proto-MT. If ידחו were read or heard as ידהו, perhaps the scribe thought similarly as what was proposed for proto-MT — parsing this as ידה ו and then pluralizing ידה. That being said, to preempt another enticing but flawed hypothetical process, it seems less likely that ידי simply comes from a reading ידיה for which ה was deleted, as this presupposes a wider distribution of Naḥal Ḥever's idiosyncrasy.
In any case, though, it perhaps can't be overstated how much the presence of רגלי — something all reconstructions accept as original — might have influenced the reanalysis of a -יד initial word, and as such could account for early emendations that might otherwise seem phonologically unlikely.
Sandbox for notes:
Richard C. Steiner, “דָּת and עֵין: Two Verbs Masquerading as Nouns in Moses’ Blessing (Deuteronomy 33:2, 28),” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 115, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 693-698?
Posted Feb 17, 2022, 1:57 AM UTC · edited