If you have spent any time in apologetics circles — or even in a sufficiently enthusiastic Bible study — you have heard the claim. Psalm 22, written by David a thousand years before Jesus, describes the crucifixion in astonishing detail. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (World English Bible). The mocking crowds. The pierced hands and feet. The divided garments. The thirst. It is, the argument goes, an unmistakable prediction of the cross, written centuries before crucifixion was even invented as a method of execution.
Nearly every element of that argument falls apart under scrutiny. Psalm 22 is not a prophecy. It was not understood as messianic before Christianity. The single most dramatic detail — "pierced my hands and feet" — rests on a word whose spelling and meaning are both genuinely disputed. And the matches almost certainly exist because the psalm shaped how the story was told, not because the events happened to fulfil the psalm. The gospel writers, particularly Mark, told the passion in the psalm's own words. Critical scholars differ on how much remembered history sits underneath that narrative — some see a historical core that Mark colored with scripture, others see far heavier construction — but the point that matters here holds either way: the specific details the apologist points to, the ones that line up with Psalm 22, are best explained as scriptural shaping rather than as report. The evangelists were not simply recording details that happened to match; they were telling the scene in the language of scripture.
The Genre of Psalm 22: Lament, Not Prophecy
The first and most fundamental problem with reading Psalm 22 as a prediction of the crucifixion is that it is not a prophecy. It is a lament psalm — one of the most common genres in the Psalter. Lament psalms follow a recognizable structure that Hermann Gunkel identified over a century ago in his pioneering classification of psalm types — form criticism, the study that sorts psalms by their structure and their setting in worship — and that scholars have refined ever since. The typical individual lament includes: an invocation of God, a complaint describing the psalmist's suffering, a petition for deliverance, an expression of trust, and — crucially — a shift to praise and thanksgiving.
Psalm 22 follows this structure with textbook precision. Verses 1 through 21a are the complaint: the psalmist feels abandoned by God, mocked by enemies, physically tormented. Then, with the abrupt "you have rescued me" of verse 21 (the Hebrew says, more literally, "you have answered me"), everything changes. "I will declare your name to my brothers. Among the assembly, I will praise you." The remainder of the psalm — verses 22 through 31 — is exuberant praise and thanksgiving. The psalmist has been delivered. God has heard his cry. The nations will worship. Future generations will be told of God's righteousness.
Susan Gillingham's reception-history commentary calls Psalm 22 a lament for deliverance "whose mood changes near the end": it pleads for God to answer, and it closes by thanking God for having answered, with the same Hebrew verb, 'anah, doing both jobs (Gillingham 2018, 136). The lament genre enacts a movement from suffering to deliverance, from abandonment to vindication. This is not predictive — it is liturgical. The psalm was composed for use in worship, probably by or on behalf of a king or other prominent figure experiencing distress. The royal associations are present in the language — the psalmist is a public figure whose suffering and deliverance have communal significance — but "royal psalm" and "messianic prophecy" are entirely different categories.
What little pre-Christian Jewish use of Psalm 22 survives treats it as the prayer of a righteous sufferer. The Wisdom of Solomon borrows its taunt: "if the righteous man is God's son, he will uphold him, and he will deliver him out of the hand of his adversaries" (Wis 2:18). Rivka Ulmer finds a few further traces, in the Qumran thanksgiving hymns and in Joseph and Aseneth, a work whose date is itself disputed, but observes that the psalm "is rarely cited or referred to in Jewish literature of the Second Temple period" (Ulmer 2011, 107). The later rabbis read it of Esther and of Israel in exile. None of these reads it as a prediction of a crucified messiah.
The "Pierced" Problem: Textual Criticism at Its Most Consequential
No discussion of Psalm 22 and the crucifixion can avoid verse 16 (verse 17 in the Hebrew numbering), because it is the linchpin of the apologetic argument. In many English translations, including the World English Bible this site quotes by default, the verse reads: "They have pierced my hands and feet." If David wrote those words a millennium before Christ, the argument goes, then we have an unmistakable prediction of crucifixion — a method of execution that did not exist in David's time.
But the textual situation is far more complicated than most apologists acknowledge. The Masoretic Text — the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament, carefully preserved by Jewish scribes — does not read "pierced." The MT reads ka'ari yadai v'raglai, which translates approximately as "like a lion, my hands and my feet." This is admittedly difficult Hebrew — the phrase is grammatically awkward, and "like a lion my hands and feet" does not parse smoothly. But the word is ka'ari (כארי), "like a lion," not a verb meaning "to pierce."
The reading "pierced" comes primarily from the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in the third to second centuries BCE. The LXX renders the phrase with the Greek verb ōryxan, which means "they dug" or "they pierced." This is the reading that Christian translations have traditionally followed.
The Syriac Peshitta also reads "they have pierced." But the other ancient translators who worked directly from the Hebrew did not agree with it, or with each other. Aquila first rendered the word "they have disfigured" and, in a later revision, "they have bound"; Symmachus has "like those who seek to bind" (Hopkin 2005, 164–165, who notes that both worked after the Jewish–Christian controversy had begun and were likely influenced by it, though, like the Greek, both read a verb here rather than "like a lion"). Jerome, translating the Psalms afresh from the Hebrew, wrote vinxerunt, "they bound" (Jerome, ed. Lagarde 1874, Ps 21:17). The word was already a puzzle in antiquity.
Now, there is a Hebrew witness too. A fragmentary psalm scroll from Nahal Hever (5/6HevPs), copied in the first century CE, reads ka'aru (כארו) where the MT has ka'ari (כארי), and Peter Flint's survey of the Psalms scrolls records it that way (Flint 1997, 88, as cited in Hopkin 2005, 167 n. 36). The official edition in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series judged the reading secure: the photograph is faded, but "most of the letters are clearly identifiable under magnification," and with waw and yod "clearly distinguishable in this hand," the variant "is assured" (DJD 38, 160–61, as quoted in Hopkin 2005, 167). Not everyone agrees. Kristin Swenson found that the facsimile "reveals a badly faded text that is nearly impossible to read" (Swenson 2004, 640–41 n. 12, quoted in Hopkin 2005, 167), and Rivka Ulmer reads the last letter as "a somewhat elongated" yod, "almost appearing like" a waw (Ulmer 2011, 107). That is a minority view of the letter, not grounds for calling the scroll unreadable.
The sharper problem is what ka'aru means. It is not a regular form of karah, "to dig": the extra aleph is the obstacle, and Ulmer points out that the verb "is never used in the context of 'piercing' in the Hebrew Bible" (Ulmer 2011, 108). The best case for "pierced," made by Shon Hopkin, who defends that reading, answers that karah is used of a body part at Psalm 40:6, where the WEB has "You have opened my ears," and that a verb for boring into the ground until water comes is not far from boring into a hand (Hopkin 2005, 165–166). That is a real argument. But it yields "dug" or "bored," not crucifixion, and it is an inference about one anomalous spelling, not a reading the text puts beyond doubt.
The Septuagint translators may have been working from a Hebrew text like the Nahal Hever scroll, or they may have been making sense of a difficult phrase in the light of the suffering around it. Either way, the most dramatic "prophecy of the crucifixion" in Psalm 22 rests on a textual variant. The Masoretic Text, the primary witness to the Hebrew Bible, does not say "pierced." The single most important detail in the apologetic argument is not securely established in the text that is supposedly doing the predicting.
The entire argument balances on one obscure word whose spelling varies between manuscripts and whose meaning is uncertain in all of them.
Direction of Influence: Who Is Borrowing from Whom?
Set aside the textual variant for a moment and consider a different question. Even if we grant every detail the apologist wants — even if we read "pierced" and "divided garments" and "mocking crowds" as genuine elements of Psalm 22 — the question remains: did the psalm predict the crucifixion, or did the gospel writers tell their crucifixion narrative in the psalm's words?
The evidence strongly favors the latter.
Mark's passion narrative is saturated with Psalm 22. Jesus cries out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" from the cross (Mark 15:34), quoting Psalm 22:1 in Aramaic. The passersby mock him, shaking their heads (Mark 15:29), echoing Psalm 22:7. They taunt him to "save yourself, and come down from the cross!" (Mark 15:30–32), and in Matthew the chief priests all but quote the psalm: "He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now, if he wants him" (Matt 27:43), where Psalm 22:8 reads, "He trusts in Yahweh. Let him deliver him. Let him rescue him, since he delights in him." The soldiers divide his garments by casting lots (Mark 15:24), echoing Psalm 22:18. The reference to thirst (John 19:28) and the sponge of vinegar (Mark 15:36) echo Psalm 69:21 ("in my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink"), though Psalm 22:15 ("my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth") also contributes imagery.
The psalm also grows as the gospels go on. Mark's mockers taunt in their own words; Matthew's borrow the psalm's. And John turns the psalm's two parallel lines, "They divide my garments among them. They cast lots for my clothing" (Ps 22:18), into two separate events: the soldiers make "four parts, to every soldier a part" of his garments, and then cast lots for the seamless coat, "that the Scripture might be fulfilled" (John 19:23–24). Hebrew poetry says one thing twice; John's narrative has it happen twice. That is what a story shaped by a text looks like.
Raymond Brown, in his monumental two-volume The Death of the Messiah, meticulously catalogs these correspondences. Brown, a Catholic priest and one of the most respected New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, takes a deliberately balanced position: he holds that a historical core underlies the passion narrative and that scriptural shaping was layered onto it, so that remembered history and creative use of scripture coexist rather than one simply replacing the other. He does not argue that Mark spun the whole account out of the Psalter. In his reckoning the "basic incidents" of the passion derive from "early Christian memory," filled out along the way by Christian reflection and imagination (Brown 1994, 14–16, as summarized in Goodacre 2006, 11 n. 7). The point to keep straight is that Brown's caution does not rescue the apologist. Where a detail is historical, it needs no prophecy to explain it. Roman law knew the practice: a condemned man's pannicularia, the clothes and small effects he had on him, were evidently being claimed by those who guarded and executed him, and the jurist Ulpian, glossing a rescript of Hadrian, rules that executioners may not take them on their own authority (Digest 48.20.6). Where the wording comes from the psalm, the match was made by the writer.
Scholars have names for this. John Dominic Crossan calls it "prophecy historicized," as against "history remembered" (Crossan 1995, 2–4); Mark Goodacre, borrowing a term Judith Newman applied to Second Temple prayer, calls it "scripturalization" (Goodacre 2006, 12). The terms are not quite synonyms. Crossan's implies that the story was generated from the prophecy; Goodacre's allows for real events retold in scripture's language, imagery, and themes. We see it throughout the Hebrew Bible itself — the account of Elisha's miracles echoes and amplifies Elijah's miracles; the Chronicler reshapes the Deuteronomistic History using prophetic and liturgical templates. In Second Temple Judaism, this practice was widespread. The Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, for example, constructs its portrait of the suffering righteous one using language drawn from Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 — demonstrating that these texts were already being used as literary templates for narratives about righteous suffering before the gospels were written. Adela Yarbro Collins has traced how Mark in particular appropriates the psalms of individual lament (Collins 1997).
Consider the logic. If a historical crucifixion happened to match Psalm 22 in multiple specific details, that would be remarkable. But if an author who knew Psalm 22 intimately constructed a crucifixion narrative, would we not expect exactly the correspondences we find? The garment division, the mocking, the cry of dereliction, the thirst — there are three ways to explain these matches, not two. They could be coincidence. They could be invented from the psalm. Or, as many critical scholars think, ordinary features of a Roman crucifixion were retold in the psalm's words: the executioners took the victim's clothes, the crowd jeered, the dying man thirsted. Goodacre, who thinks it "unlikely" that Mark invented the cry of dereliction, still counts the casting of lots among the elements "much less securely regarded as history" (Goodacre 2006, 16). The last two options are matters of degree, and neither needs a prophecy.
The Verse the Gospels Never Quote
There is a stranger fact about verse 16. No New Testament writer quotes it. The gospels quote the psalm's opening cry (Mark 15:34; Matt 27:46), and John quotes verse 18 with an explicit fulfilment formula (John 19:24), but none of them cites the pierced hands and feet, and no gospel crucifixion scene even mentions nails. The nails appear only after the resurrection, when Thomas says, "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails" (John 20:25). Even Hopkin, defending "pierced," concedes that although the Church Fathers leaned heavily on the verse, "it was never quoted in the New Testament" (Hopkin 2005, 166). The application comes later. By the mid-second century Justin Martyr writes that "the expression, 'They pierced my hands and my feet,' was used in reference to the nails of the cross which were fixed in His hands and feet" (First Apology 35). Whatever the evangelists saw in Psalm 22, they did not use this verse to show it. The line that modern apologetics treats as its linchpin was not the evangelists' proof-text.
Pre-Christian Messianic Interpretation: The Dog That Did Not Bark
If Psalm 22 were genuinely and obviously a prediction of the messiah's suffering, we would expect to find pre-Christian Jewish sources that read it this way. We do not.
Rivka Ulmer, surveying the Jewish evidence, is blunt: "Prior to the attestation in the New Testament, there is no evidence of Psalm 22 being used in a Jewish messianic context" (Ulmer 2011, 108). In the Dead Sea Scrolls, Psalm 22 appears but is not given messianic interpretation. The pesharim — the Qumran commentaries that do apply scriptural texts to eschatological scenarios — do not include a pesher on Psalm 22. (This is suggestive rather than decisive: most psalms received no pesher, so the silence is one data point among several, not a knockout argument on its own.) The Targum on Psalms, an Aramaic interpretive translation compiled well after the rise of Christianity, gives Psalm 22 no messianic reading at all, although it freely writes "King Messiah" into other psalms (21, 45, 72). At the disputed verse it keeps the lion: "biting like a lion my hands and my feet."
In the Midrash Tehillim (Midrash on Psalms), Psalm 22 is applied to Esther and to Israel. The one rabbinic text that does read Psalm 22 of a suffering messiah is Pesikta Rabbati. In its homilies 36–37, "Ephraim, Messiah of my righteousness" (Ulmer 2011, 122) endures the psalm's afflictions: his strength "dried up like a potsherd" (Ps 22:15), his mockers shaking their heads at him (Ps 22:7). A fair account concedes the point. A rabbinic source does read Psalm 22 of a suffering messiah, and some of its traditions may be old. The answer is the date and the direction. Ulmer describes Pesikta Rabbati as having "material from the first, third and fifth centuries" that "was subsequently edited in the Middle Ages" (Ulmer 2011, 119). She concludes that "the evidence for the Christian connection between Psalm 22 with Jesus on the cross predates this Psalm's association with the Messiah in Judaism," and that the Jewish suffering messiah "inverts the Christian interpretation" (123). The Ephraim homilies tell us how the psalm was read once Christianity had claimed it, not what anyone expected before Jesus.
The broader picture fits. The concept of a suffering messiah was not a standard element of Jewish messianic expectation before Christianity. The messiah was expected to be a victorious king, a military deliverer, a restorer of Israel's fortunes — not a figure who would be tortured and executed. The idea that messianic prophecy predicted a suffering, dying messiah is, on the majority view, a Christian interpretive innovation, not a pre-existing Jewish framework that Jesus stepped into. Daniel Boyarin and Israel Knohl have argued for earlier Jewish precedents, but Boyarin builds on Daniel 7 and Isaiah 53, and Knohl on a Qumran hymn read against Isaiah's servant; neither rests on Psalm 22.
This matters enormously for the apologetic argument. If Psalm 22 were so obviously a prediction of the messiah's crucifixion, why did no one notice before Christians came along and said so? The answer, I submit, is that it is not obviously a prediction of the messiah's crucifixion. It became one only after Christians, beginning with Mark, read the crucifixion of Jesus backward into the psalm and the psalm forward into the crucifixion.
The Praise Section: The Half That Doesn't Fit
The psalm does not end at verse 21. It does not end with suffering. It ends with triumph, praise, and universal worship. Apologists do use this second half. Hebrews already puts verse 22 in Jesus' mouth: "I will declare your name to my brothers. Among the congregation I will sing your praise" (Heb 2:12). Many presentations hear the psalm's last words, "he has done it" (v. 31), as "It is finished" (John 19:30). But that reading changes the rules halfway through the poem.
Verses 22 through 31 describe the psalmist's deliverance and its cosmic consequences. "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to Yahweh" (v. 27). "Posterity shall serve him. Future generations shall be told about the Lord" (v. 30). Notice the order of events. The psalmist is not raised from the dead; he is rescued from dying: "Save me from the lion's mouth! Yes, you have rescued me" (v. 21); "when he cried to him, he heard" (v. 24). A psalm whose sufferer is heard and spared is an awkward template for a sufferer who dies.
Christians, of course, read the praise section as fulfilled through the resurrection and the spread of Christianity. But this requires splitting the psalm — reading the first half as literally fulfilled at the cross and the second half as figuratively fulfilled over subsequent centuries through an entirely different mechanism. The psalm gives no signal that its halves run on different clocks. Whether it was composed as a single piece is itself debated: many critical commentators think its closing universal hymn (vv. 27–31) was added later, widening one sufferer's rescue into a vision of the nations (Lyons 2015, 645, who surveys the positions and agrees). Susan Gillingham divides it differently, thinking it likely that the lament (vv. 1–21) was composed some time before the liturgical thanksgiving (vv. 22–31) (Gillingham 2018, 136). On either view the psalm's movement runs from distress to deliverance, not to death and resurrection.
If the coda is a later addition, the apologetic reading is in a stranger position still: the verses it hears as the church's worldwide mission, and the "he has done it" that it hears as "It is finished," are the ones an editor appended to widen an individual's thanksgiving to the nations. Either way, to strip the suffering verses from the rescue that answers them and treat them as an independent prediction is to read the psalm against its own structure. But that is precisely what the apologetic argument requires.
Putting It Together
The choice, then, is this. Either Psalm 22 is a supernatural prediction of events centuries in its future: one that no reader recognized as such until after the events, whose most vivid line depends on a word the Hebrew tradition reads differently and the gospels never quote, and whose sufferer is rescued from death rather than raised from it. Or it is an individual lament, composed for worship, that early Christians steeped in the scriptures used to tell, and to make sense of, the death of their leader.
I offer that as my reading of the evidence. Its core, that Psalm 22 is a lament and that the gospels tell the passion in its words, is common ground in critical scholarship. How much of the story is remembered history is not. Raymond Brown leans strongly toward memory, John Dominic Crossan toward "prophecy historicized," and Mark Goodacre thinks the choice between them "simply too stark" (Goodacre 2006, 11).
Whether Mark was working from memory, from scripture, or, as many critical scholars think, from both, he told the story in the psalm's words. The match between Psalm 22 and the passion is something the storytellers made, not something the psalmist foresaw. The psalm did not predict the cross. The cross was narrated through the psalm.
