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Messianic Prophecies

Psalms 69:20

This passage comes from the wider catalog — a broader, more lightly curated list than the core set. Both readings are shown as peers; GEBible takes no side.

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Psalms 69:20

Reproach has broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; for comforters, but I found none.

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Don’t let the flood waters overwhelm me, neither let the deep swallow me up. Don’t let the pit shut its mouth on me.

Answer me, Yahweh, for your loving kindness is good. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, turn to me.

Don’t hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress. Answer me speedily!

Draw near to my soul and redeem it. Ransom me because of my enemies.

You know my reproach, my shame, and my dishonor. My adversaries are all before you.

Reproach has broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; for comforters, but I found none.

They also gave me poison for my food. In my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.

Let their table before them become a snare. May it become a retribution and a trap.

Let their eyes be darkened, so that they can’t see. Let their backs be continually bent.

Pour out your indignation on them. Let the fierceness of your anger overtake them.

Let their habitation be desolate. Let no one dwell in their tents.

The fulfillment reading

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

In the fulfillment reading, Psalm 69:20's portrait of a heart broken by insults with no one to give comfort is taken to anticipate Jesus' anguish in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:38), where he finds his disciples asleep rather than watching with him. Advocates stress the specific note of finding no comforter as a point of correspondence with the Gethsemane scene. Some also read the psalm's later turn from despair toward vindication as paralleling the arc from suffering to resurrection. On this reading the verse supplies a recognizable emotional foreshadowing of the Passion.

The counter-reading

How this passage is read within its own context.

In the critical reading, Psalm 69:20 is the emotional peak of the same complaint section whose wider span is also read as messianic, so isolating this verse as its own prophecy counts the same content twice. Critics note that the psalmist's sorrow is caused by mockery and the absence of comforters, whereas Jesus' sorrow in Matthew 26:38 is anticipatory grief before execution — different causes in different settings. Intense sorrow, on this view, is a common human experience rather than a distinctive prophetic marker. The link is read as a broad thematic pairing of two expressions of anguish.

How the New Testament uses this passage

Each entry names how the New Testament author draws on the passage — a direct quotation, an allusion, an echo, or a typological reading. An echo or an allusion is not the same as a prediction; the label says which is which.

  • Matthew 26:38 Echo

    Matthew 26:38 is an unmarked echo whose language aligns more closely with Psalm 42-43 than with Psalm 69:20; there is no citation of Psalm 69.