1My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?2My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don’t answer; in the night season, and am not silent.3But you are holy, you who inhabit the praises of Israel.4Our fathers trusted in you. They trusted, and you delivered them.5They cried to you, and were delivered. They trusted in you, and were not disappointed.6But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people.7All those who see me mock me. They insult me with their lips. They shake their heads, saying,8“He trusts in Yahweh. Let him deliver him. Let him rescue him, since he delights in him.”9But you brought me out of the womb. You made me trust while at my mother’s breasts.10I was thrown on you from my mother’s womb. You are my God since my mother bore me.11Don’t be far from me, for trouble is near. For there is no one to help.12Many bulls have surrounded me. Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me.
How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.
On the fulfillment reading, the cumulative specificity of Psalm 22 — the mocking (v. 7-8), the piercing of hands and feet (v. 16), the casting of lots for garments (v. 18), the thirst (v. 15), the public spectacle — is read as describing crucifixion centuries before the Romans invented it. The shift from suffering to vindication (v. 22-31) is taken to parallel the crucifixion-resurrection pattern. On this account no single historical event in the psalmist's life accounts for all these details, whereas the crucifixion does.
The counter-reading
How this passage is read within its own context.
The "pierced my hands and feet" reading depends on a textual variant. The Masoretic Text reads "ka'ari" (כארי, "like a lion [at] my hands and feet"), while the LXX and a Hebrew manuscript from Nahal Hever (5/6HevPs) suggest "ka'aru" (כארו, "they pierced"). The strongest proof-text in the psalm is thus disputed at the manuscript level. On the critical reading the other imagery — mocking, garment division, thirst — is conventional lament language found throughout the Psalter (cf. Psalms 35, 69, 88), and the passion-narrative authors, steeped in the Psalms, are taken to have shaped their accounts to echo Psalm 22 — Mark 15:34 has Jesus quote verse 1, marking the literary connection. On this account the interpretive direction runs from a known text to a constructed narrative rather than from prediction to coincidental fulfillment.
The fulfillment reading has two provenance panels and the counter-reading one. The extra panel records how the New Testament takes up these passages — including where it does not — because it is a canon that cites them, the fulfillment reading's own textual basis. The counter-reading engages the same passages through the Jewish exegetical and translational tradition — the Targums, the Talmud, the rabbinic commentators, and the medieval exegetes — with no parallel canon that cites them as its own textual basis. That difference is about which sources exist, not a judgment reached here.
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.
How the passage is read as messianic in the Christian interpretive tradition — the patristic writers, the Reformers, and later confessional commentators, named and dated in order from earliest to latest; a direct quotation is shown where a public-domain translation of the work survives.
Justin MartyrJustin Martyr (Justin of Neapolis)Greek Apologist / Ante-Nicene · c. 100 – c. 165
In an extended verse-by-verse reading addressed to his Jewish interlocutor Trypho, Justin takes the psalm as spoken by the crucified Christ. He treats the piercing of the hands and feet, the casting of lots for the garments, the derisive head-shaking, and the encircling of the sufferer as literal descriptions of the crucifixion, and argues that these particulars were realized in no figure of Israel's history but Jesus. He reads the psalm's turn from anguish to praise as the Messiah's vindication.
“For when they crucified Him, driving in the nails, they pierced His hands and feet; and those who crucified Him parted His garments among themselves, each casting lots for what he chose to have, and receiving according to the decision of the lot.”
ch. 97, on Ps. 22:16–18 — Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, ed. Roberts & Donaldson (Am. ed. A. C. Coxe), 1885
Dialogue with Trypho, chs. 97–106 (c. 155–160)
TertullianQuintus Septimius Florens TertullianusLatin / North African Ante-Nicene · c. 155 – c. 220
Tertullian cites the psalm's language of pierced hands and feet and the division of the garments as prophecy of the passion, contending that the crucified Christ, not David in his own person, is its true subject. He deploys the text to argue that the specific manner of the Messiah's death — crucifixion — was foretold in Scripture. He reads the sufferings described as prospective rather than merely biographical of the psalmist.
Against Marcion, Book III (esp. ch. 19); An Answer to the Jews, ch. 10
AugustineAurelius Augustinus of HippoLatin patristic · 354 – 430
Augustine expounds the whole psalm as the voice of Christ (vox Christi), taking the opening cry of dereliction as uttered from the cross and the mocking and garment-division as the passion itself. He reads the psalm's closing movement toward the nations as the ingathering of the Gentiles into the church, so that the sufferer and the worldwide worshipers form one body, head and members. For Augustine the suffering and the universal vindication are a single continuous prophecy of Christ and his people.
Expositions on the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), on Psalm 21 [22] (c. 392–418)
John CalvinJean CalvinReformed / Protestant · 1509 – 1564
Calvin holds that David speaks first of his own afflictions, but as a type whose full reality is completed in Christ, and he insists that the garment-division and the cry of forsakenness were truly and properly accomplished only at the crucifixion. He treats David's experience and Christ's passion as bound together, the shadow and the substance, rather than reading the psalm as bare prediction detached from its author. He sees the psalm's progress from distress to the praise of all nations as pointing beyond David to the reach of Christ's kingdom.
Commentary on the Book of Psalms (1557)
In the Jewish exegetical tradition
How the passage is read in the Jewish interpretive tradition — the Targums, the Talmud, the rabbinic commentators, and the medieval exegetes, named and dated in order from earliest to latest; a direct quotation is shown where a public-domain translation of the work survives.
RashiRabbi Shlomo YitzchakiAshkenazi · 11th c.
Reads the "Hind of the Morning" superscription as the congregation of Israel — the Sages applying it to Esther and the Jews in the Persian exile — and only secondarily as David speaking of his own sufferings.
Commentary on Psalms
RadakRabbi David KimchiProvencal · 12th-13th c.
Concludes that the "Hind of the Morning" is the congregation of Israel in the present exile, citing the psalm's ending as proof; he rejects the purely personal-Davidic reading in favor of a corporate, exilic one.
“The correct view is that the title The Hind of the Morning is used of the congregation of Israel while in this (present) exile, and the end of the Psalm proves this.”
On Psalm 22:1 (the superscription) — tr. R.G. Finch, The Longer Commentary of R. David Kimhi on the First Book of Psalms (London: SPCK, 1919), p. 97
Where this stands
Psalm 22 is an individual lament psalm that moves from suffering to vindication. The opening cry ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") is attributed to Jesus on the cross in Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46. The psalm's vivid imagery — "they have pierced my hands and feet" (v. 16, though the Hebrew is textually disputed), "they divide my garments among them" (v. 18) — is heavily echoed in the passion narratives. Critical scholars classify this as a pre-exilic individual lament, possibly royal, with no original messianic referent. The psalmist describes personal suffering using conventional ancient Near Eastern lament imagery. The Midrash Tehillim discusses portions of this psalm with some messianic application.
The strongest proof-text in the psalm is disputed at the manuscript level. The Masoretic "like a lion" vs. the LXX/Nahal Hever "they pierced" is a major axis of Jewish-Christian textual debate. The NRSVUE adopts a third rendering, "they bound my hands and feet," reflecting continued uncertainty about the verb.
Where this stands
Psalm 22 is an individual lament psalm that moves from suffering to vindication. The opening cry ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") is attributed to Jesus on the cross in Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46. The psalm's vivid imagery — "they have pierced my hands and feet" (v. 16, though the Hebrew is textually disputed), "they divide my garments among them" (v. 18) — is heavily echoed in the passion narratives. Critical scholars classify this as a pre-exilic individual lament, possibly royal, with no original messianic referent. The psalmist describes personal suffering using conventional ancient Near Eastern lament imagery. The Midrash Tehillim discusses portions of this psalm with some messianic application.