The other night I watched an interesting video on Youtube. Its title was "The Secret of Psalm 22." If you look closely at this blog entry, you'll see that I've given it the title "The Secrets of Psalm 22," with "Secrets" in the plural. I believe that Psalm 22 holds several secrets, not just one. Here's a link to the Youtube video:
The video is not only very interesting: it's quite pleasant to watch. A young woman ("Anastasia") interacts with Dr. Seth Postell. I enjoyed the dialog between them as he made his exposition concerning Psalms 22.16 (22.17 in the Hebrew text). As it turns out, there is a huge controversy concerning this verse. In the NASB it reads:
For dogs have surrounded me,
A band of evildoers has encompassed me;
They pierced my hands and my feet.
This verse (and others as well) is believed by Christians to refer to the Passion of Christ. But in the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text it says nothing about piercing; instead it says, "Like a lion my hands and my feet." This discrepancy has caused the Christians of trying to hide the Messiah, and the Jews to accuse the Christians of twisting the text to fit their agenda.
Dr. Postell presents a good case for a possible resolution of the problem in which there is no blame for either side. I'll try to reconstruct his case as best I can, since it is one that I can agree with, as far as it goes.
All of the Christian translations are ultimately based on the Septuagint (LXX), a Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, which is almost a thousand years older than our oldest copy of the Masoretic Text, and is based on an earlier form of the Hebrew text. That earlier form is not very different, but there are differences. The Greek of the Septuagint says, "They gouged my hands and my feet.." Nothing about a lion, nor does it say, "pierced." How are we to explain this?
Well, we can explain it with the help of some very old Hebrew manuscripts. The verb in two of them is
כרו (pronounced "karu"), meaning "they dug," causing that part of the verse to read "They dug my hands and my feet." This earlier form of the Hebrew text is no doubt where the Greek "they gouged" came from. But this verb normally means "to dig," as in the dirt. It doesn't mean "to pierce," which would require a different Hebrew verb.
The corresponding word in the other old Hebrew manuscript is כארו. We have to remember that when the psalm was written there were no vowel-pointing systems. Even today (in Yiddish, for example) one puts in an aleph (א) to represent an "a" vowel. But this apparently confused one of the Masoretes, who did not recognize it as another "karu." But looking at another verse in the psalm, he saw mention of lions, and thought it must be כארי (like a lion), differing only in the length of one stroke. This causes the line in the Masoretic Text to read, "like a lion, my hands and my feet." This is awkward, since there is no verb (which can happen in poetry), so most translators add a word or phrase in italics: "mauled," or "seized," or "at my," and so on. But these words are not in the Hebrew.
Dr. Postell's theory is brilliant, and I believe it sufficiently explains the variant reading in the Masoretic Text. But I don't believe it goes far enough. We are still left with "dug," which does not mean "pierced."
If I open my copy of the Vulgate to pp. 792 and 793 of Vol. I, I see, on the left side, Jerome's Latin according to the Septuagint. In that part of the verse it says, "foderunt manus meas et pedes meos" (they dug my hands and my feet." When I look at the righthand page, which has his translation according to the Hebrew text of his time, I see "vinxerunt manus meas et pedes meos" (they bound my hands and my feet). Apparently the Hebrew text of his time, or at least his copy of it, had a much more reasonable reading than "dug." Consulting my Hebrew dictionary, I find that one of the verbs meaning "to bind" looks very similar to "karu," but it is now used only for "binding books." That verb is כָּרַךְ, which without pointing would simply be כרך. Although that Hebrew verb is not, apparently, used in the Bible, a possibly related Aramaic verb is, in Daniel 3:20-1, where it refers to the binding of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. כרך is very similar in appearance to כרו, which could cause a confusion between "bound" and "dug." Further, the similarity is at least as strong in Paleo Hebrew as it is in Square Hebrew writing.
It is well known that the Evangelists used mostly the Septuagint (LXX) for their quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. The meaning "gouged" Greek probably indicates that the LXX translators had before them a Hebrew text containing the misreading "dug" for "bound." St. Jerome, in the Vulgate, was too honest to change "dug" to "pierced." Others though, including the translators of the KJV and many later translators, did so.
(to be continued)
Copyright © 2022 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
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