Interpreting Psalm 22: Its Form and Function in Scripture

If you Google for images of Psalm 22, you’ll mainly turn up various images of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

This is unsurprising, because (1) Christians seem to produce more religious Internet art than Jews; and (2)  (whether for reasons of literary art or polemics or history, I don’t know) Mark patterned the first gospel’s account of Jesus’ death after this psalm.  The other gospel writers followed him, intent as they were on proving from Hebrew scripture that Jesus was point and apex of Jewish history and scripture.

While I think that the gospel writers prove no such thing (simply because they were confessedly smoothing out the Hebrew Bible with one hand while they composed their gospels with the other), I think it’s entirely likely that Jesus quoted the psalm in Aramaic on his cross.  As a devout Jew steeped in the rabbinic traditions and Pharisaical methods of his time, he might have easily found in his sufferings an apt analog of the sufferings that the Psalm represents.

And this conjures a reflection on inspiration for a person who resists the traditional idea of plenary inspiration and its variants: there might be more than one kind of “inspiration.”  

Inspiration might well be intertextual, not historical.

It need not be the case that God dictated Psalm 22 to David (or whomever) in order that it might be fulfilled in Jesus.  But it might well be that between the psalmist and Jesus there existed a strong writer-reader relationship, a dialogue between the two of them, performed by Jesus on the cross (people do such things); observed by Mark’s sources and penned by Mark.  In that case the inspiration of scripture isn’t a divine blueprint delivered in Psalm 22 but the inspiration of Jesus to interpret the poem and to inscribe his interpretation on his own death.  That is, the Psalm was not a divine blueprint forecast through history, but the collaboration of Jesus and Mark (or just Mark) to pattern the crucifixion after it.

And this need not have been a conscious decision: to steep oneself in texts as scripture is identical to inviting such patterns and repetitions, as the apostle Paul understood full well.  Indeed, the strongest way to think of Christianity is not as a set of theological propositions (formal theology comes late to the scene) but a set of images that pattern the self.

The gospel writers, taking Mark’s cue, emphasize or create the details that solidify his interpretation, as best they themselves interpret it.

Which is far more scriptural in the long run: it puts the authority with Jesus, not with David (or whomever).

Lemme ‘splain.

Every text is an act of relationship between a writer and an audience.  It takes place in a setting that the author and audience both understand.   The author sends the reader a message based on codes that they can both interpret: a common language, common ranges of meanings for words and phrases, common background assumptions.  He might elect to create ambiguity, but that ambiguity situates itself in fields of meaning.  Some meanings are right out of bounds in this dialogue between the author and the reader. 

And this depends upon background information.

So for instance, when Isaiah 40:1-11 announces that Israel has received “the double” for her sins.

This blog and this sermon, perhaps lightly, interpret that to mean one gets “double the forgiveness.”  

This one takes it to mean double the consequences.  

Representative quotations: 

To underscore what he means the Lord says we have received “double for all our sins.” The Lord has more than paid for our sins. He has given us twice as much forgiveness as we needed.

[….]

Everyone has received double for all their sins, not because God has willed it, but because, being our own worst enemy, we will it on ourselves and on each other.

 Such interpretations are common, and ancient: John Wesley’s commentary took “Double” to mean something like “sufficient for God’s designs” while Strong’s critical commentary insisted it was forward-looking to the post-Roman period (though how he squared that with the diaspora I can’t answer).  

I have heard Malcolm Smith explain that it represents a folding over (doubling) of the certificate of debt, which is an attractive interpretation; but (as sometimes happens with his interpretations) I have not been able to find a credible source in the scholarship: in fact the scholarship tends to point me away from that interpretation.  I do not say it’s not there, but I can’t find it.  I’m not a hell of a good Hebraicist, though, so please don’t think I’m calling that great teacher-pastor a liar.

Note though how important his interpretation is, and how it ought to have wider currency if it is true: if Smith is right, the interpretations of “double forgiveness” or “double penalty” fly right out the window.  Background assumptions shared between (Deutero-) Isaiah and his audience about what “double” means (Hebrew kiflayim) collapse the easily available modern assumptions.

The word “double” in Isaiah’s Judah  therefore poses problems that people are apt to sort out by appealing to what we do know about the word “double” in our own usage.  Our theological needs and desires tinker with our presentation of the text: and this is not an extreme case, but the rule.

And this interpreting-by-the-light-of-our-own-situation is actually one that the Gospel writers, Paul, and even Jesus employ frequently.  Whether or not Jesus was born of a virgin, Luke yanks Isaiah 7:14-17 out of its own rather clear context in the Syro-Ephraimite conflict.  Jesus takes the story of Jonah to be a pattern for his own death and Resurrection rather than what it clearly is, an allegorical story of the place of Israel and the purpose of Israel’s sufferings among the Gentiles. 

(My fundamentalist friend Steve, whom I respect and love, will tell me at this point that I’m pretending to understand Jonah better than the One who wrote it.  Pace, Steve!)

Interpretation is generally a matter of extreme liberty: when we interpret a text that originates in a far away time or place, we are imposing on it the experiences that we are familiar with.  We take from it those aspects we understand and relate to, and typically leave off the stuff that has no purchase on our imaginations.   

Jesus (if I’m right about this) proves it.  For the psalm is not manifestly about crucifixion, though Christians are in the bad habit of saying it’s a fairly literal description of crucifixion. 

It’s a beautiful and amazing poem, though, and I think it’s instructive to look at its form.

The poem’s strategy is a risky one, poetically speaking: it contradicts its own mood, running through a series of reversals that I think are intended to gradually intensify the sense of despair.  The poet-narrator weaves between a kind of pleading faith and lamentation over his suffering until both the praise and lamentation have built to a climax: then the suffering becomes catastrophic but blends with the faith in a triumphant and very final closure.

The opening attribution, “Of David,” is habitual in the Psalms and often pseudepigraphic (a deliberate false authorship designed to shape the reader’s expectations in some way).  I think it is so in this case, though I scarcely think it matters.

The opening strophe (Psalm 22:1-2) sets up the lamentation in the strongest possible language: the speaker is abandoned by God, and asks for an explanation.   Note that the emphasis right from the first is as much on God’s non-responsiveness as it is on the suffering itself, indicating that the The typical Hebrew poetic habit of synonymous and synthetic parallelism is in evidence: an idea is stated and then either restated with slight variation or else developed in some way.

The second strophe (Psalm 22:3-5) does two important things.  First it establishes a pattern in which the English translations signal a thematic break with the word “yet” or “but.”  This is editorial in English translations: the word doesn’t appear in the Hebrew.  But it’s added in English translations to call attention to a counter-movement in the poem.  If one thinks of the poem as a soliloquy of David it becomes an internal dialogue.  If one thinks of it more liturgically, it might well be the response of a chorus to the soloist, the voice of the community in reply to the suffering of the individual.  Note that the section is in the first person plural: “our father.”  

The third strophe (Psalm 22:6-8) again signals a shift in both speaker and theme.  Note that English Standard Version interestingly follows the King James version in using “Yet” to signal shifts to the “chorus” and “But” to signal shifts back to the sufferer: this helps guide the reader through the sections of the poem.  In this third strophe, the sufferer imagines himself in an adversarial relationship with the community, his isolation perhaps emphasized by the community-language and first person plural of the second strophe.   But note the dislocation caused by his observation that the wider community mocks his belief in YHWH (and this is the first use of that name in the poem): in fact, the “chorus” is acting as the voice of memory and conscience, recalling past deliverance (most likely the Exodus).  Does this suggest the first delusion of suffering, that one is alone?  I think so.

The fourth strophe (Psalm 22:9-11) takes up the memory of faith, this time in the first person: now it is the sufferer who speaks, and he complains of his trouble while reminding himself of his god’s help in times past. 

The fifth strophe (Psalm 22:12-18) is a long recital of specific suffering.  There can be no doubt that the crucified devout Jew would find in these lines a very apt articulation of his predicament.  And as rabbinic Judaism had conditioned itself to think in terms of patterning present reality after texts (that is, cultural memories), it seems almost certain Jesus would have seen his sufferings in terms of fulfilling these lines.  It’s a good bet that any other devout Jew crucified by the Romans felt exactly the same.  The difference, of course, would be that Jesus had Mark and St. Paul to insist that his claim to these verses was final.

The sixth strophe (Psalm 22:19-21) supplicates for salvation.

The seventh strophe (Psalm 22:22-31) presents a future (conditional?) praise.  But its precise character is enormously important. 

If / when (this is ambiguous) God will save, the sufferer’s praise will be “in the great congregation,” that is in the Temple, or more generally among the Israelites.   God’s deliverance will affect the reconciliation with the community from which the sufferer had declared himself alienated, and which had (I think) enjoined him early in the psalm to remember God’s past deliverances.

Now, however, his praise is triumphant, not just in his reconciliation to the community but to the extension of that community.  While the praise of the second strophe had been communal memory and conscience,  now the sufferer himself speaks in terms of overwhelming celebration.   YHWH now rules over “the nations” (that is, the Gentiles, an image that Mark emphasizes by having a Roman centurion acknowledge the triumph of Israel’s God at the cross).  

This mass conversion though extends beyond even the Gentiles: the poet says that “Before him shall bow all who have gone down to the dust” (that is, the “dust of death” from Psalm 22:15).  In this verse, the Psalm throws so strong a light of hope on suffering that even death does not quench it.   “Even the one who could not keep himself alive,” the English Standard Version translates, will erupt in praise, and posterity shall continue to serve.   And a people “yet unborn” shall be told “that he has done it.”

The finality of the last word of the psalm, “He has done it” (Hebr h’f’[,, )) has something of the ring of finality of Jesus’ last words (not recorded in Mark, but in John 19:30).  

In any case, it seems clear that Jesus, in his extreme suffering, called upon the pattern of suffering that he found in the psalm.  His cry in Aramaic, “Eloi, eloi, lema sabacthani” (Mark 15:34) invokes a Psalm about praise-beyond-suffering, one that compounds suffering.  That Mark patterned his description of the crucifixion is undoubtable (see Mark 15:24 and Psalm 22:18).  

Whether he is historical or not in all of his details (such as the dividing of garments) is of little interest to me.  But what is certainly true is that whether the pattern was set by God in inspiring Psalm 22, or whether Jesus / Mark found in the Psalm the highest expression of meaning for the crucifixion, the aim was to transform suffering into the victory of Israel’s god.