The Crux of Psalm 22:17: At the Crossroads of Textual and Literary Criticism

Abstract Psalm 22:17’s כארי ידי ורגלי represents a notorious interpretive crux. The problem centers around the absence of a verb in the final phrase of the verse in the majority of Masoretic witnesses (MT). The matter has been further complicated by the psalm's use in the canonical gospel crucifixion accounts and the choice to render the phrase as “they dug my hands and feet” in the ancient Greek translation (OG), a reading that seems to portray the piercing of the hands and feet. In this article, we provide a fresh examination of the ancient Hebrew manuscript evidence, the ancient versions, as well as insights from medieval Jewish commentators and several more recent proposals. We attempt to establish the earliest inferable text form for MT's כארי. We offer a new solution based on considering the macro-level literary strategy of Psalter laments and the micro-level poetic polysemy at work in several verselines of Ps 22. We conclude that the text-critical evidence favors MT's witness to the consonants כארי while the poetic and literary evidence favors seeing the word, with the odd use of aleph, as an invitation by the poet to construe the word primarily as a reference to the verb כרה and secondarily as a reference to a lion.