Biblion Bible Commentary
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My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?
Psalms 22:1-21
1 For the Chief Musician; set to “The Doe of the Morning.” A Psalm by David. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? · WEB
A sufferer describes his own execution in detail that had no method to match it for another thousand years.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? Psalms 22:1.
These are the words Jesus cried from the cross Matthew 27:46, and quoting the first line of a psalm was a standard way of invoking the whole of it. What follows is the reason that matters.
I cry in the daytime, but you don't answer; in the night season, and am not silent Psalms 22:2. The complaint is not that God is absent but that he is silent while present, which is worse.
But you are holy, you who inhabit the praises of Israel. Our fathers trusted in you. They trusted, and you delivered them Psalms 22:3–4.
The theology is intact. He does not conclude that God is unfaithful; he holds the record of past deliverances beside his own experience and cannot make them fit. That is the actual shape of the crisis, and it is sharper than doubt.
But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people Psalms 22:6.
Then the mockery, quoted: he trusts in Yahweh. Let him deliver him. Let him rescue him, since he delights in him Psalms 22:8. The chief priests said this at the cross in almost exactly these words Matthew 27:43, apparently without recognizing that they were completing a psalm.
I am poured out like water. All my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax... My strength is dried up like a potsherd. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth Psalms 22:14–15.
The description is of a body hanging: joints pulled apart by its own weight, extreme thirst, the failure of the heart. You have brought me into the dust of death.
For dogs have surrounded me. A company of evildoers have enclosed me. They have pierced my hands and feet Psalms 22:16.
A line written centuries before crucifixion was invented, by a nation that executed by stoning. Whatever David was suffering when he wrote it, nothing in his recorded life involved pierced hands and feet, and the psalm gives no occasion for it.
I can count all of my bones. They look and stare at me. They divide my garments among them. They cast lots for my clothing Psalms 22:17–18.
Stripped, exposed, watched by a crowd, and his clothes disposed of by lot while he is still alive. All four Gospels record the soldiers doing exactly this John 19:23–24, and John names the psalm.
The force of the passage is that it is not a prediction in the form of a prophecy. It is a man's prayer in his own distress, and it describes an event a thousand years off in a manner of death not yet practiced, in detail no writer had reason to invent. The psalm ends this half still unanswered — save me from the lion's mouth Psalms 22:21 — and the answer, when it comes, changes the subject entirely.
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