Psalm 22 Before the Masoretes מִזְמוֹר לְדָוִד · תְּהִלִּים כ״ב

1The one word the whole debate turns on

Psalm 22 is the great Psalm of the suffering righteous one. It opens with the cry Jesus spoke from the cross — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (22:1) — and moves through a catalogue of torments that reads like an eyewitness account of crucifixion centuries before the Romans adopted it: mockers who "wag the head" (v.7), bones out of joint (v.14), a tongue cleaving to the jaws (v.15), and enemies who "divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing" (v.18) — the very act John records at Golgotha (John 19:24).

At the center sits the most contested word in the Hebrew Bible. In the clause at Psalm 22:16 (English) — 22:17 in the Hebrew, which counts the superscription as verse 1 — the medieval Masoretic Text reads כָּאֲרִי (kaʾărî), parsed "like a lion my hands and my feet." But the pre-medieval witnesses read a verb ending in waw — כָּארוּ (kāʾărû), "they dug / bored (→ pierced)." The entire difference is the final letter: a short waw (ו) versus an almost-identical short yod (י). The question this document answers from the physical evidence is simply: which letter did the oldest copies actually write?

The two oldest streams (first-century Hebrew + pre-Christian Greek) read a verb; the "like a lion" vocalization is attested only in the far later Masoretic pointing. Established that both readings are genuinely ancient; which is original is Disputed.

2Finding I — 4QPsf (4Q88) · Qumran Cave 4 · c. 50 BCE

The only manuscript from Qumran proper that contains any of Psalm 22. 4QPsf is a non-standard "liturgical" Psalter that also carries three non-canonical hymns. It was copied in a late-Hasmonean semicursive hand around 50 BCE — a full century before the Nahal Hever scroll, and unambiguously before the 50 CE cut-off. It preserves Psalm 22:14–17 (Hebrew) = 22:13–16 (English), which means the crux verse falls on this fragment — at its broken bottom edge.

4Q884QPsalmsᶠ Cave 4 · c. 50 BCE · DJD XVI, pl. XIII–XIV

A Dead Sea Psalms manuscript (the Great Psalms Scroll, 11QPsᵃ) — shown as context for the hand and layout of a Qumran Psalter. Wikimedia Commons. (Illustrative — not 4Q88 itself; view the real 4Q88 at the link below.)

Preserved text · Ps 22:14–17 (Heb) = 13–16 (Eng)

Heb 14 / Eng 13

פָּצוּ עָלַי פִּיהֶם אַרְיֵה טֹרֵף וְשֹׁאֵג

"They open wide their mouths at me, a lion ravening and roaring."

Heb 15 / Eng 14

כַּמַּיִם נִשְׁפַּכְתִּי וְהִתְפָּרְדוּ כָּל־עַצְמוֹתָי

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint."

Heb 17 / Eng 16 · the crux (damaged)

…הִקִּיפוּנִי כׇּרוּ יָדַי וְרַגְלָי

Ulrich's reconstruction: "…they encircled me; they dug my hands and my feet" — but the leather is broken here and the word is only faint traces.

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View the actual fragment, zoomable, at the Leon Levy Digital Library (4Q88, infrared plate B-367901). © IAA.

3Finding II — 5/6ḤevPs · Nahal Hever · c. 50 CE ★

This is the pivotal manuscript. The Nahal Hever Psalms scroll was excavated by Yigael Yadin in 1960–61 from the "Cave of Letters," a refuge of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Judean Desert cliffs. The scroll was deposited c. 132–135 CE but was copied earlier, in a Herodian formal bookhand of the mid-first century (~50 CE). It preserves Psalm 22:3–8 and 14–20 (English) — and the crux, English 22:16, sits squarely inside the preserved block, as does the "cast lots for my garments" verse.

5/6ḤevPsNahal Hever Psalms scroll Cave of Letters · ~50 CE · DJD XXXVIII (Flint)

Nahal Hever and the Judean Desert cliffs of the Cave of Letters, where Yadin's expedition recovered the scroll in 1960–61. Wikimedia Commons. (The fragment photo itself is © IAA — zoom it at the link below.)

The crux line · Ps 22:17 (Heb) = 16 (Eng)

as the scroll reads it (consonantal)

…הקיפוני כארו ידיה ורגלי

"…they encircled me; they dug / bored (pierced) … my feet." The crux word ends in waw (ו) — a verb, not "lion." (The scribe also slipped on "my hands," writing ידיה "her hands" for ידי — see honesty note.)

Heb 15 / Eng 14

כמים נשפכתי והתפרדו כל עצמותי

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint."

Heb 19 / Eng 18 · preserved on this scroll

יחלקו בגדי להם ועל לבושי יפילו גורל

"They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots." — the act John 19:24 records at the cross, physically preserved in a ~50 CE Hebrew scroll.

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View the actual "pierced" fragment, zoomable, at the Leon Levy Digital Library (5/6Ḥev 1b, Plate 891 Frag 6, infrared B-366235). © IAA.

The DJD editors judged the reading "assured." Their decisive paleographic observation: the last letter of kāʾărû is "without doubt a vav when compared with the beginning letter of the next word, which is clearly a yod" — the two near-identical strokes stand side by side on the same line in the same hand, so the scribe's own writing settles which is which. Modern IAA infrared imaging (2012) is what tipped scholarly confidence from "too faded to tell" to "assured."

4Finding III — the Septuagint (ὤρυξαν): the oldest witness of all

The honest "third finding" is not a Dead Sea Scroll at all — it is the Greek Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria in the 2nd century BCE, well before Christ. Its translators, working from a Hebrew text older than either surviving Hebrew scroll, rendered Psalm 21:17 (LXX numbering) ὤρυξαν χεῖράς μου καὶ πόδας — "they dug / bored through my hands and my feet." A verb. The later Latin Vulgate followed with foderunt ("they pierced/dug"), and the Syriac Peshitta with "they pierced."

This matters because it removes the entire "Christians invented it" objection: a Jewish translation, pre-Christian, already read the clause as piercing. The three ancient witnesses — Greek (~2nd c. BCE), 4QPsf (~50 BCE, reconstructed), Nahal Hever (~50 CE) — form a line of verbal "dug/pierced" readings that all predate the Masoretic "like a lion" by centuries to a millennium. Established: pre-Christian.

5The crux, letter by letter

Strip away the controversy and the whole thing reduces to two short vertical strokes. In the Herodian script of the Nahal Hever scribe, waw (ו) is a slightly longer downstroke and yod (י) a shorter one; they are genuinely easy to confuse, which is exactly why the reading was debated for decades. The Masoretes, adding vowel points a thousand years later, read the ambiguous consonant as yod and vocalized "like a lion"; the first-century scribe — and the Greek translators three centuries before him — read (or wrote) a waw, a verb. The scrolls do not end the debate, but they move the verbal reading from "a Christian gloss" to "the older, better-attested tradition."

6A thousand-year timeline

7Reliability — how close are the scrolls to our Bible?

Psalm 22 is one data point in a far larger result. The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed the oldest Hebrew biblical manuscripts back ~1,000 years — from the medieval codices to before 70 CE — and the headline is that the consonantal text proved remarkably stable. But the honest picture is more precise, and more interesting, than the popular slogan.

The famous claim — "more than 95% word-for-word identical" — comes from Gleason Archer's description of the Great Isaiah Scroll, "the 5% of variation consist[ing] chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling." It is directionally true but is a scholar's approximation, not a computed statistic; the Isaiah scroll in fact carries 2,600+ catalogued variants, overwhelmingly orthographic. The more defensible number is Emanuel Tov's measurement of the proto-Masoretic scrolls from the Judean Desert sites (Masada, Nahal Hever, Wadi Murabbaʿat): their divergence from the medieval Leningrad Codex is "in the region of up to 2% of the text words" — i.e. ~98% consonantal agreement across a thousand years.

8Honest verdict & the five limitations

The strongest claim the evidence will bear — true, and strong, and not inflated:

And the five limitations a careful reader must hold alongside it:

• One Hebrew manuscript clearly carries כארו, and its scribe erred in the same clause (ידיה for ידי).
• The intrusive aleph makes kāʾărû morphologically contested; reputable critics still defend the MT "like a lion."
• "Dug/bored" ≠ "pierced with nails" lexically — the crucifixion sense is a natural extension, not the bare meaning.
• 4QPsf is too damaged at the crux to serve as independent confirmation; its כרו is a reconstruction.
• The Nahal Hever date (~50 CE) sits right at the cut-off — most-cited as mid-first-century, but part of the plausible range runs later.

None of these dissolve the point; they discipline it. The Dead Sea evidence does not prove "pierced" was original — but it decisively refutes the claim that "pierced" was invented by Christians, and it shows the reading behind the crucifixion Psalm was already in Jewish hands before the cross. That is the honest, and still powerful, bottom line.