Where we are
There is a moment in the New Testament when the darkness over Golgotha breaks open with a sentence, and the sentence is a quotation. "About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). The dying Christ, with breath running short, reaches back a thousand years and speaks the first line of Psalm 22. So before we read a word of this psalm as David's, we have to reckon with the fact that its author's greater Son took it into his own mouth at the worst hour of the world — and thereby told us how to read it.
Psalm 22 is, on its surface, an individual lament — the most common single genre in the Psalter, and the one modern readers most need taught honestly. A lament is not a crisis of faith; it is an act of faith. It is the prayer of a believer in agony who keeps addressing God anyway — who cries "why?" not into the void but upward, to a covenant Lord he still calls "my God." Israel's hymnbook is not embarrassed by this prayer; it enshrines it. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments, and they teach a truth the sunnier corners of religion forget: that saying "why hast thou forsaken me?" to God is a form of clinging to him, not letting go. The line is faithful precisely because it is still a prayer.
David wrote it out of some real extremity we can no longer name — surrounded by enemies, sick unto death, mocked by men who read his suffering as proof God had dropped him. But the psalm strains beyond any occasion in David's life. No episode we know of had his hands and feet pierced, his garments gambled away, his bones countable through wasted flesh. The lament is written in a key too large for the singer — and the New Testament, and the risen Lord himself, tell us why: David was a prophet, and here he "seeing this before spake" of the Christ (cf. Acts 2:30–31). The pattern is the one Nephi named: "all things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world, unto man, are the typifying of him" (2 Ne. 11:4). David's true anguish is the vehicle; the Messiah's Atonement is the freight.
Here is what to watch as the psalm unfolds:
- It is built in two great movements. Verses 1–21 are desolation — forsakenness, mockery, physical collapse, the pierced hands, the parted garments. Then, at the end of verse 21, one word turns the whole psalm: "thou hast heard me." From there (vv. 22–31) it is thanksgiving, and the thanksgiving keeps widening — from "my brethren," to "the great congregation," to "all the ends of the world," to "a people that shall be born." Sorrow narrows to a single dying man; praise opens to the whole earth and all of time.
- The Gospel writers quote it deliberately. The cry of dereliction (v. 1), the wagging heads and the taunt "let him deliver him" (vv. 7–8), the thirst and the failing body (vv. 14–15), the pierced hands and feet (v. 16), the soldiers casting lots for the garments (v. 18) — the passion narratives lay these over the crucifixion one after another, and John quotes verse 18 word for word of the Roman soldiers. This is not our imagination reaching back; it is the evangelists reaching back, on purpose.
- The praise-half is quoted too. The New Testament does not stop at the suffering. Hebrews puts verse 22 — "I will declare thy name unto my brethren" — into the mouth of the risen Christ (Heb. 2:12). The resurrection is where the psalm was always headed.
Canonically we stand around 1000 BC, in the reign of David (secular chronologies place him c. 1010–970 BC), reading a song that Israel sang for a thousand years before its deepest meaning stood up out of a garden tomb.
"My God, my God" — the cry that is still a prayer (verses 1–5)
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? — Psalm 22:1
Read it slowly, and notice first what the cry does not say. It does not say "there is no God," or "God has failed," or even "God, I am done with you." It says "my God, my God." Twice. The possessive is the whole theology of the lament: the sufferer who feels abandoned is still holding on with both hands to the One he feels abandoned by. This is the paradox the Psalter is unafraid to sing — a man can feel utterly forsaken and be, in that very cry, utterly faithful. The Savior himself proved it. When he prayed this line from the cross, he was not renouncing the Father; he was praying to him, in the words of scripture, in the darkness — teaching every forsaken disciple after him that the prayer of dereliction is still a prayer.
The Hebrew verb behind "forsaken" is azab — to leave, abandon, let go of. And its use here is one of the most searching questions in all of scripture, because everywhere else in the Psalms it is the verb of God's promise not to do this: "the LORD... forsaketh not his saints" (Ps. 37:28); "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken" (Ps. 37:25). The psalm takes the exact word of the covenant promise and turns it into a question. That is what makes verse 1 unbearable and honest at once: the sufferer knows what God has sworn, and cannot square it with what he feels.
And then, immediately, the sufferer does the thing that makes a lament a lament rather than a despair: he remembers. "But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them" (vv. 3–4). In the same breath as "why hast thou forsaken me," he rehearses that God does deliver — the fathers "trusted in thee, and were not confounded" (v. 5). This is the shape of faithful grief: it holds the present darkness and the remembered faithfulness together without letting go of either. The word "trusted" tolls three times in two verses (vv. 4–5), a drumbeat of covenant memory laid down as a floor beneath the falling man.
A worm, and no man (verses 6–8)
But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. — Psalm 22:6
From the height of "our fathers trusted" the sufferer drops to the lowest self-description in the Psalter: not a man, a worm. The Hebrew is tola'at — and it is not the ordinary word for worm. Tola'at is the crimson grub, the coccus insect from which the ancient world crushed its scarlet dye, the very color that stained the veil of the tabernacle and the robe they would one day mock a King with. To call yourself tola'at is to say: I am a thing crushed, and my crushing produces something costly. It is hard to read that and not think of the One whose lifeblood, poured out, dyed the whole plan of salvation scarlet.
And listen to what the mockers say, because the Gospel writers were listening:
All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. — Psalm 22:7–8
Now set that beside Calvary: "And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads... He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God" (Matt. 27:39, 43). The scorners at the cross are not merely acting like the psalm — the chief priests quote it. They shake their heads (v. 7), they throw back the taunt about a God who supposedly delighted in him, they dare deliverance to come. It is one of the most chilling collisions in scripture: men fulfilling a prophecy of mockery by mocking, quoting the very psalm they are completing without knowing they are inside it.
Poured out like water, and pierced (verses 9–18)
The sufferer answers the taunt not with defiance but with a deeper reach back — all the way to the womb: "thou art he that took me out of the womb... thou art my God from my mother's belly" (vv. 9–10). Before the enemies, before the mockery, there was a God who received him at birth; he lays claim to that God now. And then the surroundings close in with animal menace — "strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round" (v. 12), mouths gaping "as a ravening and a roaring lion" (v. 13) — the human enemies become a bestiary, the way terror always makes the faces around a sufferer inhuman.
Then the body itself begins to fail, and the description is unbearably specific:
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. — Psalm 22:14–15
Physicians who have read this passage against Roman crucifixion have long noted how exactly it maps the death: the body hung by outstretched arms, its own weight pulling joints apart ("all my bones are out of joint"); dehydration collapsing strength to a dry shard ("my strength is dried up like a potsherd"); the tongue swollen and stuck for thirst ("my tongue cleaveth to my jaws"). And when John records the Savior saying "I thirst" (John 19:28), he tells us plainly why — "that the scripture might be fulfilled." Verse 15's dried-up strength and cleaving tongue is scripture being fulfilled in three syllables from a cross.
And then, at the center of the desolation, the verse the whole Christian world reads with held breath:
For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet. — Psalm 22:16
They pierced my hands and my feet — written by a psalmist a thousand years before the Romans made crucifixion their instrument of death, describing the one wound that defines that death and no other. David never saw a crucifixion; the practice did not exist in his world. Yet here are the pierced extremities, at the heart of a psalm the dying Christ himself began to pray.
Honesty requires a brief word about the Hebrew here, offered plainly and then set aside. The traditional Masoretic vowel-pointing of the word reads ka'ari, "like a lion," which would give "like a lion, my hands and my feet" — a phrase that breaks off without a verb and has puzzled readers for centuries. But an older and better-attested reading, ka'aru, "they pierced" (or "dug," "bored through"), stands behind the ancient Greek Septuagint (ōryxan, "they pierced") translated centuries before Christ, behind the Syriac, and — decisively — behind the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the psalm we possess, from the Dead Sea Scrolls at Nahal Hever, which reads the verb, not the lion. The KJV translators followed the piercing, the Septuagint followed the piercing, and the earliest Hebrew witness follows the piercing. That is where this essay stands, and where the Restoration stands: the wounds are real, and the risen Lord would one day show them. "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself" (Luke 24:39); and to the Nephites, "Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and... feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet" (3 Ne. 11:14). The psalm names the wounds; the Gospels inflict them; the resurrected Christ displays them on two hemispheres.
I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. — Psalm 22:17–18
Two more images, both fulfilled at the foot of the cross. First, "I may tell all my bones" — the sufferer can count his ribs through wasted, stretched-out flesh, while the onlookers "look and stare" (a detail met at Calvary, where the people "stood beholding," Luke 23:35). Then verse 18, which John quotes so exactly it removes all doubt about how the evangelists read this psalm:
They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. — Psalm 22:18
"Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts... Now the coat was without seam... They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots" (John 19:23–24). The Roman soldiers, gambling for a dead man's tunic at the base of a cross, are quoted the words of Psalm 22:18 by the evangelist — with the same distinction the Hebrew makes between the outer garments (divided) and the seamless vesture (gambled for whole). The Hebrew word for the lot is goral, the same lot Israel cast to divide the Promised Land — here casting to divide the clothes off the Savior of it.
Thou hast heard me — the psalm turns (verses 19–22)
For twenty-one verses the psalm has fallen. Now, at the last cry for rescue, everything pivots on a single clause. The prayer is still desperate in verse 19 — "be not thou far from me, O LORD" — and pleading through the beasts one more time: "Deliver my soul from the sword... Save me from the lion's mouth." And then, mid-sentence, without transition, the tense breaks open:
Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns. — Psalm 22:21
"Thou hast heard me." Past tense. The rescue that was begged for through twenty verses is suddenly spoken of as done. This is the hinge of the whole psalm, and it is stunning how quietly it turns — no thunder, no visible deliverance narrated, just the sufferer's sudden certainty that the cry has been received. Whatever it was — an inward assurance, the far edge of the night, the Spirit's answer — the man who began "why hast thou forsaken me?" now says "thou hast heard me," and the psalm will never look back. In the Savior's Passion, this is the far side of the ninth hour: the darkness lifts, and the last word from the cross is no longer "why?" but "It is finished" and "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). The cry of dereliction and the cry of consummation are the two ends of one psalm.
I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. — Psalm 22:22
Here the second movement is born, and the New Testament tells us whose voice sings it. The Epistle to the Hebrews takes verse 22 and places it directly in the mouth of the risen Christ, as proof that he is not ashamed to call redeemed men his family: "For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee" (Heb. 2:11–12). The Sufferer of the first movement becomes the Song-leader of the second — and his first act on the far side of the deliverance is to gather a congregation and teach it the Father's name.
All the ends of the world (verses 23–31)
Now the praise, having gathered a congregation, refuses to stay small. Watch it widen, verse by verse, until it has swallowed the whole earth and all of future time.
First the covenant people: "Ye that fear the LORD, praise him; all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him" (v. 23). And the reason given is the psalm's own testimony reversed — the God who seemed to have forsaken has done no such thing: "For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard" (v. 24). Set that against verse 1. The sufferer felt God's face hidden and his cry unheard; the delivered singer testifies that God never hid his face and did hear. Both are true — the felt forsakenness of the first movement and the vindicated faithfulness of the second — and only a lament that lets you say both can carry a soul from one to the other.
Then the circle opens past Israel entirely:
All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. For the kingdom is the LORD's: and he is the governor among the nations. — Psalm 22:27–28
This is the astonishment of Psalm 22: a psalm that began in one man's isolated agony ends with all the ends of the world turning to God. The suffering was utterly solitary — one worm, one forsaken cry, one body pierced. The praise is utterly universal — every nation, every family of the earth, worshipping. This is the shape of the Atonement itself: the loneliest act in the history of the world, accomplished by One "alone" who "trode the winepress... and of the people there was none with me" (Isa. 63:3; cf. D&C 133:50), becomes the salvation offered to everyone who ever lived. The narrower the cross, the wider the mercy that flows from it.
And it does not stop even at the living. The final verses reach across the grave in both directions — to those already gone down to the dust, and to those not yet born:
A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation. They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this. — Psalm 22:30–31
A seed — a coming generation of the faithful — will serve him, and their whole task will be to "declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born." The gospel is here handed forward across time: those who receive the delivered Sufferer's testimony become its bearers to children not yet in existence. This is the missionary and the family-history impulse in a single verse — a people declaring to a people yet unborn "that he hath done this." And that closing phrase is worth lingering over. "He hath done this" — the deliverance is finished, accomplished, done. Many readers have heard in the Hebrew a near-cousin of the word from the cross: tetelestai, "It is finished" (John 19:30). The psalm that opened with the cry of a man who felt God had let go closes with the announcement of a finished work — done, complete, and to be proclaimed to every generation that will ever be born.
The chapter's architecture
Psalm 22 is built as a diptych — two panels hinged on a single clause — and the hinge is the most important structural fact in the poem. The first panel (vv. 1–21a) is lament: it opens on the cry of forsakenness (v. 1), sinks through mockery (vv. 6–8), animal menace (vv. 12–13), and bodily collapse (vv. 14–15), reaches its nadir at the pierced hands and feet and the gambled garments (vv. 16–18), and ends still pleading for rescue from sword and lion (vv. 19–21a). Then, at verse 21b, the hinge: "thou hast heard me." The second panel (vv. 22–31) is thanksgiving, and its defining motion is expansion — the praise widens in concentric rings from "my brethren" (v. 22) to "the seed of Jacob" (v. 23) to "the great congregation" (v. 25) to "all the ends of the world" and "all the kindreds of the nations" (v. 27), and finally past the living entirely to "a people that shall be born" (v. 31). Sorrow contracts to a point; praise radiates to a horizon.
The two halves are bound by a deliberate reversal. The lament's bitterest complaint is that God has "hid his face" and not heard (implied through vv. 1–2); the thanksgiving's central testimony is the exact denial of that — "neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard" (v. 24). What the sufferer felt in the darkness, the delivered man corrects in the light — not by pretending the darkness was unreal, but by testifying that beneath the felt absence, God was hearing all along. That reversal is the theological engine of every faithful lament: the feeling was true, and it was not the final truth.
The psalm's poetry runs on Hebrew parallelism — the doubling of a thought across two matched lines that is the basic building block of biblical verse. Sometimes it intensifies ("all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax," v. 14); sometimes it distributes a single scene across two panels, as in verse 18, where "garments" parted and "vesture" gambled are one act seen twice — the very doubling John's Gospel honors when it distinguishes the divided outer clothes from the seamless coat left whole. I will not force a chiasm onto this psalm; its architecture is not a mirror but an arc — a plunge to the pierced center and a long, widening ascent out of it into universal praise. The shape is the message: this is what the Atonement looks like drawn as a line — down to the nails, and out to the ends of the world.
The old books beside the chapter
There is one ancient parallel to this psalm too striking to leave unmentioned. In the Wisdom of Solomon — composed in Greek among Alexandrian Jews in the century or two before Christ, and printed in the King James Apocrypha — the ungodly are imagined plotting against a righteous man, and the words they use are so close to Psalm 22:7–8 that they read like a commentary on it in advance.
How this chapter changes the reader
Begin where the psalm begins, because most of us have stood there: in a darkness where God feels far off and the cry "why?" is the only prayer we can manage. Psalm 22 hands us permission and a pattern. Permission — because the holiest sufferer who ever lived prayed its opening line, and a cry of dereliction addressed to "my God" is not the failure of faith but one of its bravest forms. And a pattern — because the psalm does not leave you at verse 1. It moves. It remembers the fathers who trusted; it keeps addressing God through the collapse; and it arrives, without denying a single thing it felt, at "thou hast heard me." If you are in the first movement right now, the psalm's testimony is that the hinge is real, that the felt-forsakenness is not the last word, and that the God who seemed to hide his face "hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted."
But the deepest change this psalm works is to take our private darkness and show us it was inhabited before us. Every wound named here — the forsakenness, the scorn, the pierced hands, the thirst, the counted bones — Christ took into himself, "that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people" (Alma 7:12). When you pray the first verse of Psalm 22 in your own extremity, you are not alone in it; you are standing inside a prayer the Savior prayed first, from the cross, on your behalf. And the psalm insists on where that prayer ends: not in the dust of death but in a congregation of brethren, and past them the ends of the world, and past even the living a people not yet born — all of them declaring, across every generation there will ever be, "that he hath done this." The loneliest cry in scripture opens, before it is finished, into the widest praise in scripture. That is the gospel's own shape, and Psalm 22 is its first and fullest song.