Where the manuscripts differ · Psalm 22:16
"They pierced my hands and my feet" — or "like a lion"?
One Hebrew letter separates "they pierced" from "like a lion." The Greek Old Testament read "pierced" centuries before the crucifixion, and a scroll fragment supports it — but the medieval Hebrew reads "lion," and the case deserves to be heard at full strength.
Psalm 22 is the psalm Jesus quoted from the cross. It opens with the words he cried — my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me — and it describes mockers wagging their heads, bones out of joint, a tongue cleaving to the jaws, and enemies casting lots for the sufferer's clothes. All of that is undisputed in every manuscript.
Verse 16 is the disputed one, and it is disputed over a single letter. The Hebrew word in question is either *ka'aru*, which is taken to mean "they dug" or "they pierced," or *ka'ari*, which means "like a lion." The two words differ only in the final letter: *vav* and *yod* are the same basic stroke, one longer than the other. In manuscripts from around the time of Christ they are genuinely hard to tell apart, and scribes said so.
Because this is a messianic text, the temptation to press it is strong, and the way to resist that temptation is to give the other reading its best hearing. That is what follows — both readings at full strength, and then a plain statement of how little rides on the outcome.
What the manuscripts actually show
| Witness | Date | What it reads here |
|---|---|---|
| The Greek Old Testament (Septuagint) | translated in the last centuries BC | "They dug/pierced my hands and my feet" — a verb. This is Jewish translators reading a Hebrew text as "pierced" long before there was any Christian reason to. |
| A Psalms fragment from Nahal Hever | about the early 2nd century AD | A form of the word ending in the letter that gives the verbal reading rather than "lion" — the earliest Hebrew evidence we have at this point. |
| The Syriac and Latin versions | 2nd century AD onward | "Pierced" — ancient translations agreeing with the Greek. |
| The Masoretic Hebrew text | complete manuscripts from about the 9th–11th centuries AD | *ka'ari*, "like a lion" — giving "like a lion, my hands and my feet," a phrase with no verb in it. |
The case each way
That it belongs in the text
The Greek translation reads a verb, and it was made by Jewish scholars centuries before the crucifixion. Whatever Hebrew text lay in front of them, they did not see "lion" here, and they had no motive to see anything else.
The earliest surviving Hebrew evidence, the Nahal Hever fragment, supports the verbal form rather than "lion."
The Syriac and Latin translations independently read "pierced," which means the reading was not confined to one stream.
The Masoretic phrase is genuinely difficult Hebrew. "Like a lion, my hands and my feet" has no verb at all, and readers have had to supply one — "they are like a lion at my hands and feet" — which is a translator's repair, not a translation.
The letters *vav* and *yod* differ mainly in length of the downstroke, and confusion between them is one of the best-documented copying difficulties in Hebrew manuscripts.
That it came later
The Masoretic Text is the Hebrew Bible preserved by scribes of extraordinary discipline, and it reads "lion." That is the starting point, not an afterthought.
The psalm is full of animals. Bulls of Bashan encircle the sufferer in verse 12, dogs surround him in verse 16 itself, and verse 21 prays to be saved from the lion's mouth and the horns of the wild oxen. "Like a lion" is not an odd intrusion into this psalm; it is exactly the register the psalm is written in, and it pairs with the dogs in the same verse.
The proposed verb form is itself grammatically awkward. If the word means "they pierced," its formation is unusual, and that difficulty has to be weighed alongside the difficulty of the "lion" reading rather than quietly set aside.
The Greek translators of the Psalms sometimes rendered loosely, and a translation is evidence for what a translator understood, not always for the exact letters in front of them.
The scroll fragment is small and its reading has been argued over, as fragmentary evidence usually is.