Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Psalm 22:16
They pierced my hands and my feet, or like a lion. One letter, and it is the wrong length in some copies.
Psalm 22:16, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine two letters in your alphabet that differ only by how far the stroke comes down. A tired copyist in poor light makes one slightly short, and four hundred years later two communities are arguing about what the sentence says. Nobody had to be dishonest for that to happen.
Because this is the most argued single word between Jewish and Christian readers of the Psalms, the evidence is genuinely split, and both sides routinely overstate what they have. If you learn one textual problem in the Old Testament, learn this one.
For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.
Almost every Christian English version reads pierced. Jewish publications read like a lion. The NIV footnotes both. The King James reads pierced without a note.
כָּאֲרוּ / כָּאֲרִי ka'aru / ka'ari · H3738 / H738
The Masoretic Text reads ka'ari, like a lion, which leaves the line with no verb. The Septuagint, the Peshitta, and Jerome's earlier Gallican Psalter (the version behind the standard Vulgate text) all read a verb meaning dug or pierced. A fragment from Nahal Hever, 5/6HevPs, dated to roughly the middle of the first century, has the word ending in a vav rather than a yod, which makes it a third-person plural verb.
The difference is a vav against a yod, two letters distinguished mainly by length. This is not a translation problem at all. It is a copying problem, and English can only report the outcome.
When two communities read the same verse in opposite directions, find out whether the disagreement is about meaning or about letters. Here it is letters, which makes it checkable rather than merely arguable.
The case for pierced: three ancient versions, the Nahal Hever fragment, the minority Masoretic notes, and the fact that the Masoretic reading leaves the clause without a verb. The case against: Nahal Hever is not Qumran and is later than the Qumran material, the fragment is faded and has been read both ways, the Targum supports the lion reading, and Aquila, Symmachus, and Jerome's later translation direct from the Hebrew (his Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, a different edition from the Gallican Psalter cited above) all render the hands and feet as bound rather than pierced. Anyone who tells you this is closed has not read the other side.
- 5/6HevPs (Nahal Hever) Fragment 11, published by Peter Flint in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, reads the word ending in vav
- Septuagint oruxan, they dug; Peshitta and Vulgate agree
- Masoretic ka'ari, like a lion, with ka'aru in a minority of manuscripts and in the Masoretic notes
- Kristin Swenson argues for the lion reading and disputes the legibility of the fragment
- Aquila, Symmachus and Jerome read the hands and feet as bound; the Targum supports the lion reading
