Five-minute study · Day 229 · Psalms 22
Psalm 22:1
A word worth stopping on: forsaken עָזַב azav
'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?' The verb 'forsaken' is azav. It means to leave, to abandon, to let go of, to desert. Jesus quoted this verse from the cross in Aramaic: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani' (Matthew 27:46). The moment is raw. The Son of God, dying, uses the words of a psalm written a thousand years earlier to express what is happening to him. Azav is abandonment language. It describes a person left behind by someone who was supposed to stay.
Word study: forsaken
- Hebrew
- עָזַב
- Pronounced
- azav
- Strong's
- H5800
- Definition
- To leave, to forsake, to abandon, to desert, to let go of. Describes the act of leaving someone or something behind, often with the implication of broken relationship, neglect, or deliberate departure. Used for both human and divine abandonment.
Azav appears over 200 times in the Hebrew Bible. BDB defines it as 'to leave, to forsake, to loose.' The semantic range is wide: leaving a place (Genesis 2:24, a man leaves his father and mother), abandoning a person (Psalm 27:10, 'When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up'), forsaking God (Jeremiah 2:13, 'my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters'), and God forsaking his people (the question that Psalm 22:1 asks and that the prophets wrestle with throughout the exile).
Goldingay's commentary on Psalms 1-41 in the Baker Commentary on the Old Testament identifies Psalm 22 as a psalm of individual lament that moves from devastating complaint (vv. 1-21) to exuberant praise (vv. 22-31). The structure is dramatic. The first half is all darkness: forsaking, mockery, encirclement by enemies, physical suffering described in visceral detail (dried out like a potsherd, bones out of joint, heart melted like wax). The second half is all light: praise in the congregation, the afflicted shall eat and be satisfied, all the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the LORD. The psalm does not explain how the speaker moves from one to the other. The transition happens in verse 21b ('thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns'), and the reader is given no process, no reasoning, no therapy. The deliverance simply arrives.
Jesus' quotation of Psalm 22:1 on the cross (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34) is one of the most debated moments in the Gospels. The question is whether Jesus was expressing genuine abandonment or invoking the entire psalm, including its resolution in praise. Goldingay argues that in Jewish practice, quoting the opening line of a psalm was a way of invoking the whole composition. A first-century hearer who heard 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me' would have known that Psalm 22 ends in triumph. The opening line was an index to the entire text.
This does not eliminate the anguish. The psalm begins where it begins: in abandonment. Azav in verse 1 is unqualified. The psalmist feels forsaken. The verb is in the perfect tense (azavtani, 'you have forsaken me'), indicating a completed action experienced as present reality. The feeling is not hypothetical. The theological resolution in verses 22-31 does not cancel the pain of verses 1-21. Both are true. The psalm holds abandonment and deliverance in the same breath, which is exactly what the cross does.
The phrase 'the words of my roaring' (divrei sha'agati) uses sha'agah, the roar of a lion (Amos 3:8, 'The lion hath roared'), applied to human cries of distress. The psalmist's prayer is a roar. The combination of azav (abandonment) and sha'agah (roaring) in the same verse creates an image of someone screaming into silence. God is far. The cry is loud. The distance between the two defines the psalm's opening landscape.
Historical context · Psalm attributed to David (superscription); Jesus' crucifixion approximately AD 30-33
The Cry from the Cross and the Psalm Behind It
Psalm 22 is attributed to David in its superscription ('A Psalm of David'). The historical setting of the original composition is unknown. David experienced periods of persecution (under Saul, during Absalom's rebellion) that could have generated the psalm's imagery of encirclement by enemies and near-death suffering. Goldingay notes that the psalm's language is general enough to apply to any severe crisis of faith where the sufferer feels abandoned by God.
The psalm's imagery has been extensively connected to the crucifixion narrative. Psalm 22:18 ('They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture') is cited in all four Gospels (Matthew 27:35, Mark 15:24, Luke 23:34, John 19:24). Psalm 22:7-8 ('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') parallels the mockery at the cross (Matthew 27:39-43). Psalm 22:15 ('my tongue cleaveth to my jaws') parallels Jesus' 'I thirst' (John 19:28). The connections are dense enough that the early church read Psalm 22 as a prophetic description of the crucifixion.
Crucifixion was a Roman execution method reserved for slaves, rebels, and the lowest social classes. Cicero called it 'the most cruel and disgusting penalty' (In Verrem 2.5.165). The victim was typically scourged, forced to carry the crossbeam (patibulum) to the execution site, and affixed to the cross by nails or ropes. Death came slowly, often over days, from a combination of blood loss, exposure, exhaustion, and asphyxiation as the body's weight compressed the lungs. The practice was designed to be both lethal and publicly degrading, a spectacle of shame.
Goldingay observes that Psalm 22's movement from lament to praise follows a pattern found in other psalms of individual lament (Psalms 3, 13, 31, 69). The pattern is: address to God, complaint, petition, expression of trust, vow of praise, and praise itself. Psalm 22 stretches the complaint section to extreme length (21 verses) before the resolution arrives, making the praise in verses 22-31 feel like a pressure release. The psalm's structure mirrors the experience it describes: the suffering is sustained, unrelieved, and seemingly permanent, until it is suddenly, inexplicably over.
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain fragments of Psalm 22 (4QPsf, dating to approximately the first century BC), confirming that the text was in circulation well before the time of Jesus. The psalm was part of the worship repertoire at Qumran and in the broader Jewish community. When Jesus quoted it from the cross, he was drawing on a text his hearers would have recognized, a shared cultural and liturgical inheritance pressed into service at the moment of greatest extremity.
For reflection
Psalm 22 begins with a scream and ends with a feast. Verse 1: 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' Verse 26: 'The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the LORD that seek him.' The psalm does not explain how the speaker gets from abandonment to banquet. The transition is abrupt. If you are in the early verses right now, feeling the silence, feeling the distance, the psalm asks you to hold on to the fact that verse 26 exists. You do not have to understand the mechanism. You need to know the psalm keeps going. Write down which verse of Psalm 22 you are living in today. Be honest about the number.
Azav: to leave behind, to abandon. Jesus used this word to describe what was happening to him on the cross. The word is unflinching.
Sources: BDB; Goldingay, 'Psalms 1-41' (Baker Commentary); Matthew 27:46; Dead Sea Scrolls 4QPsf; Cicero, In Verrem