Five-minute study · Day 290 · Matthew 27
Matthew 27:46
A word worth stopping on: Eli אֵלִי eli
'And 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?' Matthew preserves the Hebrew form: Eli. Mark's parallel (15:34) uses the Aramaic: Eloi. Both are first-person possessive: 'my God.' The bystanders heard Eli and confused it with Eliyyahu, the prophet Elijah. 'This man calleth for Elias' (27:47). The confusion was phonetic. Eli (my God) and Eliyyahu (my God is Yahweh) begin with the same syllable. In the noise of Golgotha, in the distortion of a voice crying out from a cross, the bystanders heard the wrong name. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22:1. The bystanders thought he was calling for a prophet. The distance between those two hearings is the distance between understanding what was happening on that hill and missing it entirely.
Word study: Eli
- Hebrew
- אֵלִי
- Pronounced
- eli
- Strong's
- G2241
- Definition
- My God. The first-person possessive form of El (God). A direct, personal address to God. The form preserved in Matthew's Greek transliteration of the Hebrew cry from the cross.
Eli appears in Matthew 27:46 as a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew first-person possessive 'my God' (from El, God, plus the possessive suffix -i, my). Metzger's textual commentary on the Greek New Testament discusses the variant readings: Matthew preserves eli eli (Hebrew), while Mark 15:34 has eloi eloi (Aramaic). The difference reflects the bilingual environment of first-century Palestine, where Hebrew and Aramaic coexisted. Both forms address God in the first person. Both come from Psalm 22:1.
France's commentary on Matthew identifies the cry as the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm that moves from abandonment (22:1-21) to vindication (22:22-31). The psalm begins with 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' and ends with 'He hath done this' (22:31), a declaration of completed work. France notes that first-century Jewish practice often cited a psalm by its opening line, with the expectation that the listener would know the entire psalm. When Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1, he may have been invoking the whole psalm, including its resolution. The cry of forsakenness and the declaration of completed salvation belong to the same text.
The bystanders' confusion between Eli and Eliyyahu is documented in both Matthew and Mark. France observes that the mishearing is plausible on phonetic grounds: eli and the first syllables of eliyyahu are identical. The crowd at Golgotha included people at various distances from the cross, and a loud cry from a man struggling to breathe would have been partially distorted. The popular expectation that Elijah would return (Malachi 4:5) made the mishearing culturally natural. Some bystanders waited to see if Elijah would come to rescue Jesus (27:49). The phonetic accident created a theological irony: the crowd expected a prophet to intervene, while the man on the cross was addressing God directly.
Metzger notes that the preservation of the Semitic words in both Matthew and Mark is significant. The evangelists could have translated the cry into Greek without retaining the original. They kept the transliteration because the sound mattered. Eli. The raw vocalization of a man in extremis calling out to his God in his mother tongue. The Greek translation follows ('that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'), but the transliteration came first. France suggests that the preservation of the original sound serves a narrative function: the reader hears what the bystanders heard and understands both the correct meaning and the mishearing simultaneously.
Historical context · The crucifixion of Jesus approximately AD 30 or 33; Golgotha (the Place of a Skull) outside Jerusalem's walls; the ninth hour (approximately 3:00 p.m.); the multilingual environment of first-century Jerusalem during Passover
The Ninth Hour on Golgotha: Languages, Psalms, and Mishearing
The ninth hour (the hora enate of Matthew 27:46) corresponded to approximately 3:00 in the afternoon. Jesus had been on the cross since approximately 9:00 a.m. (Mark 15:25, 'the third hour'). Matthew records that darkness covered the land from the sixth hour to the ninth hour (27:45), three hours of midday darkness preceding the cry. The darkness, the time of day, and the Passover context (Jesus was crucified on Passover) layer the scene with theological resonance: the Passover lamb was slaughtered in the Temple at the ninth hour.
Golgotha (Aramaic gulgolta, 'skull'; Latin calvaria, from which 'Calvary' derives) was outside Jerusalem's walls (Hebrews 13:12). Its exact location is debated: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (supported by the earliest Christian tradition, dating to the fourth-century identification by Helena, mother of Constantine) and Gordon's Calvary (a nineteenth-century proposal) are the primary candidates. Archaeological evidence, including first-century tombs found near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, supports the traditional site.
Jerusalem during Passover was multilingual. Josephus estimates that the city's population swelled dramatically during the major festivals (War 6.9.3 gives varying and likely exaggerated numbers). Pilgrims came from across the Jewish diaspora. Hebrew was the language of liturgy and scripture. Aramaic was the common spoken language of Palestine. Greek was the administrative and commercial language of the eastern Roman Empire. Latin was the language of the Roman military. The titulus on the cross was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (John 19:20). In this linguistic environment, a cry in Hebrew (Eli) could easily be misheard by Aramaic speakers familiar with the name Eliyyahu.
France notes that Psalm 22, which Jesus quoted, was well known in first-century Judaism. The psalm describes suffering in graphic detail (pierced hands and feet, 22:16; garments divided by lots, 22:18; bones out of joint, 22:14) that early Christians read as prophetic descriptions of crucifixion. The psalm's movement from lament to praise (22:22-31) provides a framework for understanding the cry as both genuine anguish and theological declaration. Metzger observes that the decision to preserve the Semitic words in the Greek text of both Gospels was a deliberate editorial choice. The early church transmitted the sound of the cry alongside its meaning, ensuring that readers would hear eli before they understood it.
For reflection
Eli. My God. Two syllables in Hebrew, spoken from a cross at three in the afternoon, after three hours of darkness. Matthew kept the sound in the text. He did not just translate. He preserved the raw vocalization: Eli, Eli. The bystanders heard Elijah. They were wrong. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, a psalm that begins with forsakenness and ends with 'He has done this.' France notes that quoting the first line of a psalm invoked the entire psalm. The cry includes the resolution. The crowd, standing at a distance, heard the wrong name and waited for a rescue that was already happening in a form they could not recognize. When you hear your own name being called in the crisis, pause. Make sure you are hearing the right word. The distance between Eli and Eliyyahu is the distance between prayer and misunderstanding. And the psalm that starts with 'Why?' ends with 'Done.'
Eli: my God. Hebrew first-person possessive of El. Metzger discusses the Matthew (Hebrew eli) vs. Mark (Aramaic eloi) variants. France traces the Psalm 22 quotation and its movement from lament (22:1) to completed salvation (22:31). The bystanders' phonetic confusion (Eli/Eliyyahu) produced theological irony.
Sources: Metzger; France, 'Matthew'