The Cry That Became a Song

Eli Eli lama azavtani.

My God my God why have you forsaken me.

Four words in Hebrew before any explanation arrives. Before the historical context, before the literary analysis, before the thousand years of commentary that will follow them. The words stand alone at the beginning of the psalm the way a cry stands alone in an empty room — preceding explanation, preceding resolution, preceding everything except the experience that produced them.

They are the most quoted words from the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament.

They are spoken from a cross in Aramaic — Eloi Eloi lema sabachthani — by a man dying in public, in the middle of the afternoon, while soldiers divide his garments below him and bystanders mock him and the ones who loved him watch from a distance.

But before they are spoken from the cross they are written in the psalm. And the psalm does not end where the opening cry leaves you. The psalm goes somewhere that the opening cry makes it almost impossible to expect.

The movement from the first word to the last word of Psalm 22 is the most important journey in the Psalter.

It begins with forsaken.

It ends with proclaimed.

What happens between those two words is the whole argument.

The Structure of the Psalm and Why It Matters

Psalm 22 is organized in a structure that the reader needs to hold from the beginning or the ending will seem like a non-sequitur rather than a destination.

The psalm moves in three movements.

The first movement — verses 1 through 21 — is the lament. The cry of desolation, the description of the suffering, the specific physical details of the experience, the prayer for rescue that has not yet been answered. This movement ends with a petition: do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.

The pivot arrives in verse 21 without announcement: save me from the mouth of the lion; from the horns of the wild oxen you have answered me. The answered me is the hinge. The petition has been received. Something has happened between the asking and the next line — not described, not explained, simply recorded in the past tense of completed action. You have answered.

The second movement — verses 22 through 31 — is the praise. The declaration of what will be proclaimed and to whom and across what distance. The movement from the individual sufferer to the community of the faithful to the nations to the generations not yet born.

The psalm that began with one person crying my God my God why have you forsaken me ends with the declaration that a people not yet born will be told what the LORD has done.

The cry becomes the proclamation. The desolation becomes the declaration. The forsaken becomes the announced.

The Theology of the First Word

Azavtani — you have forsaken me, you have left me, you have abandoned me.

The word is one of the strongest in the Hebrew vocabulary of abandonment. It is used for a husband forsaking a wife, for a parent forsaking a child, for God forsaking Israel in judgment. It is not the mild absence of someone temporarily away. It is the experienced reality of a relationship that was present and is now gone — the space where the presence was now occupied by absence.

The cry does not say: I feel forsaken. It says: you have forsaken me. The accusation is addressed directly to God — the Eli, my God, the possessive that maintains the relationship even in the accusation of its rupture. My God who has forsaken me.

The possessive is the theological precision that distinguishes this cry from despair. The person who has given up on the relationship entirely does not say my God. They say there is no God, or God does not care, or the relationship was an illusion. The cry of Psalm 22 maintains the relationship in the form of the accusation — the my that holds on even while the azavtani names the abandonment.

This is the structure Job used. Though he slay me yet will I hope in him. The maintaining of the relationship through the honest speech about what the relationship has cost — the refusal to dissolve the bond by softening the accusation, and the refusal to dissolve the bond by making the accusation terminal.

The first four words of Psalm 22 are a prayer.

Not a comfortable one. Not the kind that gets embroidered on church cushions. But the kind that Job's verdict commended — the honest speech addressed to the face of the one who permitted the suffering, in the language of the one who is suffering it.

The Contrast That Deepens the Cry

"Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises. In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame." — Psalm 22:3-5

The contrast arrives immediately after the cry.

You are holy. The ancestors trusted and were delivered. They cried and were saved. They trusted and were not put to shame.

The contrast is not a correction of the cry. It is the deepening of it. The tradition of divine faithfulness — the exodus, the wilderness, the deliverances that preceded this moment — is the very thing that makes the present silence so devastating. The God who delivered the ancestors is the same God who is not answering now. The pattern that should apply does not appear to be applying. The trust that was not put to shame before is being tested by a silence that looks exactly like shame.

"But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads: 'He trusts in the LORD; let the LORD rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.'" — Psalm 22:6-8

The mockers use the trust as the basis of the mockery.

He trusted in the LORD. Let the LORD rescue him then. The trust that should produce deliverance has produced public humiliation — the spectacle of a man whose God has not come, whose confidence in the relationship has made him the subject of contempt rather than protection.

The psalm is recording the specific suffering of a person whose faithfulness has become the evidence of their foolishness in the eyes of the watching world. The trust that the tradition says produces deliverance is producing exactly the opposite — and the watching world is pointing at the gap between the promise and the reality.

The Physical Details and What They Do

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death." — Psalm 22:14-15

The physical description in the middle section of the psalm is the most specific in the Psalter and the most difficult to read as pure metaphor.

Poured out like water — the body as liquid, as something that cannot hold its own shape, as the dispersal of substance into formlessness. Bones out of joint — the structural integrity of the body compromised, the skeleton that should hold everything together becoming unreliable. Heart turned to wax — the interior dissolving under heat. Mouth dried to potsherd — the throat like broken pottery, the tongue adhering to the palate from dehydration.

These are the physiological details of extreme physical suffering — crucifixion, specifically, though the word crucifixion does not appear because the practice had not yet been named when the psalm was written. The symptomology matches: the joint dislocation from hanging by the arms, the dehydration, the cardiac distress that produces the sensation of the heart melting, the specific thirst that execution by suspension produces.

The New Testament reads these verses as prophetic description — the psalm written a thousand years before the cross, describing what the cross would produce in the body of the one dying on it. Whether the original author intended prophecy or was simply describing the extremity of his own suffering in language that happened to be adequate to a later extremity — the text does not say.

What the physical details do in the psalm is prevent the spiritualization of the suffering.

The cry is not only theological. It is physical. The body is poured out. The bones are displaced. The mouth is dry. The suffering is happening to a specific physical person in specific physical ways, and the psalm insists on the physicality before it moves to the declaration that the physical suffering does not have the final word.

The Dividing of the Garments

"They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment." — Psalm 22:18

The detail is specific and strange in the context of a lament psalm.

The division of clothing happens when the person wearing it is no longer in a position to prevent it — when the person has been reduced to an object whose possessions can be distributed among the living because the person is effectively already counted among the dead. It is the stripping of the last marker of individual identity, the final reduction of the person to a body from which things can be taken.

The four Gospel accounts of the crucifixion all record this detail — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each noting that the soldiers divided Jesus' garments and cast lots. John's account quotes Psalm 22:18 directly, identifying the detail as the fulfillment of the psalm.

The psalm written by David in whatever extremity produced it — and the historical circumstance is not specified in the text — becomes the lens through which the Gospel writers interpret what they are witnessing. The older suffering illuminates the later one. The language found adequate for one extremity is found adequate for another, a thousand years removed.

This is what the Psalms do — not only record specific historical suffering but find the language for suffering that is deep enough to be adequate to multiple extremities across the span of human history. The words that named David's experience of desolation named the desolation on the cross. The words that named the cross will name experiences of desolation that have not yet arrived.

The psalm is the portable language of the forsaken.

The Pivot and What Produces It

"For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help." — Psalm 22:24

The pivot in verse 21 — you have answered me — is explained in verse 24.

The answer is not the removal of the suffering. The answer is the listening. The cry that felt like it was going into silence was being received. The face that seemed hidden was turned toward the afflicted one. The desolation that produced why have you forsaken me was not, in fact, abandonment — it was the experience of abandonment in the middle of a presence that had not departed.

The psalm does not explain the gap between the presence and the experience of presence. It does not account for why the God who was listening did not make the listening audible during the suffering. It simply declares, from the other side of the pivot, that the listening was happening while the desolation was being spoken.

This is not a comfortable theology. It does not resolve the problem of divine silence during suffering. It names the silence and then names what was present in the silence — not the explanation, but the listening. The face not hidden. The cry received.

The person who cried azavtani was not forsaken in the way the cry experienced the forsaking.

The distance between the experience of forsaking and the reality of listening is the space the psalm inhabits. It does not collapse the distance. It holds it — the cry and the answer, the desolation and the declaration, the forsaken and the proclaimed — simultaneously, in the same poem, without resolving the tension into a comfortable either/or.

The Expansion That the Ending Produces

"All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him." — Psalm 22:27

The psalm that began with one voice crying in desolation ends with the ends of the earth.

The movement from the individual to the universal is not gradual. It is sudden and total — from the single person whose bones are out of joint and whose mouth is dry to the families of the nations, to the ends of the earth, to the generations not yet born.

"They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: he has done it." — Psalm 22:31

The last word of the psalm in Hebrew is asah — he has done it, he did it, it is done. The same word as the seventh day of creation when God finished the work. The completion word. The word that closes the account.

A people not yet born will be told: he has done it.

What will they be told he did? The psalm does not specify. It points to the doing without naming the deed — leaving the content of the proclamation to be filled in by the history that follows the psalm, by the events that the psalm's language will be found adequate to describe, by the experiences in which the cry of desolation and the declaration of completion will be heard together in the same voice from the same throat on the same afternoon.

He has done it.

The cry of the forsaken and the completion of the work.

The same psalm. The same voice. The same movement from azavtani to asah.

What the Researchers Found About Lament

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann spent decades studying the function of lament psalms in the Hebrew tradition and identified what he called the costly loss of lament in contemporary religious practice — the systematic replacement of the lament form with praise forms, the evacuation of honest grief and accusation from religious speech in favor of the consistently positive, the therapeutically manageable, the theologically safe.

His finding was that the loss of lament produces two specific pathologies.

The first: the sufferer who cannot find the language for their experience in the religious tradition available to them concludes that the tradition has no room for their experience — and either performs a faith they do not have or abandons the tradition entirely.

The second: the community that has evacuated lament from its speech has lost the capacity for genuine praise — because genuine praise, the kind that the second half of Psalm 22 embodies, is only possible from the other side of genuine lament. The praise that has not come through the desolation is the praise of people who have not yet been to the place the psalm begins. It is thinner, less costly, less true than the praise spoken by someone whose mouth was once dried like a potsherd and whose bones were once out of joint.

Brueggemann's prescription: recover the lament. Return the honest cry to the center of the religious practice. Make room for azavtani — not as the opposite of faith but as the form faith takes when the silence has lasted long enough that the honest speech is the only speech available.

Psalm 22 is the permission.

The God who listened to the cry and declared it received — who commended Job's honest speech and answered Hezekiah's tears and heard Hannah's silent prayer — is the God who can receive my God my God why have you forsaken me without being diminished by it.

The cry is a prayer.

The prayer is received.

The receiving produces the pivot.

The pivot produces the proclamation.

The Line This Whole Story Is Building Toward

The cry of desolation is not the opposite of faith. It is the form faith takes when the silence has been total and the suffering has been physical and the mockers have used the trust as evidence of the foolishness of trusting. The psalm that begins with forsaken ends with proclaimed not because the desolation was false but because the listening that was present in the silence became audible on the other side of it — and the person who cried into the silence found, when the pivot came, that the cry had been received the whole time.

You have said azavtani.

Not in Hebrew probably. Not with the formal structure of a psalm. But in the specific form your desolation takes — the silence that has lasted too long, the prayer that has gone into what feels like nothing, the trust that the watching world is using as evidence of your foolishness, the body that is expressing what the theology cannot yet say.

The psalm gives you the language.

My God my God why have you forsaken me.

Say it. It is a prayer. The most honest prayer available in the middle of the desolation. The one that holds the relationship in the form of the accusation, that maintains the my while speaking the azavtani, that refuses to resolve the tension by either performing a faith you do not have or abandoning the relationship that the suffering has made feel absent.

He has not hidden his face.

He has listened to the cry for help.

A people not yet born will be told what he did.

Asah.

He has done it.

Psalm 23 follows Psalm 22 in the Psalter — and the sequence is not accidental. The person who has been through the valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 22 is the person who can say with genuine knowledge in Psalm 23: even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil. The next article is Psalm 23 — the most memorized passage in the Old Testament, the one spoken at more deathbeds than any other, the one whose familiarity has buried what it is actually saying. The opening will be a declarative statement. The statement that names what is wrong with how we hear this psalm before we read it properly.