This was not a rare or obscure practice. It was the standard mode of rabbinical discourse. In a world where Jewish boys were expected to commit vast portions of Scripture to memory by age twelve (where the Torah, Prophets, and Writings circulated without chapter and verse numbers) a rabbi could not say “Turn to Psalm 22, verse 7.” Instead, he would quote the opening line, and the congregation would mentally “unroll the scroll” to its conclusion. 

Yeshua Himself employed this technique throughout His ministry. When children shouted Hoshia’na in the Temple and the chief priests objected, He responded by quoting only:

“From the lips of children and infants, you have ordained praise.”
-Psalm 8:2

But the very next phrase in that Psalm says this praise comes:

“because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.”

The leaders knew the whole line. Yeshua did not need to spell it out. His hint implied that the children’s praise was right, and that those opposing it aligned themselves with God’s enemies. 

So when Yeshua cried out Eli, Eli, lama azavtani from the cross, He was not uttering a stand-alone statement of despair. He was using remez to invoke the entire arc of [Psalm 22]; from its opening cry of anguish to its triumphant conclusion of worldwide worship. He was pointing every literate Jew within earshot to a text they knew by heart. 

The Architecture of Psalm 22: From Lament to Universal Praise 

To grasp what Yeshua was invoking, we must read the Psalm as a whole; precisely as His audience would have done in their heads. [Psalm 22] is not a poem of unrelieved suffering. It is a carefully structured composition that moves through three distinct phases: lament (verses 1–21), deliverance (verses 22–26), and universal dominion (verses 27–31).
The lament section opens with the very words Yeshua quoted and then details sufferings that correspond to the crucifixion with a specificity that has startled interpreters for two millennia: 

“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death. For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet. I can count all my bones; they stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.”
-Psalm 22:14–18

Every detail finds its fulfillment in the Gospel passion narratives: the piercing of hands and feet at crucifixion [John 19:37; Zechariah 12:10], the dividing of garments and casting of lots [Matthew 27:35; John 19:23–24], the mocking of bystanders who shook their heads [Matthew 27:39; Mark 15:29], the taunt “He trusts in the Lord; let Him deliver him” [Matthew 27:43], and the agonizing thirst [John 19:28]. 

But the Psalm does not end in the dust of death. Its pivot comes at verse 21b–22, where the speaker transitions abruptly from petition to praise:

“You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen! I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.”
-Psalm 22:21b–22

The author of Hebrews explicitly identifies Yeshua as the speaker of this verse: “For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, ‘I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise’” [Hebrews 2:11–12].

And the Psalm’s climax is nothing less than a vision of worldwide salvation, the universal dominion section: 

“All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. . . . Posterity shall serve him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation, and they shall proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it.”
-Psalm 22:27–28, 30–31

The final Hebrew phrase of the Psalm ki asah (כִּי עָשָׂה) means “for He has done it” or “it is accomplished.” This stands in profound parallel with Yeshua’s final cry from the cross as recorded by the Apostle Yochanan: Tetelestai “It is finished” [John 19:30]. The two cries are bookends of the same psalm. Matthew and Mark preserve the opening line; Yochanan preserves the echo of its closing declaration. Yeshua began the Psalm on the cross and completed it.

The Witness of the Early Church: Ante-Nicene Testimony 

The earliest post-apostolic interpreters of the faith understood Yeshua’s cry exactly this way; not as evidence of divine abandonment, but as a deliberate prophetic invocation of the entire Psalm. This reading was not a later theological refinement; it was the original understanding of the church before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. 

Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 AD), in his Dialogue with Trypho (the oldest surviving literary dialogue between a Jew and a Christian) devoted chapters 97–106 to an exhaustive exposition of [Psalm 22] as a prophecy of the Messiah’s suffering, death, and resurrection. Justin argued that Yeshua “prophetically declared His glory” through the words of the Psalm, and that the cry from the cross was not evidence of ignorance but of deliberate invocation:

“Lest any one should say, He did not know then that He had to suffer, He adds immediately in the Psalm: ‘And it is not for want of understanding in me’” -Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Chap. 99–102

 Justin read the Psalm’s conclusion (the gathering of all nations to worship) as foretelling the resurrection and the expansion of the faith to the Gentile world. 

Tertullian (c. 160–220 AD), writing in his Against Marcion, Book III, declared:

“If you require still further prediction of the Lord’s cross, the twenty-first Psalm is sufficiently able to afford it to you, containing as it does the entire passion of Christ, who was even then prophetically declaring His glory” 
-Tertullian, Against Marcion III.19

For Tertullian, the Psalm was not a text of abandonment but a text of glory declared through suffering; the entire passion mapped in advance by the Spirit of prophecy. 

Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–202 AD), in Against Heresies, insisted on the real incarnation and real suffering of the Messiah as essential to human redemption:

“For if He did not receive the substance of flesh from a human being, He neither was made man nor the Son of man; and if He was not made what we were, He did no great thing in what He suffered and endured”
-Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.22

For Irenaeus, the suffering on the cross was genuine, but the Psalm’s framework ensured that it was understood as redemptive and purposeful, not as evidence of a sundered Godhead. 

Augustine (354–430 AD), though post-Nicene, preserved and transmitted the ante-Nicene reading when he wrote in his Exposition on Psalm 22:

“For from the head of this Psalm are the words which He cried out while hanging on the Cross, sustaining also the person of the old man, whose mortality He bare. For our old man was nailed together with Him to the Cross” 
-Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 22

Augustine understood Yeshua as speaking on behalf of humanity; voicing the cry of the “old man” who is “far from salvation” because of sin, while the divine nature remained unbroken. 

The Pseudo-Athanasian commentary preserves the same reading:

“The psalm is sung by Christ as in the person of all humanity. It narrates what he endured from the Jews when he bore the cross for our sake” -The Fathers on Psalm 22, Pursuing Veritas

And Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid, transmitting earlier patristic tradition, explained that Yeshua “spoke on behalf of the Jews and said, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken the Jewish race, O Father, that it should commit such a sin?’”; reading the cry as intercessory rather than despairing (see Fr. John Whiteford: Stump the Priest). 

The Rabbinic Counter-Reading: Esther and the Doe of the Dawn 

The Psalm’s superscription (‘al Ayelet HaShachar עַל אַיֶּלֶת הַשַּׁחַר, the “Doe of the Dawn”) became a critical battleground between Jewish and Christian interpretation. The Babylonian Talmud offers several explanations. Rabbi Zera asks:

“ Why is Esther likened to a hind? It is to tell you: Just as in the case of a hind its womb is narrow and it is desirable to its mate at each and every hour like it is at the first hour, so too, Esther was desirable to Ahasuerus at each and every hour like she was at the first hour. Rabbi Asi said: Why was Esther likened to the dawn? It is to tell you: Just as the dawn is the conclusion of the entire night, so too, Esther was the conclusion of all miracles performed for the entire Jewish people."
-Tractate Yoma 29a

This discussion connects the phrase to Queen Esther, who brought salvation to the Jewish people like the dawn breaking through darkness [Yeshivat Har Etzion: Psalm 22 and Purim]. 

The Kehot commentary on Tehillim notes that shachar (“dawn”) evokes shachor (“darkness”), “for darkness creates the desire for light. It is from darkness that dawn is born” [Chabad: Conversations With The Conductor]. The Talmud in Megillah records that when Esther passed through the hall of idols on her way to petition King Achashverosh, she felt the Shekhinah (the calm dwelling of God's spirit in her) departing from her, and she cried out the very words of Psalm 22:1: Eli, Eli, lama azavtani (BT Megillah 15b; cf. Wikipedia: Psalm 22 – Jewish Interpretation). 

Midrash Tehillim 22 (the most extensive midrashic treatment of the Psalm) systematically identifies the text with Queen Esther, depicting scenes from the Exodus, the siege of Jerusalem under Hezekiah, and the Purim narrative. Scholarly analysis has demonstrated that the later layers of this midrash were developed as an explicit counter-reading to the Christological interpretation:

“The background for this trend was a polemical confrontation with the Christian interpretation which viewed the Psalm as a prefiguration for Yeshua's crucifixion” -Midrashic Traditions, Literary Editing, and Polemics in Midrash Tehillim 22, ResearchGate 

This is a remarkable admission embedded in the structure of the rabbinic literature itself: the rabbis found it necessary to provide an alternative protagonist for the Psalm precisely because the early Christians had so powerfully connected it to the crucifixion. The Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160–1235 AD) acknowledged:

“Some explain it as referring to David while he was running away from Shaul. And they said that it refers to Esther and to the people of Israel who were in exile at that time” -Yeshivat Har Etzion: Psalm 22 and Purim

Yet he also preferred to read it as referring to all of Israel in exile; suggesting even the medieval commentators recognized that the text resisted a single, simple historical identification. 

What the Bystanders Heard: The Cross as Midrash in Real Time 

The Gospel narratives confirm that the bystanders at Golgotha were actively engaged in interpreting the cry; and that they connected it to Scripture, not merely to a man’s despair. Matthew records that “some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, ‘This man is calling Elijah’” (Matthew 27:47). The confusion between Eli (“My God”) and Eliyahu (“Elijah”) reveals that the crowd was parsing the Semitic words, not simply hearing a scream of agony. They were engaged in textual interpretation even at the foot of the cross. 

More significantly, the religious leaders who mocked Yeshua were themselves quoting from the same Psalm without realizing they were fulfilling it. Their taunt:

“He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if He desires him”
-Matthew 27:43

Is a near-verbatim quotation of Psalm:

“He trusts in the LORD; let Him deliver him; let Him rescue him, for He delights in him.”
-Psalm 22:8

The rabbis used remez from the Psalm to mock Yeshua; Yeshua used remez from the same Psalm to answer them. He was, in effect, saying: “You are quoting from the middle of a Psalm that ends with My vindication and the worship of all nations. Read to the end.” 

The Gospel writers themselves confirm this reading by saturating the passion narrative with additional [Psalm 22] references that the crowd would not have narrated but that literate readers would recognize: the dividing of garments by lot [John 19:23–24], the mocking and head-shaking [Mark 15:29], the extreme thirst [John 19:28]. The evangelists were not prooftexting after the fact; they were showing that the entire script of the Psalm was being enacted at Golgotha. 

The Linguistic Evidence: Hebrew, Aramaic, and the Targum 

A closer examination of the language itself reveals another layer of intentionality. The canonical Hebrew of Psalm 22:1 reads: Eli, Eli, lama azavtani (אֵלִי אֵלִי לָמָה עֲזַבְתָנִי), using the Hebrew verb ‘azav (עזב, “to leave, forsake”). But the Gospel accounts record sabachthani (σαβαχθανι), which reflects the Aramaic verb sh’vaq (שבק, “to leave, permit, forgive, forsake”) (Wikipedia: Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani). 

This mixed Hebrew-Aramaic phrasing (Eli is Hebrew while sabachthani is Aramaic) is significant. It reflects the living bilingual reality of first-century Judea, where Scripture was known in Hebrew but often discussed and prayed in Aramaic. The Aramaic Targums of the Psalms use precisely the root sh’vaq in their rendering of [Psalm 22:1]. Yeshua was quoting the Psalm in the language of daily prayer (the language in which His audience would most immediately recognize it). This was not a garbled cry; it was a liturgically precise invocation. 

The Codex Vaticanus preserves an especially revealing variant in [Mark 15:34]: Eloi, Eloi, lama zabafthanei, which scholars have noted aligns more closely with the Hebrew original of Psalm 22 (Eli, Eli, lama azavtani) than with the standard Aramaic rendering (Wikipedia: Psalm 22 – New Testament Usage). This suggests that the earliest manuscript traditions understood Yeshua to be quoting the Hebrew Psalm directly, further confirming the remez reading.

The Four Gospels in Concert: A Unified Testimony 

A holistic reading of all four Gospel accounts of Yeshua’s death dismantles the “abandonment” interpretation further still. Matthew and Mark preserve the opening line of [Psalm 22]. But Luke and Yochanan (John) preserve Yeshua’s other words from the cross, and these tell a very different story from despair. 

In Luke, Yeshua does not cry “Why have you forsaken me?” Instead, His final word is one of intimate trust: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” [Luke 23:46] (a quotation from [Psalm 31:5]), another psalm of lament that ends in confident deliverance. In Yochanan, the final word is Tetelestai “It is finished” a declaration of completion, not collapse [John 19:30]. As one scholar has noted:

“In Luke and John, there is no sense whatsoever of Jesus having been abandoned by the Father. Jesus is totally aware of accomplishing the will of the Father” 
-Resurrection Church Boise: Psalm 22 and Jesus’ Cry from the Cross 

Furthermore, Luke records that Yeshua interceded for His executioners:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”
-Luke 23:34

and promised the repentant criminal beside Him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” [Luke 23:43]. These are not the words of a man who has been abandoned by God. These are the words of a man who is operating in full communion with the Father, exercising divine prerogative to forgive sins and promise eschatological reward even while hanging on a Roman execution stake. 

Did God Separate from Yeshua? The Question of Divine Presence at Golgotha 

We turn now to the question that the Cry of Dereliction inevitably raises: Did the Father actually separate Himself from the Son at the cross? Was there a genuine ontological rupture between the first and second persons of the Godhead? Did the sin-bearing work of atonement require the Father to withdraw His presence from the Son? 

The dominant argument for divine separation rests on a particular reading of two texts. The first is:

“You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong.”
-Habakkuk 1:13

The second is:

“Your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you.”
-Isaiah 59:2

The logic runs thus: if Yeshua bore the sins of the world on the cross, and if God cannot look upon sin, then the Father must have turned away. 

But this reading has severe problems; exegetical, theological, and textual. 

First, the Habakkuk passage is misapplied. The prophet is not making a metaphysical claim about God’s inability to perceive sin. He is raising a theodicy question: “Why do You look on those who deal treacherously, and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the one more righteous than he?” The very complaint presupposes that God does see evil; and Habakkuk wants to know why He tolerates it. The God of Scripture beholds wickedness continually and judges it; He does not flee from it. 

Second, the [Isaiah 59] passage addresses Israel’s corporate condition, not the mechanism of atonement. It speaks of the separation that sin creates in the experience of the sinner, not a separation imposed upon the sinless Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world [John 1:29]. To apply Isaiah 59:2 to Yeshua would be to claim that He became a sinner in substance, a position the apostolic witness explicitly denies: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin” [2 Corinthians 5:21]. The language of “being made sin” is covenantal and representational, not ontological. 

Third, Psalm 22 itself explicitly denies that the Father turned away. In the very Psalm that Yeshua invoked, verse 24 declares: 

“For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” 

-Psalm 22:24 

This is devastating to the abandonment thesis. If Yeshua used remez to invoke the whole Psalm, then He was quoting a text that categorically denies that God hid His face from the sufferer. As one scholar has observed, “By invoking this psalm, Yeshua is quoting a Scripture which says that the cry of the one who is apparently forsaken by God is actually heard by God the Father, that the Father doesn’t turn his back on the one who is afflicted, and instead hears his prayer and answers the prayer” (Catholic Productions: Why Have You Forsaken Me). 

Fourth, the supernatural signs at the moment of death point toward divine presence, not divine absence. The tearing of the Temple veil from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51) was an act of God, a sovereign rending of the barrier that separated humanity from the Holy of Holies. It declared not withdrawal but access: the way into the presence of God was being opened at the very moment of Yeshua’s death. The earthquake, the splitting of rocks, and the opening of tombs were theophanic signs, the kind of phenomena associated throughout Scripture with the arrival of God, not His departure. When God gave the Torah at Sinai, the mountain shook (Exodus 19:18). When Elijah encountered God at Horeb, earthquake preceded the divine whisper (1 Kings 19:11–12). At Golgotha, the earth itself testified that God was present and acting. 

Fifth, the patristic consensus is firmly against ontological separation. Cassiodorus, transmitting the teaching of Cyril of Alexandria, affirmed: “We must not believe that divinity was absent to Him even at the passion, since the apostle says: If they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8; cf. Fr. John Whiteford: Stump the Priest). The title “Lord of glory” applied to the crucified one means that divinity was united to humanity even in the moment of death. There was no point at which the Word ceased to be who He was. 

The Weight of Mortality: What Yeshua Actually Experienced 

If the Father did not ontologically abandon the Son, what did Yeshua experience in that cry? The answer lies not in a ruptured Trinity but in the full weight of the incarnation. Yeshua was, as the author of Hebrews insists, “made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17) and “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). His human nature experienced the full spectrum of mortal anguish. 

The darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour (Matthew 27:45) was a sign of judgment, echoing the plague of darkness in Egypt (Exodus 10:22) and the prophetic imagery of the Day of the LORD: “The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining” (Joel 2:10). In the crushing physical agony of crucifixion, surrounded by this cosmic darkness, Yeshua’s human experience was one of being pressed to the absolute limit of mortal endurance. He tasted what the psalmist described: “My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death” (Psalm 22:15). 

But the remez ensures that we hear the whole Psalm. The cry was not the final word. It was the opening measure of a composition that moves inexorably toward: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD” (Psalm 22:27). Yeshua’s cry was the seed planted in the darkness of Golgotha that would burst forth in the dawn of resurrection; the Ayelet HaShachar, the Doe of the Dawn, breaking through the night. 

The impending death did not cause the Father to separate from the Son. Rather, the death was the instrument through which the Father accomplished the plan they had shared from before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:20). Yeshua said it plainly in His high-priestly prayer just hours before:

“And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed”
-John 17:5

The cross was not a rupture in the divine communion; it was its supreme expression. 

Ki Asah: For He Has Done It 

Yeshua’s cry from the cross was not the unscripted howl of a man abandoned by Heaven. It was the deliberate, liturgically precise invocation of the most detailed messianic psalm in the Hebrew Bible; a psalm that begins in agony but ends in worldwide worship, a psalm whose own internal testimony declares that God “has not hidden His face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” 

The rabbis of the Second Temple period taught by remez (by quoting a single line and trusting the audience to hear the whole). Yeshua employed that technique from the cross, inviting every Jew within earshot to mentally unroll the scroll of [Psalm 22] and follow its arc from pierced hands and divided garments to the declaration that would echo across millennia: ki asah “For He has done it.” 

The ante-Nicene Fathers understood this. Justin Martyr read the entire Psalm as prophecy fulfilled. Tertullian called it the “entire passion of Christ.” The patristic tradition affirmed unanimously that divinity was not absent at the cross. The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash Tehillim, by constructing an elaborate alternative reading centered on Esther and Purim, inadvertently testified to the power of the Christological interpretation (one does not build a counter-narrative to a claim that has no force). 

Did God separate from Yeshua at the cross? The Psalm Yeshua Himself chose to invoke says No. The supernatural signs at the moment of death say No. The four Gospel accounts, read in concert, say No. The unanimous patristic tradition says No. What happened at Golgotha was not the absence of God but the fullest expression of His presence; the tearing open of the veil so that all who trust in the blood of the Lamb might enter the Holy of Holies forever.