The Disenchantment of the Tovia Singer Siren Song · Exhibit A
How Psalm 22:17's כָּאֲרוּ Fits a Real Pattern in the Masoretic Text
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The Masoretic Text of Psalm 22:17 reads כָּאֲרִי ("like a lion"), while the Septuagint, the Peshitta, Jerome's Vulgate, and — on the reading defended by Abegg, Flint, and Ulrich — the Nahal Hever Psalms scroll (5/6ḤevPs) read כָּאֲרוּ, "they have bored/pierced." Objectors have called כארו an impossible word, since no verbal root כאר exists in Biblical Hebrew. But the aleph in כארו is not a root letter at all. It belongs to a small, well-attested class of forms in which a hollow (ע"ו) root's medial vav is spelled with aleph instead. Two Masoretic Text occurrences of the same device — one in Hosea, one in Zechariah — show that this was a live orthographic option long before the Nahal Hever scribe ever touched a pen to parchment.
A hollow root such as קוּם ("to arise") or רוּם ("to be high") carries its middle consonant as a vowel-letter, a vav that marks a long u/o sound rather than functioning as a true radical. In ordinary spelling that vav simply elides in certain inflected forms. In the three passages below, the Masoretes instead wrote an aleph in that slot — the same silent, vowel-bearing letter used everywhere else in Hebrew as a mater lectionis. The result looks, at a glance, like a brand-new triliteral root. It is not; it is an old root wearing an unfamiliar spelling.
Hosea 10:14
וְקָ֣אם שָׁאוֹן֮ בְּעַמֶּ֒ךָ֒"An uproar shall arise against your people." Root קום. Expected spelling וְקָם (veqām); attested spelling וְקָאם (veqā'am).
Zechariah 14:10
וְרָאֲמָה֙ וְיָשְׁבָ֣ה תַחְתֶּ֔יהָ"And [Jerusalem] shall be raised up, and shall dwell in her place." Root רום. Expected spelling וְרָמָה (veramah); attested spelling וְרָאֲמָה (vera'amah).
Psalm 22:17 · 5/6ḤevPs (Nahal Hever)
כָּאֲרוּ יָדַי וְרַגְלָי"They have bored/pierced my hands and my feet." Root כור (a byform behind כרה, "to dig, bore"). Proposed spelling for כָּרוּ (karu); attested in the scroll as כָּאֲרוּ (ka'aru), against the Masoretic כָּאֲרִי.
| Reference | Root | Expected | Attested | Sense |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hosea 10:14 | קום | וְקָם | וְקָאם | shall arise |
| Zechariah 14:10 | רום | וְרָמָה | וְרָאֲמָה | shall be exalted |
| Psalm 22:17 (5/6ḤevPs) | כור | כָּרוּ | כָּאֲרוּ | they have bored/pierced |
This is not the same phenomenon as aleph prostheticum ("prosthetic aleph"), the helping aleph the Masoretes sometimes prefixed before an initial consonant cluster to ease pronunciation (e.g., אֶזְרוֹעַ for זְרוֹעַ, "arm"). That aleph stands before the root. The aleph in וְקָאם, וְרָאֲמָה, and כָּאֲרוּ stands inside a hollow root, in the very slot the root's own vav would otherwise occupy. Grammars do not give this medial device one settled Latin name; it is usually described simply as aleph written for a hollow root's medial vav.
The force of Hosea 10:14 and Zechariah 14:10 for Psalm 22 is text-critical, not exegetical: both are undisputed Masoretic Text readings, in prose no one contests, that do exactly what critics say כארו cannot do — spell a hollow root's vav as aleph and still be intelligible Hebrew. Whatever one concludes about the DSS reading, image quality, or the versions, "כארו cannot be a real Hebrew word" is not an argument the Masoretic Text itself allows.
The reading has been contested since Flint first published it, and the objections deserve a fair hearing rather than a dismissal. Six are raised most often.
Objection 1 · The Ink Is Too Faded
The surviving ink is unquestionably damaged, and the final letter has therefore been scrutinized by scholars as either a long י or ו. But this does not reduce the evidence to an irresolvable photographic ambiguity. First, the disputed letter in the Nahal Hever manuscript is followed immediately by an unambiguous י in the next word, ידיה, providing a direct paleographic control within the same hand. The editors of the manuscript judged the disputed letter to be ו, not י, on precisely this comparative basis. The published scholarly discussion likewise notes that the adjacent yod makes the distinction possible. Second, the evidence does not stand or fall with the Nahal Hever photograph. The substantially earlier Qumran manuscript 4Q88 (4QPsᶠ) preserves the same verse in a damaged form conventionally reconstructed הקיפני כרו ידי ורגלי. The surviving כ–ר sequence contains no visible intervening aleph, and the editors reconstruct כרו. Third, כארו/כרו is independently attested in the medieval Hebrew manuscript tradition, demonstrating that this reading was not created by modern interpreters attempting to extract a crucifixion prophecy from a deteriorated Judean Desert fragment. Accordingly, the proper conclusion is not that the evidence is "equally unresolved." The photograph must be acknowledged as damaged, but the paleographic evidence favors ו, and that reading is strengthened by independent textual witnesses. The prudent conclusion is therefore: The ink is damaged, but the damaged ink does not constitute a neutral 50/50 objection. The surviving paleography, especially the comparison with the following י, favors כארו; and the independent evidence from 4Q88 and the Hebrew manuscript tradition makes the כארו/כרו reading considerably more substantial than a reading derived from a single ambiguous photograph. One further refinement: We must actually separate 5/6ḤevPs from 4Q88 throughout the argument. Calling both of them simply "the Qumran fragment" weakens the case because an informed critic can immediately point out that Nahal Hever is not Qumran. The argument becomes much more powerful when stated precisely: The later Nahal Hever manuscript appears to preserve כארו, while the earlier Qumran 4Q88 manuscript independently points toward כרו. That is considerably harder to dismiss as an artifact of one faded photograph. And there is an important historical-textual consequence: the argument for the “pierced/dug” reading does not depend upon proving that one barely visible Qumran ink-stroke is unquestionably a ו. Even proponents concede this.
Weight: Genuinely unresolved? No.
Objection 2 · "כארו Is Not a Word"
No root כאר exists in Biblical Hebrew; the form looks invented.
Weight: Answered above. The aleph is not a root letter but a mater lectionis standing for the vav of a hollow root (כור) — the same device attested in Hosea 10:14 and Zechariah 14:10. BHS's own apparatus records minority medieval MT manuscripts reading כארו and כרו at this verse, so the spelling is not a Qumran-only oddity.
Objection 3 · כור/כרה Means "Dig," Never "Pierce"
In its attested MT occurrences the root is always about pits, wells, and tombs — never a wounding sense.
Weight: A real observation, but the semantic extension from "bore/dig" to "pierce" is not a stretch — it is the ordinary sense of an instrument boring through something. And three independent ancient translation traditions — the Septuagint (ὤρυξαν), the Peshitta, and Jerome's Vulgate (foderunt) — converge on this sense centuries apart and without dependence on one another. That convergence is a real datum, not a theological preference.
Objection 4 · The Scribe Was Careless
The following word is written יְדֵיהָ ("her hands") instead of יָדַי ("my hands") — cited as proof the scroll can't be trusted here either.
Weight: A likely ה/י error on a pronominal suffix does not license discounting an unrelated י/ו confusion in the root a few letters away. The two are different error types with different mechanisms; one does not predict the other.
Objection 5 · Lectio Difficilior Favors כארי
"Like a lion" is the harder, more original-looking reading; כארו/כרו looks like a later smoothing.
Weight: Cuts both ways. MT's כָּאֲרִי as it stands supplies no verb at all ("like a lion my hands and my feet"), which is why exegetes since Rashi have had to supply one. A reading that requires a supplied verb is at least as difficult as a verb some find lexically unfamiliar; the principle does not obviously favor MT here.
Objection 6 · Crucifixion Is Anachronistic to the Psalm
Reading "pierced" imports a later event into an earlier text.
Weight: Conflates the Hebrew verb's meaning with a later theological application of it. "They have bored/pierced my hands and feet" does not itself require crucifixion as referent; the objection targets a use of the verse, not the philological question of what כארו/כרו means.
Taken together: the ink-quality problem is real and unresolved; the aleph-for-vav mechanism is textually supportable from undisputed MT parallels; the semantic and versional convergence across LXX, Peshitta, and Vulgate is real; the scribal-reliability argument is weaker than it is often presented. This remains a live text-critical dispute — worth stating as such rather than as settled in either direction.
The כארו/כרו reading is not a modern invention read back into a faded photograph. It surfaces independently within the medieval Masoretic manuscript tradition itself, apart from Nahal Hever entirely — a fact that answers Objection 2 more directly than the Hosea/Zechariah parallel alone.
| Variant | Reading | Manuscript Numbers |
|---|---|---|
| Text reads כארו | כָּאֲרוּ | 39, 267, 270, 277, 288, 660 |
| Text reads כרו | כָּרוּ | 283, 291 |
| Text כארי, margin כרו | כָּאֲרִי / כָּרוּ | 539, 542, 649 |
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia · Critical Apparatus
BHS still flags the variant at Ps 22:17: pc Mss Edd כָּאֲרוּ, 2 Mss כָּרוּ — "pc Mss" being the standard abbreviation for pauci manuscripti, "a few manuscripts," here joined by early printed editions (Edd) attesting the same reading. The "pc Mss" behind BHS at Ps 22:17 traces back to Benjamin Kennicott's 18th-century collation, Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (1776), and De Rossi's later supplement. Kennicott's apparatus records the variant in three groups. Instead of כארי, it is written כארו in manuscripts numbered 39, 267, 270, 277, 288, and 660; instead of כארי, it is written כרו ("dug") in manuscripts numbered 283 and 291; and the reading כארי is written in the text but with כרו in the margin in manuscripts numbered 539, 542, and 649. So, mapped onto the BHS notation: pc Mss (כָּאֲרוּ) → Kennicott MSS 39, 267, 270, 277, 288, 660 (six manuscripts with the vav-verb spelling) 2 Mss (כָּרוּ) → Kennicott MSS 283, 291 (A third group, 539, 542, 649, has כארו/כרו only as a marginal correction to the main-text כארי — BHS doesn't cite this group under the lemma, since it's not a full running-text variant.) A caveat worth flagging: Kennicott's numbering is his own manuscript sigla (keyed to his Dissertatio Generalis and manuscript list), not a standardized modern shelf-mark system — so "39" or "660" means "Kennicott's manuscript #39/660," not a library catalogue number, and would need cross-referencing against his Dissertatio Generalis or later catalogues (e.g., Richard Gottheil's or the more recent digitized listings) to identify the actual codices behind them. BHS itself doesn't unpack Kennicott's numbers in the apparatus — it just inherits "pc Mss" as shorthand for "some number of Kennicott/de Rossi witnesses," Kennicott's actual variae lectiones volume.
The Masorah's Own Note · Jacob ben Chayyim
Compiling the Masorah Parva and Finalis for the Rabbinic Bible (16th c.), ben Chayyim recorded that in some accurate codices he found כארו written as the Ketiv against כארי as the Qere — though he could not locate this pairing in his standard lists of words spelled with vav but read with yod, nor among the East–West variant lists. A working Masorete, centuries before Qumran's rediscovery, already knew a כארו tradition existed and flagged it as anomalous.
What this does and does not establish: it confirms the reading is independently attested in the Hebrew manuscript tradition, not manufactured from a faded Nahal Hever photograph or from Christian apologetic pressure. It remains a small minority within Kennicott's massive collation of manuscripts. And a minority MT reading can itself be secondary — its existence settles that the variant is real and pre-existing, not which reading is original.
Is it possible that the reason LXX, Peshitta, and Vulgate do not translate "like a lion" in Ps 22:16[17] is because the LXX, Peshitta, and Vulgate translators are not seeing "like a lion" because this Hebrew is a later scribal corruption? Yes, that's a live possibility in the field, and it's worth separating from the popular apologetic framing (which usually runs the argument backwards — "LXX/Vulgate preserve the true messianic reading against a rabbinic conspiracy to hide it"). The serious text-critical version of this question is symmetrical: which direction did the corruption go, and why. The crux itself. MT Ps 22:17 reads כָּאֲרִי יָדַי וְרַגְלָי — "like a lion my hands and feet" — which is not really a grammatical sentence; "like a lion" needs a verb it never gets. LXX ὤρυξαν χεῖράς μου καὶ πόδας ("they dug/bored my hands and feet"), Peshitta ܒܙܥܘ (roughly "they pierced/bored"), and Jerome's Vulgate foderunt (foderunt, Latin: they dug) manus meas et pedes meos all presuppose a verb, most plausibly כָּארוּ, 3 mp perfect of כרה "to dig/bore" (cf. Gen 26:25; the noun כֵּרָה "cistern"). Graphically כארו vs כארי is a single letter, ו/י, which are notoriously easy to confuse in Second Temple and later square script. Why this direction (כארו original → כארי corrupted) is defensible, not fringe: Lectio difficilior normally favors the harder reading as original, and on pure grammar כארי is not harder, it's broken — that's actually against the usual assumption that MT preserves the more original text here. A scribe "fixing" an unfamiliar or rare verbal form into a familiar noun-idiom is a recognized corruption pattern, not a contrived one. כארי would be an easy unconscious substitution precisely because "like a lion" tearing at prey is already a stock image the psalm itself uses nearby (bulls of Bashan, a devouring lion in v.14, dogs in v.17a) — a copyist's eye or memory could pull a familiar predator-idiom into a spot with an unfamiliar verb. Jerome is an independent witness worth real weight here, not just an LXX echo: he translated Hebraica veritas directly with Jewish informants in Bethlehem, and he still renders foderunt, not "like a lion." That argues against the corruption (if it is one) being purely a Greek translational quirk — it suggests a Hebrew Vorlage (Source Text), or at least a live interpretive Hebrew tradition, with the verbal form still known in the 4th century. Symmachus and (in one hexaplaric transmission) Aquila also do not render "like a lion" cleanly — the picture across the versions is not "LXX alone against MT," it's most of the ancient translation tradition failing to see a bare noun-simile there.
Related: the concordance entry for כָּרָה (Strong's H3738) and its Louw–Nida–style companion, and the interlinear treatment of Psalm 22:17 in the Heaven Project Hebrew Tanakh Interlinear.
Artists for Israel International — Heaven Project
The Disenchantment of the Tovia Singer Siren Song
Exhibit A: כארו · Exhibit B: Almah / Virgin · Exhibit C: Isaiah 53 · Exhibit D: Zechariah 12:10 · Exhibit E: Psalm 22 · Exhibit F: Psalm 110 · Exhibit G: Isaiah 9:6 · Exhibit H: Daniel 7:13-14 · Exhibit I: Psalm 2 & 45 · Exhibit J: Daniel 9:24-27 · Exhibit K: Genesis 49:10 · Exhibit L: Beit Lechem →