Easter 2026: Doe of the Dawn

A dying man quotes a psalm in the vernacular. Everything follows from that.

There is a moment in the Passion narratives that has always disturbed commentators more than they tend to admit. Not the flagrum-torn flesh, not the nails, not the vinegar on a sponge. The most visceral moment is verbal. From the cross, according to both Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Church Fathers wrestled with it. Hilary of Poitiers, in De Trinitate, noted that some took the cry as proof that Christ had been deserted and reduced to weakness. His response was to insist that the line cannot be read in isolation from the rest of the Passion, in which the same Christ speaks and acts with unimpaired divine authority.

Chrysostom took a different tack. In Homily 88 on Matthew, he argued that the cry is evidence not of distance from the Father but of unity with him, since Christ speaks the words of the Hebrew scriptures to demonstrate that he is “no adversary of God” and “bears witness to the Old Testament even to his last breath.”

Both readings preserve something important while stepping carefully around the full force of what the words actually say. Later Western theology, unable to sit comfortably with a God who felt abandoned by God, progressively softened it.

Augustine established the template: the cry is Christ as Head of the Body speaking with the voice of sinful humanity, voicing the dereliction of the whole human race rather than simply his own. Aquinas refined this with characteristic precision. In the Summa Theologiae (III, Q.46, A.7) he argued that Christ’s soul on the cross simultaneously enjoyed the beatific vision in its higher faculty while the lower sensory and emotional faculties suffered genuine desolation. An architecturally elegant solution in which Christ felt what he did not, at another level, cease to know. The cry was real but contained, authentic yet partitioned, spoken on behalf of suffering humanity rather than from his own need.

I. The Language Problem

The philological surface of the phrase is already strange. The canonical Hebrew text of Psalm 22:1 reads Ēlī, Ēlī, lāmā ʿazabtānī, with the verb azav (עזב), a standard Hebrew root meaning “to forsake.” But the word sabachthani in the gospel accounts does not derive from azav. It comes from the Aramaic root šbq, meaning “to allow,” “permit,” or “forsake,” a form that exists in Aramaic and in late Mishnaic Hebrew but is absent from classical Biblical Hebrew. Jesus on the cross was not quoting the canonical text of the psalm. He was quoting an Aramaic Targum, a vernacular rendering of the kind used in synagogue readings for those whose literacy in classical Hebrew was limited or non-existent.

Matthew and Mark do not even agree on the first word. Matthew gives Ēlī, which could be either Hebrew or Aramaic, while Mark gives Elōi, corresponding specifically to the Aramaic elāhī in the Galilean vernacular. Mark is probably the closer witness. His gospel is distinguished throughout by its preference for preserving Aramaic exactly as spoken: Talitha koum at the raising of Jairus’s daughter, Ephphatha at the healing of the deaf man, Abba in the garden. Mark’s instinct is to record the voice before the gloss. Elōi fits that pattern, while Ēlī looks like a harmonisation toward the more familiar Hebrew of the psalm.

Yet on the crucial word, the two gospels agree entirely: both use sabachthani, the Aramaic verb, rather than azavtani, the Hebrew of the canonical psalm. This convergence matters as it suggests that the Aramaic is not a later editorial decision by either evangelist but a shared memory of what was heard. Whatever Jesus was doing at that moment, he was doing it in Aramaic. The cry was uttered in the spoken tongue of the crowd at the foot of the cross. It was not liturgical Hebrew but the language of the market, the family, the fishing boat.

This is not a minor textual curiosity as it tells us that what was heard at Calvary was something simultaneously intimate and scriptural — a text everyone knew, rendered in the accent of a Galilean man. The bystanders who thought Jesus was calling for Elijah were not being obtuse. The similarity between Elōi and Eliyyahu in rapid Aramaic speech is real. They heard a dying man call out to his God in their own language, and some of them misheard, which is exactly what might happen at a chaotic, crowded execution.

II. The Title of a Lost Song

Before a single word of the psalm itself, the Hebrew text carries a superscription. Most translations either pass over it quickly or bury it in a note. It reads: lamnatseach al ayelet hashachar, “To the choirmaster: according to ‘The Doe of the Dawn,’” or, more loosely, “The Hind of the Morning.” This was probably the title of a pre-existing melody or musical setting now lost, rather like an English hymnal instructing that a text be sung “to the tune of Kingsfold,” though the phrase remains obscure enough that certainty is impossible.

Even so, the phrase hangs over the psalm like an overture, inviting readers to hear the lament under the sign of hunted vulnerability. The body of the psalm is crowded with predators: bulls that encircle, a lion that gapes, dogs that surround, wild oxen closing the sequence with horned violence. Against them, the speaker is reduced not to resistance but disintegration: bones out of joint, heart melted like wax, strength dried up like a potsherd. Earlier he has already named himself “a worm, and not a man.” It is tempting to hear the superscription’s doe as an overture to what follows — not a proven identity but a suggestive note of helplessness before the lament has even begun.

The psalm pivots dramatically at verse 21: “You have answered me.” Whether that marks an instantaneous reversal or the beginning of one, the effect is unmistakable. The cry of pursuit breaks into praise. The hunted speaker is not left in the mouth of beasts.

The tune itself has vanished. Not a single note survives, which may be the most quietly vertiginous fact in the story. The most theologically freighted words in the NT were, in their original Jewish context, sung to a melody — learned in childhood, passed through oral tradition, inseparable from the text in the way a folk tune is inseparable from its words — and that melody is gone. We cannot reconstruct it. There is no acoustic trace of Ayelet HaShachar anywhere in the world. What Jesus and every Jewish child of his era knew by heart, we know only by the label on a lost jar.

III. The Whole by the First Line

Modern readers tend to assume that a citation is just that: a fragment, lifted out and left to stand alone. Jewish interpretive culture, and the wider oral culture of antiquity, often worked by a different logic. The opening words of a sacred text could invoke the whole of it. A community that had memorised the Psalms in their entirety would no more stop at the first verse of Psalm 22 than a congregation today would hear the opening bars of O Come All Ye Faithful and fail to proceed, internally, through the rest. The first line is the whole song. To utter it is to summon everything that follows.

What follows Psalm 22:1, then, is essential to what Jesus said from the cross. The psalm moves through three broad phases. The first is the lament (verses 1–21): the cry of abandonment, the circling enemies, the dissolution of the body into water and wax. Christ entered that region fully. But the second phase (verses 22–26) turns toward trust and praise even before the suffering has resolved. And the third (verses 27–31) expands into something larger still: an eschatological vision in which all the families of the nations turn to God, all who go down to the dust bow before him, and the psalm ends with the terse Hebrew clause kī ʿāśāh, “for he has done it,” or “that he has done this.”

The reader of John’s gospel will hear an echo there. John 19:30 records Christ’s final words from the cross as tetelestai, τετέλεσται — “It is accomplished,” “It is finished,” “It is completed.” Whether this is a deliberate echo, an independent parallel, or the convergence of two traditions on the same theological moment, the resonance is exact. The psalm that begins with the cry of forsakenness ends with the proclamation of completion, and the gospel that does not record the cry of forsakenness records the proclamation of completion in the textual equivalent of a diptych.

If first-century Jewish listeners at Golgotha understood the cry as invoking the full psalm then what they heard was not a man collapsing into despair. They heard a man announce, in the opening phrase of a song they knew by heart, the entire arc of Psalm 22.

IV. The Jewish Life of the Psalm

The Christian reader who sees Psalm 22 as prophecy fulfilled at Calvary — the divided garments, the mockery, the pierced hands, the cry of abandonment answered by vindication — is working within a framework that is internally coherent: the psalm was written for this moment, and the moment reveals the psalm. The Jewish reader who sees instead a hymn of the persecuted righteous, intelligible in its own right long before and long after Calvary, is equally coherent. The two readings are not symmetrical but the Jewish exegesis enriches the Christian reading by refusing to exist in service to it.

The Talmudic tractate Megillah records that Rabbi Levi, commenting on Esther’s approach to Ahasuerus (Xerxes), imagined her passing through a hall of idols and feeling the Shekhinah, the divine presence, withdraw from her. In that moment, he says, she cried out the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” The psalm thus entered rabbinic imagination as a prayer for extremity: not only David’s lament, but the cry of Esther, a Jewish woman alone before pagan power, acting for the lives of her people under the hiddenness of God. Related rabbinic traditions went further, linking the psalm’s superscription, Ayelet HaShachar, “Doe of the Dawn,” to Esther herself, and later Jewish practice gave Psalm 22 a place in the orbit of Purim as well.

There is a further detail here that ought to unsettle any reader who assumes the Passion narratives were simply assembled after the fact by mining the Hebrew scriptures for usable prophecy. Isaiah 50:6, one of the Servant Songs, reads: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from disgrace and spitting.”

The spitting is claimed by the gospels. Matthew records it twice, at the trial and at the mocking. But not one gospel witness mentions the beard. Nobody claims it was plucked. If the evangelists or the tradition behind them were constructing a fulfilment narrative by systematically working through the available prophetic material, the beard is an obvious gift lying on the table that nobody picked up. The argument from prophecy cuts both ways: the texts that are claimed as fulfilment are interesting, but the texts that could have been claimed and were not are, in their silence, at least as interesting.

This does not resolve the question of what the Passion narratives are. Jewish reader and Christian readers will weigh the observation differently: one may see it as evidence of haphazard rather than systematic construction, the other as evidence of honest witness. But it should discourage the lazy assumption, common in skeptical readings, that the correspondences between the Old Testament and the Passion are simply the product of a community that knew its scriptures too well and embroidered accordingly. Communities that embroider do not usually leave prophetic threads on the floor.

This is not a footnote. It means that when Jesus uttered the psalm’s first line from the cross, he was entering a crowded space: David the abandoned king, Esther the endangered queen, Israel in exile, the individual righteous person surrounded by enemies. The cry was available to Jewish memory as a prayer for precisely those moments when the face of God is hidden — not when God is absent but when God’s presence is felt as absence. The later Jewish mystical term for this is hester panim, the hiding of the face. It is one of the most harrowing concepts in the tradition because it refuses the comforts of either pure faith or pure atheism. The hiding of the face is a theological category for the experienced silence of a present God [a separate essay could be penned on its historico-theological implications].

V. Chalcedon and the Byzantine Problem

This is where the question enters Byzantine territory, and the conventional apologetic move — the cry as merely evidence of Christ’s humanity — runs into the harder Chalcedonian architecture. The Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) defined Christ as one and the same Son in two natures, divine and human, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Against those who blurred the natures, it insisted on the full integrity of Christ’s humanity. Against those who split the subject, it insisted on the single hypostasis, the one person, in whom both natures inhere.

That makes the cry of dereliction harder, not easier. It cannot be resolved by saying simply that the human nature speaks while the divine nature remains untouched, as though a neat line could be drawn through the middle of Christ. What Christ experiences, he experiences as one personal subject, not a partitioned one. Yet Byzantine theology was equally unwilling to speak of any literal rupture between Father and Son. The problem, then, was not how to separate the suffering man from the impassible God, but how to speak of the incarnate Word undergoing the furthest reaches of human desolation without breaking the unity of the person or the life of the Trinity.

This is what made the cry so difficult. Not because the divine nature was thought to have yielded to the human, nor because the Logos ceased to know the Father, but because the incarnation had to be understood as complete. The one who speaks from the cross is not a human person alongside the Word. He is the Word incarnate, speaking and suffering through the humanity he assumed. The cry therefore cannot be shrugged off as incidental to Christ himself. It belongs to the drama of what he took on.

Gregory of Nazianzus supplied the principle that governs the whole question: what was not assumed was not healed (Letter 101, to Cledonius). He used it above all against any truncation of Christ’s humanity but, really, its logic presses further. If Christ did not assume the extremities of human dereliction, then even that region of human life would remain outside redemption. On that reading, the cry from the cross is not a metaphysical rupture within God. It is the salvific inhabitation of an extremity human beings already know well enough, though waist-deep in sin we know it confusedly rather than cleanly.

VI. The Lost Melody

There is one last strand that has no theological resolution and is perhaps more haunting for it. The word “psalm” reaches us through the Greek psalmos — a song sung to harp music — which is a translation of the Hebrew Tehillim, “praises.” The Book of Psalms is not, in its origins, a devotional anthology to be read quietly but a hymnal, assembled for performance, and it announces this openly. More than a hundred of its 150 poems carry superscriptions: ancient liturgical and musical instructions addressed to the menatseah, the chief musician or choirmaster, specifying instrumentation, vocal register, and often the name of an existing melody. The Psalter as we have inherited it is saturated with production notes for a concert that no longer exists.

The ancient Near East was not musically inarticulate. The Hurrian Hymn No. 6, discovered in the ruins of Ugarit in modern Syria and dating to around 1400 BC, is the oldest (mostly) complete melody yet found, and it comes with lyre-tuning instructions precise enough for modern musicians to attempt reconstruction. At the other end of the period, the Seikilos Epitaph, engraved on a marble tombstone in what is now Turkey around AD 100, is the oldest complete musical composition with both lyrics and notation clear enough for note-for-note performance today.

Yet Ayelet HaShachar is gone. The tune exists nowhere. Unlike the canonical text of the psalm, which survived through continuous liturgical use, the melody was carried only in living practice, and those communities were dispersed, transformed, and in many cases destroyed by the catastrophe of AD 70 and all that followed. We know only that it existed.

There is a quiet comedy in this for anyone who has read the Psalter attentively. Non-Jewish readers of the Bible are constantly confronted by musical instructions they cannot act on. Selah appears seventy-one times in the Psalms and three times in Habakkuk; no one has satisfactorily established what it means, with candidates ranging from a pause to a change of key to a direction to lift the voice. Al-tashheth, “Do not destroy,” heads four psalms and is usually understood as the name of a tune or musical style. Mahalath appears twice; Gittith three times; Sheminith twice. The Psalter that Christians received as a book of devotional poetry is in fact a hymnal with its rubrics intact and its music stripped out, like inheriting a vast collection of sheet music with all the staves removed.

Yet to speak only of loss is to tell half the story. The psalm has not gone silent. It has been sung continuously in the Byzantine liturgical tradition since late antiquity.

The Orthodox still treat the Psalter less as a book than as a weather system to be lived through (entailing everything in that phrase: endurance, celebration, boredom, relief). The 150 psalms are divided into twenty kathismata, or “sittings,” and monastics chant through the whole lot every week at Vespers and Matins. In Lent, in fits of enthusiasm, they do it twice.

This system has been running since late antiquity with the serene confidence of something that assumes its choirs will outlast empires. Every monk who enters it steps into a cycle older than almost any other cultural cycle on earth. Some psalms are fixed to certain hours regardless of the weekly rotation. Others move through the system in order. Either way, the point is the same: the Psalms are not simply read, they are lived in.

And they are sung. Not briskly dispatched like a reading at a parish AGM, but chanted in tones, refrains and drones that give the words weight, shadow, contour and memory. A single voice may carry the verse; the timbre of an individual's voice is always unique, half-divine. Two choirs may answer one another across the nave. Underneath it all, in the Byzantine tradition, runs the ison, the low sustaining note that holds everything together like a stubborn floorboard in the universe.

This is the afterlife of Psalm 22. Not its original Temple melody — that is gone for good — but a tradition that kept the words in the mouth after the music was lost to history. Stone churches, desert cells, mountain monasteries: the psalm survived not as ink alone but breath.

That matters because what the evangelists give us at Golgotha is not an abstract doctrine but a sound: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani. The voice itself has gone. The Aramaic cadence has gone. The exact pitch and force of it are gone. We cannot recover the acoustics of Calvary.

But we can still recover the movement. Psalm 22 begins in abandonment and ends in praise. The cry from the cross opens a psalm that runs all the way through desolation and out the other side. The hunted creature reaches dawn. The abandoned one is vindicated.

And so the Church does not answer Calvary with an argument. It lets the Paschal song loose: first the bishop’s voice, then parts of the clergy catch it, then the congregation gathers around it until the cry of one becomes the triumph of all:

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη ἐκ νεκρῶν, θανάτῳ θάνατον πατήσας, καὶ τοῖς ἐν τοῖς μνήμασι, ζωὴν χαρισάμενος.