Psalm 22:22 - Who will praise God?
To understand this verse, we need to talk about numbers, and vocabulary, and also poetry. You have been warned.
First off, the verse number needs to be addressed. Remember, the chapter and verse numbers are not really part of the Bible! They are just a convenience, which we all agree to use because it is very convenient. However, there are a few places where there is minor disagreement on the numbers, and this verse is one of them, probably because poetry. It might be verse 21 or 22. So now we have:
“I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you”
Who is being told about God’s name, and in whose midst is God being praised? I bet you can already tell what the problem is going to be.
| Translation/Language: | Date: | Phrase: | Approach: |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original Hebrew text | achay | ||
| Popular translations: | |||
| King James Version (KJV) | 1611 | my brethren | Male |
| American Standard Version (ASV) | 1901 | my brethren | Male |
| The Living Bible (TLB) | 1971 | my brothers | Male |
| New King James Version (NKJV) | 1982 | my brethren | Male |
| New International Version – 1984* | 1984 | my brothers | Male |
| New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) | 1989 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| Good News Translation (GNT/GNB/TEV) | 1992 | my people | Paraphrase |
| Contemporary English Version (CEV) | 1995 | your people | Paraphrase |
| New Living Translation (NLT) | 1996 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| New International Version (NIV) | 2011 | my people | Paraphrase |
| Common English Bible (CEB) | 2011 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| English Standard Version (ESV) | 2016 | my brothers | Male |
| Christian Standard Bible (CSB) | 2017 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| The Message (MSG) | 2018 | my friends | Paraphrase |
| New American Standard Bible (NASB) | 2020 | my brothers | Male |
| NRSV Updated Edition (NRSVUE) | 2021 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| Specialty translations: | |||
| God’s Word (GW) | 1995 | my people | Paraphrase |
| New Century Version (NCV) | 2005 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| The Inclusive Bible (TIB) | 2009 | my sisters and brothers | Inclusive |
| Expanded Bible (EXB) | 2011 | my brothers and sisters | Inclusive |
| Names of God (NOG) | 2011 | my people | Paraphrase |
| New English Translation (NET) | 2017 | my countrymen | Male/Paraphrase |
The word in question here is achay, which is the possessive “my” added to the root word ach.
The Greek adelphois, which has come up before (and will come up again), may refer to siblings, or specifically to brothers (male siblings). The Hebrew here, though, has a somewhat different range of meanings. It can refer specifically to brothers. It can also refer less specifically to a sibling of any gender. And it can refer to relatives who are not specifically siblings!
There is no Greek in Psalm 22, I’m just making this comparison to illustrate how different words can have meanings that overlap but are not identical. In this example, depending on which language you are using, you might have:
(Greek) adelphois mou – my siblings or my brothers
(Hebrew) achay – my relatives or my siblings or my brothers
In each case, you are not free to simply choose whichever translation you like best. You have to consider the context, and then you have to make a choice.
Consider the context
The context, in this case, is that we are dealing with poetry. Psalms are poems! Specifically they are Hebrew poems, and Hebrew is less interested in rhyming sounds and more interested in rhyming ideas.
For example, one popular “rhyme” scheme looks like this: A B A B. So, if we are rhyming sounds, we might have (with apologies to Gelett Burgess, who may have regretted writing this):
I never saw a Purple Cow, (A)
I never hope to see one; (B)
But I can tell you, anyhow, (A)
I'd rather see than be one. (B)
In this example, A is cow/how, and B is one.
If we are rhyming ideas, though, we might have:
Deliver my soul (A)
from the sword, (B)
my life (A)
from the power of the dog! (B) - Psalm 22:21
In this example, A is something like “save me” and B is something like “from this threat”. Save me from this threat/Save me from this threat. ABAB. The same idea, said two slightly different ways. Poetry!
The next verse has another simple parallel, which is also a low-key introductory chiasm (don’t ask unless you really want to know): ABBA.
So it goes like this:
I will tell your name (A)
to [achay] (B)
in the midst of the congregation (B),
I will praise you (A)
“I will tell your name” matches “I will praise you”. Therefore, to be good Hebrew poetry, “to my [whatever]” should also match “in the midst of the congregation”.
That’s the context. Whoever we are talking about in the first part of the verse, it should be the same people as in the second part of the verse.
Make a choice
“Congregation” here means “people”, as in, “the people who are gathered here to worship God”.
Do you think the Psalm was written exclusively for male people who gathered to worship God? If so, then “my brothers” would be an acceptable translation.
An unsurprising number of modern translations apparently do think that this Psalm is only for the guys, which, okay, fine. If they want to err on the side of potentially excluding fully half of God’s people, that is a risk they can choose to take.
But, we have plenty of biblical evidence for women and girls participating in worship. In what may be one of the oldest passages in the whole Hebrew Bible (Exodus 15:20-21), Miriam leads the singing and the dancing to celebrate God’s victory over the armies of Egypt. In the New Testament, we have all sorts of famously confusing instructions for how women were to behave in worship, which means it goes without saying that women were allowed to be in worship1.
When Miriam led worship, the instrument she played may have been more like a hand-drum than a modern tambourine, but this isn’t a blog post about translating the names of musical instruments.
So, if you think that any of those biblical women, or women like them, might possibly have been included in this Psalm, then you can't choose “my brothers”. At that point, whether you choose “my siblings” or “my relatives” is a matter of style.
For some reason, on the chart, I have labeled “brothers and sisters” as the inclusive translation and variations on “people” or “relatives” as paraphrase, but the truth is, both approaches are a little bit of both. It is impossible to translate without paraphrasing. Translation and paraphrase are not actually two different things.