Panel essay · Psalms · Aug 17–23, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona whose job is to state the hard questions fairly and leave them standing — not a real person.
This week's lesson opens with a sentence more candid than most Come, Follow Me introductions: "We don't know for certain who wrote the Psalms." That admission is worth holding onto, because almost every hard question in this block runs through it. The Psalter is the part of the Old Testament that Latter-day Saints use most and examine least. We sing it, quote it at funerals, and put it on vinyl wall decals. Underneath the comfort is a book with contested text, contested authorship, contested theology, and a New Testament that reads it in ways the original singers would not have recognized. None of that makes the Psalms less true. It does make the easy version of the questions unusable.
Start with the verse the lesson explicitly asks you to pair with the Crucifixion: Psalm 22:16, "they pierced my hands and my feet," cross-referenced to Luke 23:32–33. This is the most contested half-line in the Hebrew Bible.
The Masoretic Text — the medieval Hebrew standard behind most Jewish translations — reads כארי (ka'ari), "like a lion," producing something like "like a lion, my hands and my feet," with no verb at all. The Septuagint, translated centuries before Christ, reads a verb meaning "they dug/gouged," which is where the KJV's "pierced" ultimately comes from. So the question is whether Christians inherited an older and better Hebrew reading, or whether the Greek translators guessed at a broken line and Christians later built a prophecy on the guess.
A fragment from Nahal Hever (5/6HevPs), a first- or second-century Psalms scroll, appears to read כארו — with a final waw rather than yod, supporting a verb. Shon Hopkin argued in BYU Studies that this "strikes at the heart of the controversy," since it shows the reading predates Christian–Jewish polemic ("The Psalm 22:16 Controversy: New Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls," BYU Studies 44/3). That is a real point and Jewish counter-apologists who claim the "pierced" reading was invented by Christians are simply wrong about the chronology.
But the apologetic case overreaches in the other direction. In Hebrew script waw and yod are nearly identical strokes; scribes confused them constantly. And even granting כארו, the root would most naturally be כרה, "to dig" — not the technical vocabulary of crucifixion. Kristin Swenson proposed reading the line with the lion imagery of the surrounding verses, the enemies encircling hands and feet ("Psalm 22:17: Circling around the Problem Again," Journal of Biblical Literature 123/4). The crux is still live in the technical literature: Seth Postell and Joseph Justiss revisited it in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 30 (2025), which is not what you would expect if a scroll fragment had settled it in 2002.
The honest summary: the "pierced" reading is ancient and defensible, not a Christian forgery — and it is also not certain, and no responsible reader should present a smudged letter on a decayed scroll as proof of anything. A Latter-day Saint has an interesting additional wrinkle here: 3 Nephi 11:14 has the risen Christ invite the multitude to feel the wounds in his hands and feet, so the tradition of pierced extremities does not stand or fall on Psalm 22:16 for us. That is worth noticing precisely because it means we can afford to be honest about the Hebrew.
The lesson lines up seven psalm-to-Gospel pairs and asks, "What do you learn from studying these connections?" The question it does not ask is which direction the connection runs.
Read Psalm 22 as a whole and it is a lament with a standard shape: complaint (vv. 1–2), remembered deliverance (vv. 3–5), renewed complaint (vv. 6–18), petition (vv. 19–21), and a vow of public praise once rescued (vv. 22–31). Its images — bulls of Bashan, dogs, a melting heart, dried-up strength — are the stock vocabulary of the genre. Nothing in it announces itself as prediction. The same is true of Psalm 31:5, "into thine hand I commit my spirit," which in context is a prayer of a man expecting to live.
Donald Juel's Messianic Exegesis (Fortress, 1988) makes the strongest form of the critical case: early Christians began with a crucified and risen Messiah and then combed Israel's scriptures for language adequate to him — the conviction came first, the proof-texts second. On that reading, Matthew did not find the Crucifixion in Psalm 22; he found Psalm 22 in the Crucifixion.
Two responses are available and both are serious. The first is that this is a false dichotomy: a text can be a genuine lament of an eighth-century sufferer and be shaped by a God who knew what it would one day describe. The Book of Mormon's own hermeneutic runs this way — Nephi "likens" scripture (1 Nephi 19:23) without claiming its authors were talking about him. The second is that Jesus himself, by quoting Psalm 22:1 from the cross (Matthew 27:46), performed the identification. Though even that cuts both ways: a dying Jew praying the opening line of a psalm he had known since childhood is the most natural thing in the world, and the psalm he chose ends not in abandonment but in vindication and worldwide worship (22:27–31), which is either a profound clue or an inconvenience for the "utterly forsaken" reading that Elder Jeffrey R. Holland developed in "None Were with Him" (April 2009 general conference).
What is genuinely at stake for a Latter-day Saint is smaller than it first appears. Our scriptures do assert explicit pre-Christian messianic prophecy (Mosiah 14, quoting Isaiah 53; 1 Nephi 19:10). But nothing in the Restoration requires that every psalm the New Testament quotes was written as prediction. The chapter headings in the LDS edition, which call Psalms 8, 21, 22, and 40 "a messianic psalm of David," are twentieth-century editorial additions, not revelation and not part of the Hebrew text.
Psalm 2:7 is the sharpest doctrinal collision in the block. Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. In its likely original setting this is coronation language — the formula by which a Judean king was declared God's son at his enthronement, the pattern Sigmund Mowinckel developed in The Psalms in Israel's Worship. "Today" means today, the day of the ceremony. Egyptian and Mesopotamian parallels for divine royal sonship are abundant.
That produces two problems, pointed in opposite directions. For traditional Christians, it looks adoptionist: a sonship conferred on a date rather than eternally possessed. Acts 13:33 — which the lesson cites — makes it worse, or better, by applying "this day have I begotten thee" to the Resurrection, as though something became true then that was not before.
For Latter-day Saints the tension is different and less discussed. We teach a literal, premortal divine sonship, and we also teach that Christ "received not of the fulness at the first, but continued from grace to grace" until he received a fulness (D&C 93:12–14). Psalm 2:7's "this day" is arguably closer to our Christology than to Nicene Christology — a Son whose glory is received in stages. Whether that is a comfortable fit or an accident of two unrelated ideas landing in the same words is a question I do not think has been answered well from either direction.
Turn to Psalm 8:5, "a little lower than the angels," and look at the footnote in your own scriptures: HEB less than the gods. The Hebrew is אלהים, elohim. The KJV followed the Septuagint and Hebrews 2:7 in softening it to "angels."
This is the doorway to the divine-council background of the Psalter, and this block is full of it. Psalm 29:1 addresses "O ye mighty" — in Hebrew bene elim, "sons of gods." Frank Moore Cross argued in "Notes on a Canaanite Psalm in the Old Testament" (BASOR 117, 1950) that Psalm 29 is a lightly Yahwized Canaanite storm hymn; the cedars of Lebanon, the thunder over the waters, the enthronement over the flood all have Ugaritic cousins.
Latter-day Saints often reach for this material as vindication — see, the Bible always knew there were many gods. The problem is that our confidence usually outruns our evidence. Michael Heiser, an evangelical who spent his career arguing for a real divine council in the Hebrew Bible, nevertheless argued that Latter-day Saints misread it, because the biblical writers treat Yahweh as species-unique among the elohim rather than as one god among peers ("You've Seen One Elohim, You've Seen Them All? A Critique of Mormonism's Use of Psalm 82," FARMS Review 19/1, 2007). David Bokovoy answered him in the same issue ("Ye Really Are Gods"). Read both. The exchange is a model of what steel-manning looks like, and neither side walks away with an unqualified win.
The Bible Dictionary in our own scriptures notes that seventy-three psalms are ascribed to David, that this ascription grew into the popular belief that he wrote them all, and that "the Hebrew titles are sometimes inaccurate." That is a remarkable concession sitting in the back of the standard works. Psalm 46 in this block is not Davidic at all — it belongs to the sons of Korah — and Psalm 33 carries no superscription in the Hebrew. The Hebrew preposition le- in le-David can mean "by," "for," "belonging to," or "in the style of."
Which leads to the harder question. Suppose the traditional ascriptions are right. You are then praying Psalm 26:1 — "I have walked in mine integrity" — in the voice of the man of 2 Samuel 11. Our own scripture is blunt about it: D&C 132:39 says David "hath fallen from his exaltation" because of Uriah. So the block asks you to sing the self-vindication of a man scripture says was not vindicated.
There are honest answers. Psalm 26 may be a liturgical oath of innocence regarding a specific accusation, not a claim of general sinlessness. Psalm 32 shows the other David — silence that rots the bones (32:3), confession, release. Some readers find the juxtaposition of Psalm 26 and Psalm 32 the whole point. Others find it disturbing that the psalm of confession never names what was confessed. Both reactions are defensible; the lesson raises neither.
Psalm 1:3 promises the righteous man that everything he does will prosper. The LDS cross-references run to Mosiah 1:7 and Alma 50:20 — the Book of Mormon's prosperity covenant. Last week's block was Job, whose entire argument is that this is not how the world works. Placing Psalm 1 immediately after Job, in the same summer, without comment, is a curriculum choice worth noticing.
The tidy resolution is that Psalm 1 states a general principle and Job the exception. That resolution fails anyone whose life is the exception — which is to say, most people at some point. A better move may be to let the Psalter itself do the arguing: this block contains Psalm 22:1 and Psalm 1:3, side by side, and does not reconcile them. The book is not internally consistent about retribution, and that inconsistency is arguably its most honest feature.
Two more items, briefly, because both get quietly dropped.
First, the imprecations. Psalm 21:10 asks God to destroy the enemies' offspring "from among the children of men." Psalm 28:4 asks him to "render to them their desert." Psalm 40:14 wants the psalmist's enemies "ashamed and confounded." C. S. Lewis, in the chapter "The Cursings" in Reflections on the Psalms (1958), refused to soften these — he called such passages diabolical — while arguing that the vindictiveness is itself evidence of a moral seriousness about evil that indifference lacks. You do not have to accept his solution to appreciate that he did not pretend the verses were not there.
Second, the Joseph Smith Translation. The JST rewrites Psalm 32:1 from "whose sin is covered" to "who have no sins to be covered" — a substantive theological reversal, replacing atonement-as-covering with atonement-as-removal. It also expands Psalm 30:5 and 30:9 considerably. Robert J. Matthews, in "A Plainer Translation" (BYU Press, 1975), treated the JST as substantially restorative. Kevin Barney, in "The Joseph Smith Translation and Ancient Texts of the Bible" (Dialogue 19/3, 1986), found no ancient manuscript support for most JST readings in his sample and proposed reading it as inspired commentary rather than textual restoration. That is not a settled question either, and Psalm 32 is a good place to feel its weight.
One last small thing, offered as a caution about how easily a translation becomes a doctrine. Psalm 46:10, "Be still," which the lesson gives to children as an invitation to quiet contemplation, uses a form of the Hebrew root רפה — a verb whose range in the standard lexicon (Brown-Driver-Briggs) runs to "slacken," "let drop," "desist." In context, one verse after God breaks the bow and burns the chariot (46:9), it reads far more like stop fighting shouted at warring nations than like an invitation to sit quietly. The devotional reading is beautiful. It is also probably not what the line meant. Holding both of those facts at once, without panic, is most of what honest study of the Psalms requires.