Panel essay · Psalms · Aug 17–23, 2026 · Six outlooks
Written by an AI persona applying Donald W. Parry's six-outlooks framework. Professor Parry is a real scholar; the framework is his, the words here are not.
Donald W. Parry, professor of Hebrew Bible at Brigham Young University and a member of the international team of translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls, has argued that Isaiah is not read well by one method alone. In a chapter titled "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks", published in Search Diligently the Words of Isaiah (Religious Studies Center, BYU / Deseret Book), he lays out six distinct interpretive stances: the historical or near view; prophecy, or the distant view; dual- and multiple-fulfillment prophecy; likening the words to ourselves; reading a passage for personal reasons; and reading to understand doctrine. Parry has also written on the Psalms — a chapter called "The Psalms: Hymns of Praise, Thanksgiving, and Worship" in From Wilderness to Monarchy — and his framework transfers to the Psalter without strain. (Parry's BYU Speeches page collects his devotional addresses; the six outlooks come from the Isaiah chapter, not from a speech, and the summaries here are paraphrase, not quotation.)
This week's block gives us an obvious test case. I want to take a single line — Psalm 22:1, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?" — and walk it through all six. I chose it over the other strong candidates (Psalm 24:3–5, Psalm 2:7, Psalm 23:4) for one reason: with those verses, the historical reading and the messianic reading run in parallel and reinforce each other. With Psalm 22:1 they collide. The near view and the distant view of this verse end in different places — one in rescue, one in a tomb — and the collision is where the doctrine lives.
A note on the numbering before we start: in the Hebrew Bible the superscription counts as verse 1, so what the King James Version calls 22:1 is 22:2 in Hebrew editions and in most Jewish scholarship. Same words, different address.
Start where Parry says to start — with what the words meant to the person who first said them and the community that first sang them.
Psalm 22 is a lament. A. J. Berkovitz, writing at TheTorah.com, calls it "a typical biblical lament", and the shape is textbook: a cry of abandonment, a catalogue of enemies, a petition, and then a turn. The speaker is surrounded by bulls of Bashan, dogs, and lions (22:12–13, 16, 20–21) — stock imagery for hostile human beings. His body is failing: bones out of joint, heart melted like wax, strength dried like a potsherd, tongue stuck to his jaws (22:14–15). People mock him with a taunt aimed precisely at his piety: "He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him" (22:8).
Notice two things a careful near-view reading turns up.
First, there is no confession of sin. Compare Psalm 31, also ascribed to David, where the speaker says plainly, "my strength faileth because of mine iniquity" (31:10), or Psalm 40:12, "mine iniquities have taken hold upon me." Psalm 22 has no such line. Whatever is happening to this man, the psalm does not present it as deserved. That is unusual, and it matters.
Second, the psalm ends in survival. At verse 22 it pivots hard: "I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee." Then verse 24 says something that flatly contradicts verse 1: "he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard." And verse 25: "I will pay my vows before them that fear him." Vows are paid by someone who is alive. In its near view, Psalm 22 is the testimony of a man who was rescued, standing in the sanctuary, telling the assembly what it felt like in the dark and then what God did.
That is not a small point. Read historically, Psalm 22 is not a psalm about being forsaken. It is a psalm about having felt forsaken, spoken by someone who now knows better.
Even the superscription leans that way. The psalm is set "upon Aijeleth Shahar" — Hebrew ayyelet ha-shachar, "the hind of the dawn." Berkovitz notes the phrase is obscure and may simply name a tune. But if you have Psalm 30:5 in the same week's reading — "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" — the accidental resonance is hard to miss. Something about this psalm was filed under dawn.
Now the second outlook. Jesus of Nazareth, dying, says this verse out loud. Matthew records it in transliterated Aramaic — "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" — and translates it (Matthew 27:46); Mark gives "Eloi, Eloi" (Mark 15:34). The Gospel writers are not reaching for an allusion. They are reporting a quotation.
And once you have the quotation, the rest of the psalm reads like a transcript. Passersby "wagging their heads" and taunting "He trusted in God; let him deliver him now" (Matthew 27:39–43; compare Psalm 22:7–8). Soldiers casting lots for clothing — which John 19:24 explicitly flags as fulfilling scripture, the one place the Gospels name Psalm 22 as prophecy outright (compare Psalm 22:18, Matthew 27:35, Mark 15:24, Luke 23:34). And Psalm 22:16, "they pierced my hands and my feet."
That verse is worth pausing on, because it is where textual scholarship and this week's lesson intersect. The Masoretic Text reads ka'ari, "like a lion," which yields no coherent sentence. The Septuagint translators read a verb — "they dug" or "pierced." A Psalms fragment recovered from Nahal Hever (5/6HevPs) reads ka'aru, with a final waw rather than yod, supporting the verb. Shon D. Hopkin surveyed the evidence in "The Psalm 22:16 Controversy: New Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls," BYU Studies 44:3, and concluded the "pierced" reading is superior and — crucially — that it predates the Jewish–Christian polemic, so it cannot be a Christian retrojection. Conrad R. Gren treated the same crux in "Piercing the Ambiguities of Psalm 22:16 and the Messiah's Mission," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48/2 (June 2005): 283–99. The reading is not universally settled — the fragment's legibility has been questioned — but the honest summary is that the oldest Hebrew evidence and the oldest translation agree against the medieval Masoretic vocalization.
Held at the distant view, then, Psalm 22 is a description of a Roman execution written centuries before Rome existed.
Parry's third outlook says some passages are fulfilled more than once, or admit more than one legitimate reading. Psalm 22 is the case that proves why that category is necessary rather than a dodge.
Here is the grinding point. In the near view, verse 24 is the resolution: God did not hide his face. In the distant view, verse 1 is the truth: he did. The historical speaker was mistaken about being forsaken and lived to say so. The Man on the cross was not mistaken, and did not live.
So the psalm's own answer to its own question — "he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted" — becomes, in the messianic reading, a promise that appears to fail at exactly the moment it matters most. Unless the resolution has moved. Unless "he heard" is answered three days later rather than three verses later. Read that way, the psalm's structure is not broken by the crucifixion; it is stretched across it. Verses 1–21 are Friday. Verse 22 forward — "I will declare thy name unto my brethren" — is what the Epistle to the Hebrews does with this psalm, quoting Psalm 22:22 as the risen Christ's words about those he is not ashamed to call brethren (Hebrews 2:12). The turn at verse 22 is the Resurrection.
And there is a third fulfillment, which most Latter-day Saint readers have never encountered. In the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 15b, Rabbi Levi has Esther speak this verse: as she passes the house of idols on her way to the king, the divine presence departs from her and she says, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Berkovitz documents the tradition, along with the reading of ayyelet ha-shachar as Esther herself — the doe who brought light like the dawn. A queen walking toward a throne room where she may be killed, saying the same words. The verse has been three people's, and refusing any one of them impoverishes the other two.
The fourth outlook is Nephi's: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23), and "liken them unto yourselves, that ye may have hope" (19:24). Note that Nephi gives a purpose — hope — which is a constraint as much as a permission.
Likening Psalm 22:1 does not mean claiming your circumstances are Gethsemane. It means claiming the grammar. What the verse licenses is this: you may address God directly, in the second person, with an accusation, and this counts as worship. The psalm is in the hymnbook. Israel sang it. The complaint is not a lapse from faith that the psalm later repairs — it is the opening line of the liturgy.
This is where the near view earns its keep. If you only have the messianic reading, Psalm 22:1 is a sentence only Christ may say, and it stays sealed. The historical reading unseals it. A man who was not the Messiah said these words, was wrong about the forsaking, and was still right to say them out loud in the sanctuary.
Parry's fifth outlook is the loosest and the most honest: sometimes we go to a passage for comfort, strength, or personal revelation, and what we receive has little to do with what the passage is technically about.
I will name the personal use plainly, because it is the one most people actually make of this verse. Psalm 22:1 is the scripture that establishes that the feeling of divine absence is not evidence of divine absence. Verse 1 and verse 24 are in the same poem, in the same voice. The man who said "thou hearest not" (22:2) also said "when he cried unto him, he heard" (22:24). Both are true statements about the same episode, made from different points in time.
If you have ever been told that your dryness or your silence means something is wrong with your faith, this psalm is the counterevidence, and it is canonical. The lesson manual for this week gestures at the same thing when it observes that the psalmists "express fear, sorrow, or anxiety" and that "such feelings are normal, even for people of faith" (Come, Follow Me — Old Testament 2026, lesson 34).
Parry places doctrine sixth and last — the culminating outlook, the one the other five are feeding. So: what does Psalm 22:1 teach, as a proposition about God?
Three things, I think, and they are load-bearing.
First, that the Atonement included abandonment as a component, not merely pain. The cry is not "this hurts." It is "you are not here." Whatever else the Atonement was, Psalm 22:1 on Christ's lips asserts that it contained the experience of the withdrawal of God — which is the one thing the Son had never known. The physical horrors of verses 14–18 are prelude. Verse 1 is the wound.
Second, that the Messiah's suffering was scripted before it was suffered. Not in the sense that the psalmist knew he was writing about a crucifixion — the near view forbids that reading. In the sense that a real man's real anguish, written down for reasons entirely his own, turned out to be shaped in advance to fit a later and larger anguish. That is a claim about how God works in history, and it is more interesting than a simple prediction would be. The psalm was not a coded message. It was a life, and the life was a type.
Third, and this is the doctrine the six outlooks together produce that no single outlook produces alone: the psalm demonstrates that God's answer can arrive after the verse that says it didn't. Verse 1 is not corrected by verse 24 the way an error is corrected. It is outlived. The near view shows a man who got to verse 24. The distant view shows a Man who got there by way of a tomb. And the likening outlook says the same architecture is available to you — that you are permitted to be at verse 1, out loud, in the congregation, with the rest of the psalm not yet written.
That is why this psalm sits in the same week as "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (23:1) and "God is our refuge and strength" (46:1). Psalm 23 is what the shepherd looks like from the green pasture. Psalm 22 is what he looks like from the valley of the shadow, when you cannot see him at all and say so — and it is the same shepherd, and the same psalter, and the dawn is in the title.