Did the Masoretic Text remove 'they pierced him' from Psalm 22?

Something happened between the pre-Christ Hebrew of Psalm 22:16 and the Hebrew we have at AD 900. The text was not preserved unchanged across the millennium.

Here is what is at stake. Psalm 22:16 contains a phrase that in most English Old Testaments reads "like a lion my hands and my feet" — which is grammatically incomplete and hard to make sense of. The Septuagint reads "they dug / pierced my hands and my feet." Early Christian writers read it as a prophecy of crucifixion. Jewish interpreters, especially post-resurrection, tended to defend the "like a lion" reading.

The Hebrew tells the story. The difference between the two readings is a single letter: יוֹד (yod, י) versus וָו (waw, ו). One letter. The word kāʾărî (כָּאֲרִי, "like a lion") contains the yod at the end. The word kāʾărû (כָּאֲרוּ, "they dug / bored") contains the waw. In old Hebrew script — particularly the paleo-Hebrew and early square script of the pre-Christian period — yod and waw look similar enough that a scribe or a damaged manuscript could produce one where the other was intended. They are also visually distinct enough that, with reasonable care, one could deliberately substitute one for the other.

The pre-Christ Hebrew reads the verbal form. Two independent Hebrew manuscripts preserve it. The Nahal Hever Psalms scroll (5/6HevPs) reads:

[כי] [סבבוני] [כלבי]ם עדת מרעים הקיפוני כארו ידיה ורגלי

"[for] [dogs] [surround me], the assembly of evildoers encircle me; they pierced my hands and my feet"

A separate Qumran manuscript, 4Q88 (4QPsᶠ), attests the same verbal reading. The Septuagint, translated from a Hebrew Vorlage around 200 BC, reads the same — ὤρυξαν (ōryxan, G3736, "they dug / pierced"). Two pre-Christ Hebrew manuscripts and the Greek translation from a third Hebrew Vorlage all attest the verbal reading. The Masoretic tradition that the rabbis preserved through the centuries after Christ carries the noun reading (kāʾărî, "like a lion"), and that reading leaves the line grammatically incomplete: "the assembly of evildoers encircle me; like a lion my hands and my feet" — like a lion does what to my hands and feet? The MT reading does not finish the sentence.

The manuscript evidence makes two things clear and one thing genuinely uncertain. Clear: two pre-Christ Hebrew witnesses (5/6HevPs and 4Q88) read "they pierced." Clear: the Masoretic text reads "like a lion," and that reading is grammatically incomplete in a way the older reading is not. Uncertain: whether the change between the two readings happened through accidental yod/waw confusion in the proto-Masoretic transmission line, through a deliberate scribal substitution, or through two parallel Hebrew Vorlages that already differed before Christ. The mechanism is buried in scribes who left no record.

The conspiracy reading is that the rabbis deliberately altered "they pierced" to "like a lion" to remove a prophecy of crucifixion. The naturalistic reading is that yod/waw confusion is a well-documented Hebrew scribal phenomenon, and this verse is one instance of it. The manuscripts do not allow us to choose between these two explanations — both are mechanically plausible. What the manuscripts do allow is the textual judgment: where the older Hebrew preserves a more grammatically coherent reading at a Christologically pointed verse, the older reading is to be preferred.

"For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evildoers have enclosed me — they have pierced my hands and my feet." — Psalm 22:16 (following the older Hebrew preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the LXX)

No single NT author directly quotes Psalm 22:16's "pierced" phrase, though John alludes to the Psalm in his crucifixion narrative. The full study Which Old Testament? works through the textual case in detail, including what the divergence at Psa 22:16 means for the broader question of when the MT differs from older Hebrew witnesses — and when those differences are real, even if their motive cannot be proven.