Psalm 22: The Death and Resurrection of King David

In this article, I argue that Psalm 22 should be reckoned as a key text in the development of specifically Jewish resurrection hope. To sustain this thesis, I examine three aspects of the psalm: (1) Building on recent work concerning the psalm’s relationship to Second/Third Isaiah, I argue that there are eschatological features inherent in the psalm’s redaction and that these features extend the resurrection tendencies of Isaiah’s suffering servant(s). (2) I contend that the appellation of the Davidic superscript contemporized and corporatized the psalm and encouraged a dual individual/corporate reading of the text. (3) I trace how the psalm’s poetic depiction of an individual death and resurrection (v. 16) is pluralized into a hope for corporate resurrection (v. 30).