Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34

The divine vocatives in Daniel 9:19 that I wrote about last week got me thinking about Matthew 27:46:

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Mark 15:34 is a parallel verse:

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I think it may be significant that "My God" is repeated here.  Of course, this is a quotation of Psalm 22:1, where אֵלִי appears twice, but in this context, where Jesus is experiencing a separation from God as part of the punishment for sin, it's almost as if each "My God" is directed to an-other Person in the Trinity:  one to God the Father and one to the Holy Spirit.  The verbs here are singular, though.

Matthew 27:20

For about a year and a half now, I've been slowly working through New Testament Greek for Laymen by Michael Merritt, which I downloaded from the resources page of the Daily Dose of Greek website.  Two months ago, I lookt up Matthew 27:20, since it's one of the "verses for application" at the end of Chapter 13 "Aorist Active and Middle Indicative."

Οἱ δὲ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ πρεσβύτεροι ἔπεισαν τοὺς ὄχλους ἵνα αἰτήσωνται τὸν Βαραββᾶν, τὸν δὲ Ἰησοῦν ἀπολέσωσιν.

Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus.  [ESV]

At first, I noticed only that - as I'd been noting with many other verses at the time - there's a chiastic structure that indicates opposites:  αἰτήσωνται τὸν Βαραββᾶν, τὸν δὲ Ἰησοῦν ἀπολέσωσιν  "to ask for Barabbas, Jesus to destroy."  By themselves, these two verbs don't mean opposite things, but they do in this context.

(For what it's worth, the same structure is also in the Latin Vulgate:  "Princeps autem sacerdotum et seniores persuaserunt populis ut peterent Barabban Iesum vero perderent")

In thinking about the verse some more, I realized that this chiastic structure may also indicate the thoughts of the chief priests and elders, namely that they want to crucify Jesus (the structure of the chiasm resembles the shape of the cross).  Right after this, in verses 22-23, the crowd, incited by the chief priests and elders, calls for Jesus' crucifixion.  The chiastic structure here may act as a sort of foreshadowing of this.

Matthew 27:46-47

Recently, I was thinking about the part in Matthew 27 where Jesus calls out, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" and some in the crowd think that He is calling Elijah.  In the same way that they miss the source of Jesus' words (Psalm 22:1) and don't recognize "Eli" as אֵלִי, the Hebrew word for "my God," they also don't recognize Jesus as the Word of God.

Matthew 27:59

A couple years ago, I noticed that in the recitative "Und Joseph nahm den Leib" in Bach's St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, there's internal rhyme in the first sentence:  "Und Joseph nahm den Leib und wickelte ihn in ein' rein Leinwand."  In May (the 7th, to be specific), I realized that there's significance to this.

First of all, translated, this is: "And Joseph took the body [of Jesus] and wrapt it in a clean linen."  My German Bible is only slightly different from the text in the Bach oratorio: "Und Josef nahm den Leib und wickelte ihn in ein reines Leinentuch" (Matthew 27:59).

The internal rhyming of "ein' rein Leinwand" or "ein reines Leinentuch" ("a clean linen cloth") illustrates the purity and cleanliness of the linen cloth.