In his translation and commentary of Psa 22:16 (Heb. v. 17), Mitchell Dahood
rendered the verse as:
For gods have surrounded me,
a pack of evildoers encircle me,
Piercing my hands and my feet.
He offered the following note supporting the reading of “piercing”
(something that is debated in some circles):
Piercing my hands. Much-contested k’ry is here tentatively
analyzed as an infinitive absolute from kry, “to dig,” with the archaic ending
-I, as in Gen xxx 8, xlix 11; Exod cv 6. See W. L Moran in The Bible
and the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed.
G. E. Wright (New York, 1961), p. 62; J. M. Solá-Solé, L’infinitif sémitique
(Paris, 1961), p. 185b. The aleph would be intrusive as, e.g., in
Prov xxiv 7, r’mwt for rmwt. (Mitchell Dahood, Psalms I—1-50:
Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AB16; New York: Doubleday, 1965], 140-41
