What Does Psalm 22:24 Mean?
For he does not despise, nor recoil from, the bowing low of the bent one; he does not hide his face from him, but when he cries out to him, he hears and responds.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For 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.THE KEY
The person called “afflicted” here is the same עָנִי that Psalm 34:6 calls “poor”: vulnerability does not place the cry outside God’s hearing.
THE MEANING
Your affliction is not despised or treated as something to hide. The face is not turned away from you; when you cry, you are heard. Being heard is present within the distress, before the verse says anything about its ending.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that your suffering makes you repulsive to God or that your cry disappears unheard.
THE ROOT
עָנִי
ʿānî
GROWS FROM
ענה
To be bowed down, humbled, or afflicted.
“bowing low” in this verse is ʿānî. English gives you an affliction and an afflicted person, but Hebrew keeps both within the same root: the distress and the one bent under it share one seed. Psalm 34:6 uses this same word, עָנִי, for “poor,” showing how English divides what Hebrew holds together.
ALSO GROWS
ʿŏnî: Affliction, misery
עֳנִי
This is the noun for the distress paired with the afflicted person in the verse; both come from the same root.
ʿānî: Poor, afflicted, or lowly person
עָנִי
Psalm 34:6 uses this same word for the “poor man” who cries and is heard.
שָׁמֵעַ
shomeaʿ
GROWS FROM
שמע
To hear, listen, or heed.
“hears and responds” in this verse is shomeaʿ. The word translated “heard” belongs to the same root as shema, “hear” or “listen.” The verse presents the cry as received by an attentive hearer, rather than disappearing into silence.
ALSO GROWS
shemaʿ: Hear; listen
שְׁמַע
The familiar call to hear comes from the same root, linking hearing with attentive listening.
shemuʿah: Report, tidings; something heard
שְׁמוּעָה
This branch names what has reached someone’s hearing, echoing the verse’s movement from cry to reception.
THE PATTERN
A cry from within affliction reaches God as something seen and heard.
And the LORD said, I have surely seen the bending low of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their drivers. For I know their pains.The aligned cry out, and the LORD hears, and snatches them out of all their narrow places.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
This bowed one cries out, and the LORD hears him, and brings him out of all his narrow places.Psalm 34:6 calls the one who cries עָנִי (ʿānî), the very same Hebrew word translated “afflicted” in Psalm 22:24. Both verses show the person in distress crying out and being heard.
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