Psalm 16 and the Prophecy of Messiah

In Acts 2 the apostle Peter is preaching to the Pentecost crowds who have been drawn to the apostles by their miraculous speaking in the foreign languages represented by the Jews there from other countries outside Israel. Peter declares that the crucified Jesus couldn’t be held by death but came back to life as king David had said, and he quotes a portion of Psalm 16:

^{Acts 2:25} I foresaw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I might not be shaken. ²⁶ Therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced; my flesh also will dwell in hope. ²⁷ For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor will you let your holy one see corruption. ²⁸ You have made known to me the paths of life. You will make me full of gladness with your presence.

Then Peter says,

²⁹ Brothers, I can tell you with confidence concerning the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. ³⁰ Being, therefore, a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would place one of his descendants on his throne, ³¹ he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. ³² This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses.

Peter seems to be saying that Psalm 16 was a direct prophecy by David that the Messiah would be resurrected from the dead, that it is the Messiah, Yahweh’s holy one, who is being promised that he would not be abandoned to Sheol or Hades, and would, in fact, not see corruption in death, but would know the paths of life.

However, when one reads Psalm 16 it does not so clearly seem to speak about Messiah, but rather about David, who is requesting preservation from an immediate danger, declaring his faithfulness to Yahweh as motivation for Yahweh to answer his request, David, who receives a word from Yahweh that Yahweh will indeed answer his prayer, then explodes in confidence over how God will keep him from dying.

How can this be a prophecy of Messiah?

Trull[1] has given a helpful survey of the various views as to how this psalm functions prophetically. One view is that it does not function prophetically at all, that the translators of the Old Testament into Greek (the Septuagint) and the apostles were affected by the more developed views of the afterlife that had arisen after the Old Testament period and that led the translators to mistranslate the Hebrew of Psalm 16:8-11 and the apostles to misapply the mistranslation as a prophecy of Messiah’s resurrection. To be sure, the Greek translation of these verses is what the apostles used, and it does have some questionable choices, questionable, but not necessarily wrong.

For example, in Psalm 16:8 the Septuagint translates שִׁוִּ֬יתִי, shiviti, a piel perfect, I have set, with προορώμην, proorōmēn, an imperfect middle indicative, I was seeing or foreseeing. Though this doesn’t have to be translated ‘foreseeing,’ it suggests a more prophetic action, “I was seeing or foreseeing the Lord always before me.” In verse 9 the Septuagint translates בֶֽטַח, betach, security, with ἐλπίδι, elpidi, hope. The word betach suggests being confident or without care, and this approaches hopefulness, but hope, elpidi, has a forward, future-looking perspective to it that is not really encompassed in the word betach. In verse 10 the Hebrew שָֽׁחַת, shachat, pit, is translated by the Greek διαφθοράν, diaphthoran, corruption. To be sure, shachat can be legitimately translated ‘corruption’ or ‘destruction’ (see Psalm 55:23, the pit of shachat, and Isaiah 38:17 where the shachat, the pit, is called the shachat of destruction). The pit is the burial place, or death itself, which is associated with the corruption of the flesh in death. But none of these translation shifts radically changes what the Hebrew signifies in terms of a potential Messianic prophecy as the other views see it.

The sensus plenior or fuller meaning view believes that what David intended in the psalm was him being prevented from death by God’s deliverance, but that God, the divine author behind David’s words, intended a rescuing from an experienced physical death of Messiah through resurrection. David would have had no sense or intention of referring to Messiah, but God did. This would be akin to what the apostle John says of the high priest Caiaphas’ declaration, “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish,” that “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation” (John 11:50,51). The problem with this view is it takes any intended meaning by David out of the picture, whereas Peter says,

^{Acts 2: 30} Being, therefore, a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would place one of his descendants on his throne, ³¹ he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.

David, in Peter’s view, did intend this meaning, in some sense, at least.

This same problem attends the canonical view, which says the meaning of Psalm 16 evolved through the years from seeing David as the individual referred to in the psalm to the kingly line being referred to, and then to a messianic reference which the apostles applied, then, to Jesus. These evolving meanings leave behind David’s original intent for one created by those who read the psalm in later centuries. That doesn’t fit Peter’s description either.

The direct prophecy view understands David’s intended meaning to be that God would preserve or deliver the Messiah from death by actually letting him die and then resurrecting him. David says, in verse 10 of the psalm, that, as Peter quotes it from the Greek translation (Septuagint),

^{Acts 2:27} For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor will you let your holy one see corruption.

That is, you will not abandon me, David, to Hades (Sheol in Hebrew), and you will not let your Messiah see corruption.

This would certainly make this a direct prophecy about Messiah, but it is hard to accept that this is what David is saying. If “holy one” was a unique descriptor only used of the anticipated Messiah or of Yahweh, one could see this interpretation. But it is a common term used of God’s people.[2] And the way Peter argues his case (‘we know David is buried here and therefore corrupted’) suggests that everyone has understood David’s statement in Psalm 16:10 to be referring to himself. This has certainly been the consistent interpretation of Jewish commentators,[3] and makes the most sense of the passage. Why would David suddenly switch from speaking of himself to speaking of the Messiah? How would the disposition of God toward the Messiah mean anything specifically for David? It doesn’t seem logical.

The other problem with this view is that Peter says David said of Messiah both that he was not abandoned to Hades and that he did not see corruption. Peter does not see a differentiation between David in the first part of verse 10 and Jesus in the second part.

The best understanding of how Psalm 16 could be a prophecy of Messiah is the typological view. Trull cites Baker in defining a type as “a biblical event, person, or institution which serves as an example or pattern for other events, persons or institutions.”[4] In this case, David is the type, the biblical person, king of Israel, who serves as an example or pattern for the Messiah who is his offspring and legitimate claimant to the throne. Because the Jews viewed themselves as a corporate solidarity, that is, that individuals and groups are bound together so tightly—covenantally, socially, and spiritually—that the actions of one member affect the whole, and the identity of the whole shapes the individual, it was understood that the experiences of the type could and would be duplicated in the promised ultimate Israelite, Messiah. Thus, though David was not attending consciously, most likely, to the person of Messiah in Psalm 16, if asked could his experience be duplicated by Messiah, he could say yes. This is not sensus plenior because the human author is indirectly intending the meaning.

What is somewhat problematic is that the experience of David, in this understanding of the psalm, is that he is kept from dying and thus spared from Sheol and corruption. That is not exactly what was duplicated with Messiah. He was not spared death but died and then was raised to life. Was there an expectation that the experience of the type could be escalated in the anti-type? Could David have had an expectation that the Messiah’s experience would be like his but also eclipse it, that whereas David escaped death by being kept from it, Messiah would escape death by dying but then by being resurrected? Maybe not that exact escalation, but some escalation? Where would this expectation of an escalation come from?

We see escalations like this  in the fulfillment of types (the righteous person will have no broken bones [meant as hyperbole or exaggeration] but Messiah literally has no broken bones, Psalm 34:20 and John 19:36. That is an escalation of the type’s experience. Again, Isaiah’s wife [virgin=young woman] has a child [named God with us] as a sign to Ahab, but Jesus is born of a literal virgin and is literally God with us, Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23. Perhaps expectation of an escalation for the antitype comes from the experience of Israel that prophecies had minor fulfillments before the ultimate fulfillment (the seed of the woman has conflict with the seed of the serpent over and over before the final fulfillment leading to the total defeat of the serpent’s seed; Moses has many prophets succeed him before the ultimate prophet comes, etc.; Joshua can speak as if the acquiring of the land of Canaan fulfills all of God’s good promises for Israel, Joshua 21:45, whereas there was a future expectation of an even broader fulfillment, say like in Ezekiel 40-47). Maybe that produced this expectation in Israelites of an escalation of what was experienced by the type. If so, it is still within David’s intended meaning that Messiah could have an experience like his, only elevated beyond his experience.

And thus Peter, understanding how types work, could speak of David prophesying the Messiah’s resurrection, not meaning directly and consciously, but indirectly and as part of David’s shared consciousness with all Israel.

[1] Views on Peter’s Use of Psalm 16:8–11 in Acts 2:25–32, Gregory V. Trull, Bibliotheca Sacra 161:642 (Apr 2004)

2] 1 Samuel 2:9; 2 Chronicles 6:41; Psalm 4:3; 12:1; 18:26; 31:23; 32:6; 37:28; 50:5; 52:9; 79:2; 86:2; 89:18; 97:10; 116:15; 132:9,16; 145:10; 148:14; 149:1,5,9; Micah 7:2

[3] The early Jewish transmission of Psalm 16: from psalm to messianic proof text in Luke-Acts, James L. Johns (Edinburgh Research Archive, https://era.ed.ac.uk/items/ceff1a0a-b8f7-4475-8953-23f4e0bfa8f9?utm_source=copilot.com)

[4] Baker, Two Testaments One Bible, 195.