The Worm, the Scarlet, and the Cross

Matthew records that near the end of the crucifixion Jesus cried, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). These words should first be heard as the words of a suffering man. Jesus is not merely reciting Scripture from the cross as though He were detached from its anguish. He is enduring the horror and shame of crucifixion while bearing the consequences of human sin.

At the same time, the words He chooses are not accidental. Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1, and that quotation invites the hearer who knows the Scriptures to return to the psalm from which it comes.

Psalm 22 begins with the experience of apparent abandonment. The suffering righteous man cries to God while deliverance seems distant. His enemies surround him, ridicule his confidence in God, and treat his suffering as evidence that God will not rescue him. As the lament develops, the language becomes even more severe. In verse 6 the sufferer declares, “But I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people.”

The Hebrew terminology translated “worm” belongs to the tôlaʿ word family. That detail will eventually prove important, but responsible interpretation requires us first to establish what the word is doing in Psalm 22 itself. The psalmist is not describing the biological characteristics of an insect. He is describing humiliation. The second half of the verse interprets the first: he is “a reproach of men and despised by the people.” He has been treated as though his human dignity has disappeared and he has become something beneath the regard of those who surround him.

That immediate context must remain our interpretive anchor. Only after establishing what the image means within Psalm 22 are we prepared to investigate how the same vocabulary functions elsewhere in Scripture.

An especially interesting comparison occurs in Job 25:6, where Bildad emphasizes the frailty and insignificance of humanity when compared with the majesty of God. He asks, “How much less man, that maggot, and the son of man, that worm!”

English translations can obscure an interesting feature of the Hebrew because Bildad does not use the same word in both halves of the poetic parallelism. The first term is rimmah, a word associated with worms or maggots and used elsewhere in contexts involving corruption, decomposition, and death. The imagery is appropriate to Bildad’s argument because mortal humanity eventually returns to the earth and experiences bodily decay. The creature who might imagine himself impressive before God is nevertheless mortal.

In the second half of the verse, however, Bildad changes his vocabulary. When he speaks of the “son of man,” he uses tôlēʿâ, belonging to the same Hebrew word family encountered in Psalm 22:6.

We must resist the temptation to make more of this than the passage itself permits. Job 25:6 is not a direct messianic prophecy merely because Bildad uses the expression “son of man.” Within Job’s immediate setting, ben adam is a normal expression for humanity. Nor should Hebrew parallelism be converted into a secret code in which every difference in vocabulary necessarily anticipates a later theological development.

Nevertheless, the lexical distinction deserves to be noticed. In Job 25:6, mortal man is compared with rimmah, language particularly evocative of corruption and decay, while the “son of man” is compared with tôlaʿ. Psalm 22 subsequently places the tôlaʿ image upon the lips of the suffering righteous man, and Jesus—who repeatedly identifies Himself in the Gospels as the Son of Man—deliberately speaks Psalm 22 from the cross.

These passages should not be collapsed into one another as though Job were consciously predicting the crucifixion. Yet when Scripture is read canonically, the resonance is worth hearing. Canonical interpretation permits us to recognize such relationships while still respecting the historical and literary integrity of each passage.

The tôlaʿ word family becomes even more interesting because its semantic world extends beyond the simple image of a worm. The terminology is associated with the insect from which valuable crimson or scarlet dye was produced in the ancient world. Modern archaeological and scientific investigation has confirmed that brilliant scarlet dyes in the ancient Near East could be produced from scale insects, and the labor required to gather and process the material made such textiles valuable.

This historical background allows us to understand why the same Hebrew lexical family can participate in two apparently different semantic worlds. On the one hand, it can designate the small creature itself; on the other, it becomes associated with the distinctive crimson color produced from it.

Here, however, another interpretive distinction is necessary. Tôlaʿ does not lexically mean “royalty,” and we should not teach that Psalm 22:6 could simply be translated, “I am royal.” That would ask the Hebrew word to carry a meaning it does not possess. The connection with royalty is indirect but nevertheless historically meaningful. Scarlet was difficult and expensive to produce, and scarlet textiles therefore appeared in sacred, prestigious, elite, and sometimes royal settings.

This distinction actually makes the teaching stronger because it allows us to appreciate the association without confusing association with lexical meaning. The worm itself is not “royalty,” but the crimson produced from this small and seemingly insignificant creature could adorn places and persons of extraordinary dignity.

That tension between lowliness and dignity will become particularly interesting as the canonical story develops.

Once we recognize the relationship between this word family and crimson dye, the Old Testament begins to provide a broader canonical setting. Scarlet repeatedly appears in the construction and service of Israel’s Tabernacle. In Exodus, scarlet is placed alongside blue and purple in the curtains, the veil, the ephod, the breastpiece, priestly garments, and other sacred textiles associated with Israel’s worship.

Consequently, scarlet became part of the visual world in which Israel encountered the holiness and presence of God. It belonged to the sanctuary, the priesthood, and the ceremonial life of the covenant community. Scarlet also appears in purification rituals, further embedding the color within Israel’s religious imagination.

The imagery takes another significant turn in Isaiah 1:18, where God declares, “Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool.” Here scarlet and crimson function as images of deeply stained sin against which the transforming cleansing of God is dramatically displayed.

We should not conclude that every occurrence of scarlet in Exodus or Isaiah secretly predicts the crucifixion. Such an approach would confuse canonical interpretation with uncontrolled allegory. Instead, we should recognize that biblical vocabulary develops within an increasingly rich theological environment. Scarlet belongs to Israel’s world of sacred space, priesthood, purification, sin, cleansing, prestige, and dignity. Those associations become part of the canonical background against which later biblical uses of scarlet can be heard.

That background becomes particularly intriguing when Matthew describes the humiliation of Jesus immediately before His crucifixion. The Roman soldiers strip Him and place a scarlet robe upon Him. They press a crown of thorns upon His head, place a reed in His hand, kneel mockingly before Him, and hail Him as “King of the Jews.”

The scarlet robe is intended to humiliate Jesus through the parody of royalty. The soldiers are not acknowledging His kingship; they are ridiculing it. Everything that ordinarily signifies dignity is transformed into an instrument of shame. The robe imitates royal clothing, the thorns imitate a crown, the reed imitates a scepter, and their kneeling imitates the homage offered to a king. Their entire performance communicates contempt.

This is precisely where the canonical setting begins to deepen our understanding of the scene. Psalm 22 describes a righteous sufferer who considers himself a tôlaʿ because he has become “a reproach of men and despised by the people.” Matthew presents Jesus being publicly subjected to that same kind of degradation. The soldiers surround Him, ridicule His identity, and transform the symbols of kingship into instruments of humiliation.

We should not claim that Matthew’s scarlet robe was necessarily dyed from the particular insect associated with the Hebrew tôlaʿ, nor does Matthew explicitly identify the robe as a fulfillment of Psalm 22:6. Such claims would go beyond the evidence. Nevertheless, the canonical resonance remains striking. The word family associated with the humiliated “worm” of Psalm 22 also belongs to the world of crimson, while Matthew places a scarlet garment upon the humiliated Messiah immediately before He is crucified and quotes Psalm 22 from the cross.

The irony is profound. Rome uses the appearance of royalty to declare Jesus ridiculous, while the remainder of the Gospel will demonstrate that the One mocked as king truly is King.

Mark tells us that Jesus was crucified at approximately the third hour. Then, beginning at the sixth hour, darkness came over the land and remained until the ninth hour. At the conclusion of that period of darkness, Jesus cried the opening words of Psalm 22.

The narrative progression deserves careful attention because the Gospel itself supplies the theological setting. Jesus has already endured hours upon the cross when darkness descends. For approximately three hours the land remains covered in darkness, and at the ninth hour the silence is broken by the cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Earlier forms of the popular Tola-worm teaching sometimes connected an alleged three-day period in the insect’s reproductive cycle with the three days between Christ’s death and resurrection. That comparison is memorable, but the biological evidence is not sufficiently strong to support the elaborate parallel frequently repeated in Christian teaching. We do not need to defend an uncertain biological analogy when the Gospel itself gives us a much firmer narrative framework. The three hours of darkness immediately precede Jesus’ invocation of Psalm 22, and they therefore belong to the biblical account itself rather than to an illustration imported into it.

We should exercise similar care with the common statement that Jesus was “separated from the Father” during those three hours. Scripture unmistakably presents Christ as bearing sin and enduring the terrible reality of divine judgment, and His cry must not be emptied of its genuine anguish. At the same time, the Gospel writers never state that the eternal relationship between Father and Son was ontologically severed for three hours. We can affirm everything Scripture says about Christ bearing our sin without attempting to describe the inner life of the Trinity beyond what Scripture reveals.

If Jesus’ words direct us to Psalm 22, then responsible canonical reading requires more than recognizing the quotation. We must read the entire psalm.

The opening portion certainly contains anguish. The sufferer experiences apparent abandonment, public humiliation, physical distress, and the mockery of enemies who challenge his confidence in God. He describes himself as a worm and not a man. Those around him ridicule his trust in the LORD. His strength disappears, enemies surround him, and even his garments become the possession of others.

The correspondence with the crucifixion narratives becomes increasingly striking as the psalm progresses. Yet the most important interpretive observation may be that Psalm 22 does not remain in this atmosphere of abandonment.

Psalm 22:24 declares that God “has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.” That statement must be allowed to stand beside the opening cry. The psalm begins with the experience of being forsaken, but it eventually testifies that God heard the afflicted one. The apparent abandonment experienced within the suffering is therefore not God’s final verdict upon the sufferer.

This is one reason we should hesitate before constructing an elaborate doctrine of Trinitarian separation from Psalm 22:1 alone. The canonical setting of Jesus’ quotation includes not merely the cry with which the psalm begins but also the vindication toward which the psalm moves.

The movement of Psalm 22 becomes even more remarkable in its final portion. The sufferer who began the psalm crying in apparent abandonment eventually declares that he will praise God among his brethren. From there the horizon widens beyond Israel until “all the ends of the earth” remember and turn to the LORD and “all the families of the nations” worship before Him.

The horizon then extends beyond the immediate generation. Future generations will hear what God has done. The suffering of one despised individual ultimately becomes the occasion for testimony extending to peoples and generations far beyond him.

When we return to the Gospel after reading the whole psalm, Jesus’ quotation takes on a much richer canonical setting. The cross remains an event of terrible suffering, and nothing about the larger context should be used to diminish that reality. Nevertheless, humiliation is not the conclusion of either Psalm 22 or the Gospel.

Jesus dies and is buried, but He is raised. The One publicly mocked as “King of the Jews” is vindicated by God. The One whose enemies used the symbols of royalty to humiliate Him is revealed through resurrection to possess an authority Rome could neither grant nor remove. What human beings intended as a declaration of shame becomes, in the unfolding purpose of God, part of the pathway to exaltation.

Philippians 2 expresses the same movement from another perspective. Christ humbles Himself in obedience “to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and Paul immediately follows that statement with the declaration, “Therefore also God highly exalted Him.” Humanity’s verdict at Golgotha and God’s verdict in resurrection stand in dramatic contrast. Those who crucified Jesus treated Him as a reproach, while God vindicated and exalted Him. The scarlet robe that was intended to ridicule His kingship becomes deeply ironic when viewed from the other side of the empty tomb.

At this point we can return to the Tôlaʿ and recognize that the most valuable lesson it gives us is not an elaborate biological analogy to the crucifixion. Its greater value lies in what our investigation teaches us about biblical interpretation itself.

The popular version of the Tola story is immediately attractive because the parallels appear extraordinary. The creature is said to attach itself to wood, sacrifice itself for its offspring, release a crimson stain, and involve a three-day period that seems to correspond beautifully with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Such an illustration is memorable and emotionally powerful.

The difficulty is that not all of those details can be established with the confidence necessary to build biblical teaching upon them. At that point, the interpreter faces an important decision. We can preserve the illustration because it is effective, or we can submit the illustration to historical investigation and to Scripture itself.

When we choose the latter approach, something important happens. We do not impoverish the lesson by removing questionable material; instead, we discover that the biblical evidence is richer than the illustration we were attempting to protect.

The uncertain three-day biological parallel gives way to the actual three hours of darkness recorded by the Gospel writers. The popular description of the worm gives way to the genuine lexical relationship between tôlaʿ and crimson. That relationship takes us into the sacred textiles of Israel’s Tabernacle, Isaiah’s imagery of scarlet sin and divine cleansing, the humiliation of the suffering righteous man in Psalm 22, and the scarlet robe placed mockingly upon Jesus before His crucifixion. Job 25 adds another dimension by placing rimmah, the imagery of decay, beside tôlēʿâ in its description of mortal humanity.

What began as an interesting story about a worm therefore becomes something far more substantial: an illustration of how careful interpretation works.

Canonical interpretation does not mean searching the Bible for words that sound alike and then constructing theological connections between them. Neither does it mean assuming that every repeated image constitutes a hidden prophecy. Rather, canonical interpretation begins by allowing each passage to speak within its own historical and literary setting before asking how that passage participates in the larger revelation of Scripture.

That sequence matters enormously. Psalm 22:6 must first describe humiliation before tôlaʿ can contribute anything further to our study. Job 25:6 must first concern human frailty before its vocabulary can be compared with Psalm 22. The scarlet materials of Exodus must first belong to the worship of Israel before we ask how scarlet functions elsewhere in the canon. Matthew’s scarlet robe must first be recognized as an instrument of mock royalty before we consider the theological irony created by the resurrection.

Later revelation can illuminate earlier revelation without erasing what the earlier text originally meant.

This approach protects us from two opposite interpretive errors. One is isolation, in which we treat individual verses as though they have no literary, historical, or canonical context. The other is uncontrolled imagination, in which every verbal similarity becomes a prophetic connection regardless of whether Scripture provides sufficient reason for making it.

Responsible canonical interpretation avoids both errors by respecting the boundaries of the text while remaining attentive to the relationships that Scripture itself creates.

The most important lesson from this study may ultimately be very simple: when a passage of Scripture opens a door into another part of the biblical canon, we should walk through it carefully and continue reading.

When Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” we should not stop with the emotional power of that sentence. We should recognize Psalm 22 and return to the psalm. When the psalmist says, “I am a worm and not a man,” we should not immediately construct a theology from the biological characteristics of an insect. We should first ask what the image means within the psalm and then investigate how its vocabulary appears elsewhere in Scripture. When we encounter crimson and scarlet, we should follow those associations carefully without assuming that every occurrence carries precisely the same theological significance.

As we proceed in this manner, the canonical landscape gradually comes into view. Job reminds us of humanity’s mortality and frailty. Psalm 22 gives voice to the humiliation of the suffering righteous one. Israel’s worship introduces us to the costly scarlet that adorned sacred space. Isaiah uses scarlet and crimson to portray the stain of sin and the astonishing cleansing of God. Matthew clothes Jesus in scarlet as part of Rome’s cruel parody of kingship, and Jesus Himself directs us back to Psalm 22 while hanging upon the cross.

Yet neither Psalm 22 nor the Gospel ends with humiliation. The sufferer is heard, the despised one is vindicated, the nations are brought into view, and future generations are told what God has accomplished. In the Gospel, the crucified Christ is raised, and the One whom human beings clothed as a king in mockery is revealed to be the King whom God has vindicated.

That is why canonical setting matters. A single verse may give us a genuine truth, but the larger canon allows us to see where that truth belongs within the unfolding revelation of God. Sometimes the detail that begins the investigation is surprisingly small. In this case, it is nothing more impressive than a worm. Yet when that word is studied responsibly within its immediate context and then followed carefully through the canon, it opens a window onto humiliation, mortality, scarlet, sacrifice, kingship, the cross, and vindication.

The lesson, therefore, is not merely that we should look more closely at the Tôlaʿ. The lesson is that we should learn to read Scripture as Scripture was given to us: not as a collection of isolated verses, but as a unified canonical witness whose individual voices become clearer, deeper, and richer when they are heard together.