A great darkness shrouded the scene for three hours, and then, in His native Aramaic, Jesus cried in the words of the Psalm, " My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken Me?"
Although there is no psalm which can be shown with any probability to be pre-exilic, it is not impossible that there are some which date from as early a time as the age of Zerubbabel, by whose appointment national hopes were raised to so high a pitch.
The presence of a late hand is also proved by the psalm in xxii.
Since this last collection includes a psalm (cx.) which can scarcely refer to any one earlier than Simon the Maccabee, and cannot well be later than his time, we are justified in assigning the compilation of this collection to about the year 140 B.C. But by this time a great change had taken place in the aims and aspirations of the Jews.
In a psalm which has a chiastic structure one would expect also to find a thematic chiasmus.