This reading was retained by Jerome in his translation from the Greek Hexapla into the Latin of his Gallican Psalter (Foderunt manus meas et pedes meos) which was incorporated into both the Vulgate and the Divine Office.
Significantly, the 5/6 H. ev–Sev4Ps Fragment 11 of Psalm 22 contains the crucial word in the form of what some have suggested may be a third person plural verb, written כארו ("dug").
Wycliffe's Bible of 1395 uses delueden, an alternate spelling of "delveden", the preterite form of the Middle English weak verb delven.
Miles Coverdale in 1535, likely influenced by Luther's German translation as durchgraben (dig through, penetrate), chooses pearsed (pierced); and this has been retained in the majority of subsequent English versions.
To explain how divergent translations from the biblical text came about, Gregory Vall, a Christian professor of Religious Studies at Trinity Western University, speculated that the Septuagint translators were faced with כארו; i.e. as in the Masoretic text, but ending with the longer letter vav (ו) rather than the shorter yod (י), giving כארו ka'aru.
[22] An exception to this is a Psalms fragment from Nahal Hever, where the word in question is written as כארו, karu, which becomes "dug" when omitting the aleph, as Vall had previously speculated.
[24] Gregory Vall proposes that the text originally read אסרו (’asaru), which means "they have bound" before ס and א got inadvertently swapped, resulting in the meaningless סארו, which was later changed into כארי (ka'aru); this could explain why Aquila of Sinope, Symmachus, and Jerome all translated it the word as "to bind".
For example, Craig Blomberg, commenting on the allusions to Psalm 22 in the Gospel of Matthew, includes "he is surrounded by wicked onlookers (22:16a) who pierce his hands and feet (22:16b)" among "an astonishing number of close parallels to the events of Jesus' crucifixion".
[26] However, the phrase is not quoted directly in the New Testament, despite the Septuagint Greek reading "dug" that might be thought to prefigure the piercing of Jesus' hands and feet.