«Dios mío, Dios mío, ¿por qué me has abandonado»

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the last cry attributed to Jesus in Shmuel Ash’s account of the crucifixion. It is the decisive rupture in Shmuel’s revision of the Gospel story: Judas Iscariot has arranged the execution in the hope that Jesus will reveal himself as God and descend from the cross, but Jesus dies as a human being, and Judas recognizes that the life he devoted to this expectation has ended.

The cry in Shmuel’s account

In the account Shmuel writes in his notebook, Jesus’s final words come after the crowd has challenged him to save himself and come down from the cross. Jesus struggles to hold on to Judas’s promise, but doubt overtakes him. At the moment of death he cries the words from the Psalms, which Shmuel translates as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The expression does not announce a miracle; in Shmuel’s reading, it is the plea of a dying man who had believed, or believed only partly, that God would help him escape.

Shmuel’s account makes the cry the culmination of an expectation that has governed the scene. Judas has arranged for Jesus to be crucified among two criminals because he believes that the public execution will force Jesus to disclose his divine power. Even as Jesus suffers, Judas expects him to free himself and proclaim the command to love one another. The final cry instead signals that this anticipated revelation will not come.

Death and recognition

The words alter the meaning of the crucifixion for both figures. Jesus dies “like any man,” in Shmuel’s formulation, rather than rising from the cross or demonstrating that he is divine. Judas, watching the failure of the event he organized to produce the promised revelation, understands that he has caused the death of the man he loved and admired. Shmuel’s narrative joins the two deaths in a single moment of recognition: Judas realizes that the purpose of his life has collapsed, leaves, and hangs himself.

The expression therefore carries more than grief or a sense of abandonment. Within Shmuel’s reconstruction it confirms the gap between Judas’s faith in a coming miracle and the human death before him. The cry is the point at which his scheme is exposed as irreparable: instead of bringing about a public revelation, it has brought about the death of Jesus and, soon after, Judas’s own death.

A contested inheritance

Elsewhere in the novel, the phrase belongs to a broader inquiry into how Jewish writers have interpreted Jesus and how Christian tradition has represented Judas. Shmuel notes that Jewish polemicists who disputed Christian accounts of Jesus often avoided writing about Judas, even when they challenged claims about the crucifixion and resurrection. His own account reverses that silence by making Judas central to the Passion: the supposed betrayer becomes the organizer of the crucifixion, and his actions arise from an intense faith in Jesus rather than simple hostility.

The cry also resists any easy equation of religious language with redemption. Gershom Wald argues that religions and revolutions may promise goodness or salvation yet become entangled with persecution and bloodshed when backed by power. Shmuel’s reconstruction gives that skepticism a narrative form: a hoped-for divine intervention does not prevent death, and the words spoken at the cross register abandonment rather than deliverance.

The scene’s counterpoint

A later telling of the crucifixion complicates the emphasis on the final cry. In that scene Jesus calls repeatedly for his mother through the hours before his death; only at the end does he address his father, not as “Father,” but with the words of abandonment. Judas understands that this last utterance means both their lives have ended. The shift from a long appeal to the mother to the final address to God gives the phrase a place within the scene’s movement from human attachment to unanswered appeal.

Across these versions, the expression is the hinge between expectation and recognition. It preserves the words as a familiar scriptural lament while Shmuel’s interpretation places them inside a particular human tragedy: Jesus dies, Judas’s conviction fails, and the hoped-for rescue leaves no one saved.