A Crimson Worm

By the end of Psalm 22, you can feel the grit under your nails.

It opens with abandonment—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"—and then it keeps digging, as if the only honest way to talk from that place is downward. The psalmist doesn't dress his pain up as a "hard season." He names the social reality of it.

"But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people."
—Psalm 22:6

The point is not to find Christ in an insect; the point is to watch how Scripture turns humiliation into the place mercy begins.

The line doesn't need help. "I am a worm" already names the place where dignity dies—where a person is no longer argued with, only used. Where you're beneath the category of "neighbor" and drifting toward the category of "thing."

And still, Hebrew poetry rarely settles for a single register. Words carry residue. They echo. They stain.

The word translated "worm" here is often linked to tolaʿath—a term that can name the creature and the crimson dye associated with it. Hebrew doesn't lack other options. If you want "maggot," rimmah exists. So when the verse carries a word that can hold both worm and crimson, it creates a kind of double exposure: humiliation overlaid with stain.

Anyone claiming airtight certainty about the author's intent is overselling what they can prove—and they know it.

That's why the popular "crimson worm lifecycle" story feels so irresistible: the little nature parable where a mother affixes herself to wood, births her young in red, is consumed to feed them, and then turns white. It preaches itself. It also tends to be repeated with a certainty it has not earned. At best, it's an illustration. It is not an argument.

The Bible hands you something sturdier than folklore.

Scarlet in Scripture is not a cute color. It's what guilt looks like when it won't be hidden.

"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."
—Isaiah 1:18

Scarlet is guilt that won't stay private. Not because God is squeamish, but because sin is not a smudge—it's rupture. It tears something in the world, and the tear bleeds.

That is why scarlet saturates the architecture of worship. It shows up in curtains and veils, in priestly garments, in rites of cleansing—threaded through the whole system like a warning: nearness to God is not a vibe; it is purchased.

"And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen…"
—Exodus 25:4

"Then shall the priest command to take… cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop…"
—Leviticus 14:4

Again and again, the color returns wherever access and cleansing are being taught to a stubborn people: holiness is not assumed. It is granted. It costs.

And once you see that, the "worm" deepens without needing any insect mythology. The worm names humiliation—the stripping away of personhood. Crimson names stain: not cosmetic failure, but moral rupture. And whiteness names the impossible hope that what is soaked through might still be made clean.

That hope runs all the way through Israel's imagination. Even the later tradition about the Day of Atonement—the scapegoat sent away, the crimson thread watched, the longing for red to become white—draws power from the same human ache: not to manage guilt, but to be cleansed of it. The symbol is older than any single story. Guilt transferred. Stain removed. Acceptance made visible.

Then the New Testament refuses to let it stay poetic:

"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin…"
—2 Corinthians 5:21

That sentence is not decorative. It is the claim that the stain is not ignored; it is carried. The humiliation is not denied; it is entered. The lowest place is not bypassed; it becomes the doorway.

Psalm 22 doesn't need to be a clever code. Its force is more terrifying and more tender than that. It dares to imagine redemption beginning at the bottom—where humans stop performing, stop bargaining, stop polishing. Where the only honest thing left to say is the thing the psalmist said:

I am a worm.

And the terrifying consolation is that God does not start with your best self. He starts with the one on the floor, dirt in his mouth, whispering the only honest prayer left—and God answers that mouthful of dirt with mercy—blood-bought, cleansing, real.