Commentary for Psalms 22:16

my palate Heb. מלקוחי. This is the palate which is called palayc (palais) in Old French, gaumen in German. When a person is distressed, he has no saliva in his mouth. Menachem, however, interprets מלקוחי as etenayles in Old French (tongs), like (Isa. 6:6): “with tongs (במלקחים) he had taken it.” And the מלקוח is the teeth, which resemble a smith’s tongs. (The quotation from Menachem appears only in the Salonika edition of Rashi printed in 1515.)

My strength is dried up like a potsherd: – My revered father of blessed memory, quoting the words of our Rabbis of blessed memory (Babli, Baba Kamma 3 b), wrote to כחי (= my strength), כיחי i.e. "his phlegm (כיחי) and his effort to remove it." And some have explained it (one of the Geonim," according to the testimony of Ibn Ezra) as a metathesis equivalent to on (= my palate), as though he said, I am not able to speak, just as when he says "and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws." The learned Rabbi Abraham ben Ezra expounds כחי (my strength) literally: " because man's life consists in the moisture implanted at birth which binds the whole together and sustains the body. He calls (this) moisture by the name strength (כח). And see (he says) it is dried up, as happens to an old man advanced in years."

and in the dust of death To the crushing of death.