"Cursed Is Every One That Hangeth on a Tree": The Curse of the Law Becomes the Curse for Us
Old Testament: Deuteronomy 21:22-23
When a man hath committed a crime for which he is to be punished with death, and being condemned to die is hanged on a gibbet: His body shall not remain upon the tree, but shall be buried the same day: for he is accursed of God that hangeth on a tree: and thou shalt not defile thy land, which the Lord thy God shall give thee in possession.
New Testament: Galatians 3:13-14
Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written: Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree. That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Christ Jesus: that we may receive the promise of the Spirit by faith.
The connection
Deuteronomy's law was protective, not a description of the Cross to come; it kept Israel's land from being defiled by an unburied, accursed body left hanging overnight. Paul reads the crucifixion straight through this verse's own vocabulary and does not soften it: Christ genuinely bears the curse the Law itself names. The curse Paul has in view a few verses earlier is the Law's curse on "every one that abideth not in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them" (Galatians 3:10). Christ owed nothing under that curse; He is not condemned for His own transgression but takes on a sentence Deuteronomy wrote for someone else's guilt, so that the curse ends there instead of continuing to fall on those who actually earned it.
Moral sense
Nobody under Deuteronomy's law volunteered for the gibbet; the curse simply landed where guilt already was. Christ's curse is entirely uncoerced, freely taken up for others' guilt rather than His own, the pattern every soul is asked to imitate in smaller ways, bearing a cost that could rightly have fallen on someone else.
Anagogical sense
The curse Paul names is not the final word even in the same sentence: Christ became a curse precisely "that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles" (Galatians 3:14). The tree of the curse in Deuteronomy becomes, in Christ, the tree through which the ancient blessing promised to Abraham finally reaches everyone, the curse spent in order to release the blessing behind it.
Warrant
Checked in the Greek: xylon is the word three times over at Deuteronomy 21:22-23 in the Septuagint and once at Galatians 3:13, so Paul is citing the Greek of the Law and not reaching for a different image.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 580.
The verses
Deuteronomy 21:22 · Deuteronomy 21:23 · Galatians 3:13 · Galatians 3:14
