This is what jesus was doing at the time.
What was that thing he said?
ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἀφεὶς φωνὴν μεγάλην
ἐξέπνευσεν.
And jesus let out this great voice, and breathed out his breath for the last. He ex-pneumaticized (took out his breath).
This is what jesus was doing at the time.
ἐξέπνευσεν - This is a way people have of saying "to die", in antiquity. The breath is life. That pneuma. If you dont have yourpneuma anymore, you dont have life.
He's dead on the cross. There's one problem. He's early. No one else is dead. those people he was hanging between are not dead. This is not how you die by crucifixion. You die by crucifixion, by suffocating. So when it came time we've got some problems with the guards, saying jesus died prematurely (they were going around to break legs, to force those hanging to crush their rib cages under their own weight, to cause / speed-along that death). It's now at this point when he breathes out his last air.
At this point, these people were making a joke about him hallucinating:
In the 9th hour, he shouted ἐβόησεν. This is not the behaviour of someone dying from loss of blood. Jesus shouted out in this great voice, strong lungs, bellowing out Ἐλωῒ Έλωῒ λαμά σαβαχθανεί.
Ἐλωῒ Έλωῒ λαμά σαβαχθανεί - People incorrectly declare "this must be aramaic!", "this must be hebrew!", "this must be the sacred language of the ages!"....
stop for just a second.... let's analyse this
Ἐλωῒ Έλωῒ
That lambda is often times a representative of a diagamma, in the language.
People up the stream couldn't pronounce it in the same way.
Ἐλωῒ / EFwi (digamma)
We have the shout that is given to bacchus.
What do we have in σαβαχθανεί?
σαβαχθανεί
We've got 2 gods. We've got Saba, and we've got Saba in his xthonian version, written large.
This is the shout of a bacchant who is performing the mystery
What's crazy is that he got himself killed while performing the mystery itself.
He was supposed to enter "into death", and then come out in "ressurection", but his boy got clipped, and he ended up dazed on a cross, screaming out bacchic implications to the god.
Ἐλωῒ - bacchic shout
σαβαχθανεί - screaming out bacchic imprecations to the god.
Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages
im•pre•ca-tion / imprakaSH(a)n/
noun
FORMAL
a spoken curse.
"she hurled her imprecations at anyone who might be listening"