While the son of God motif appears in so many legends and tales of the Old Testament in the form of the quite commonplace ancient Near Eastern tale type of a ‘birth of the son of God’ or – as in the Moses story – the birth of a saviour, it everywhere is used to present the hero of these stories as, in one way or the other, making God present to Israel. This presence of God betrays a wide spectrum of theological thought. Often the hero stands far from the good. Cain is a murderer. In some stories, the divine presence does little more than express the heroic, supernatural, strength or invincibility, as in the story of Samson, which is so reflective of Homer’s story of Achilles or even Gilgamesh’s role as the son of a goddess. As a theological motif, reflecting the divine presence, no role is more central in the Bible than the role that Yahweh is given in the song of Moses that is sung from Mount Nebo in Deuteronomy 32; 8. The poem illustrates the understanding of God the Most High reiterated in the Book of Daniel (for example 4: 22, 29). He creates the world and proportions its rule to whom he wants. In Moses’ song the Most High distributes the nations among the sons of God. It is Yahweh who, as one of God’s sons, receives Israel as his inheritance. Not only does Yahweh himself take up the role of son of God here, but in Exodus 3: 12, when Yahweh meets his son Israel, to choose Israel for himself, he explains to Moses this role. He is ehyeh imak, God for Israel. He is God’s presence in Israel. He is God as Israel knows him. It is this Immanuel role that is given to every manifestation of the sons of God in the Bible. That angels of God and sons of God are commonly interchangeable in the Bible’s songs and stories is based on the function of angels and messengers of the divine: they reflect God’s presence. So the messenger of Yahweh who is a watcher over Israel in Exodus 23 can also take the form of a pillar of fire to mark God’s presence in the tent of meeting. He can be a cloud-pillar in the light from Egypt to hide the escaping Israel from the Egyptians. God’s messenger can be the arrow of plague that visits disaster on Israel or its enemies, or the king of Assyria or Babylon who carries out God’s will against Israel.
It is this theme of divine presence in human affairs, and not something that describes the virtue of any of the children in the stories, that dominates all the son of God stories. The problematic character of this divine presence – for good or evil – lies just below the surface of the best of these stories. Especially in the prophets, as we will see, this motif turns truly ominous for Israel.
This is no less true of the parallel stories in the New Testament, whether of John the Baptist or of Jesus. In John 7: 40–43, there is a brief description of ‘the people’ as students and philosophers asking whether Jesus as the messiah could be the ruler of Israel who is mentioned in the prophecies of Micah (5: 1–3): ‘With a rod they strike the cheek of the ruler of Israel. You, O Bethlehem, Ephrathah, who is the least of Judah’s clans, from you will come one who will be ruler in Israel, one whose origin is from ancient times. He will abandon them [and here, Micah echoes Isaiah 1 and 8] until she who is in labour has given birth. Then the remnant of our brothers will return to the people of Israel.’
In the Jesus birth story in Matthew, the magi cite a close variant of this same discussion. This occurs after Matthew has quoted from the birth story of Isaiah 7. It is already clear that both Matthew’s and Luke’s birth stories offer significant contributions to the Bible’s philosophical discussion about the interrelationship of the human and the divine. Certainly Matthew, with its interpretation of Isaiah’s story through the more positive lenses of the mythological divine son of Isaiah 9, is in full agreement that such a figure is implied in Micah’s ruler of Israel, Luke, on the other hand, has supported it much more wide-ranging discussion, which engages the larger theological context.
Whatever any specific tendency of each gospel might be, their understanding of the function of this cluster of motifs is so competent and clear that we are forced to doubt the assumption that these stories are presented in the gospels as apologetic arguments about Jesus as an historical person of the past who had a special and unique association with the divine that is different from other use of such themes and motifs in the Bible. Only an historicizing reading of the New Testament and a misinterpretation of the texts could allow such a conclusion. Matthew’s and Luke’s birth stories were not written as historical accounts; nor were they understood to have been so written. That much is clearly obvious from the great, well-known and fully accepted differences in the narrative plots of their stories. They never tried to tell anyone how an historical Jesus had been born. These New Testament stories are rather an intensified continuation of the Bible’s discussion. They are to be understood from within the perspective of this same larger tradition.
Although Mark has no birth story, it makes a central and important contribution to the Bible’s discussion of the son of God metaphor. The opening statement of Mark shows that such is the author’s intention. It is the central theme of the gospel: ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, son of God.1 Mark understands his gospel as taking part in the Old Testament’s discussion on the theme of divine presence. The very next verse justifies this strong opening with a quote from Exodus 23: 20: ‘I send an angel before you. He shall protect you along the way and lead you.’ In Exodus, this Yahweh‘s angel bore the meaning of Yahweh as ‘God with’ or ‘for Israel’ as in Exodus 3: 12. The Book of Malachi, which is a small collection of questions and answers about the tradition, cites this same line from Exodus 23 and expands it to answer the question: ‘Where is the God of judgement?’ The answer in Malachi 3: 1–5 is a deft interpretation of Exodus’ two scenes. On one hand, it identifies the two metaphors of God’s presence, as Yahweh and as his angel, and on the other it marks the contradiction central to the tradition of a longing for justice: this God of judgement, fully aware of the potential horror implicit in this human desire for perfection.
I will send my angel before me to prepare my way, and Yahweh whom you are looking for will suddenly come to his temple. The angel of the covenant whom you delight in, he will come . . . but who can survive the day of his coming? Who can stand when he shows himself, like the Ire of the refinery? and he will be present as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them like gold and silver, that they might become an offering of righteousness to Yahweh. Then, the sacrifices of Judah and Jerusalem would be acceptable to Yahweh.
In uttering his metaphor about moral purity, Malachi draws heavily on an Isaiah-like irony about the human desire to seek the fulfilment of their desires in the divine, by asking for God’s presence.
Mark enters this discussion about how God is with Israel in the same manner, bringing together the two theophanies of Exodus in his portrayal of Jesus and John. John echoes the role of Yahweh’s angel. Also, other motifs are included. As in the opening chapters of Luke’s gospel, Mark’s John takes up many of the motifs associated with the son of God in the birth stories. He portrays a Nazirite, sketched with dramatic fantasy. John appears on stage in Mark’s opening scene dressed in crude camel’s-hair clothing tied with a leather strap. He lives off grasshoppers and wild honey, he brings salvation out of a desert’s emptiness, he calls Israel to repentance and brings divine forgiveness. John’s is Isaiah’s lonely voice giving comfort in the desert of exile, as Mark places in his mouth a citation from one of the most serene of all the Bible’s songs, and the one on which the entire book of Isaiah pivots: ‘Comfort, be comforted my people, says your God; words to the heart, to Jerusalem.; call out to her that the war is past, her sin forgiven,1 Marl gives dramatic structure to Isaiah’s song through his characterization of John; ‘There is one who cries from the wilderness, prepare the way of the lord, make his way straight.’ To Jesus, Mark gives Yahweh’s role. John is the messenger preparing his way.
The strong image of the wild ascetic preacher from the desert, coupled with Mark’s citation of Malachi and Isaiah, marks the desert as the proving pound for forgiveness. That Jesus immediately leaves John to go out to the desert to be tested by Satan and purified in the desert’s ire allows this brief scene of Mark 1: 12–13 to function as a metaphorical journey of Jesus as every man. It is the divine spirit that drives him out to the desert. There he lives like Israel in the temptations of Exodus’ wilderness wandering, with God’s angels caring for him, Mark is not everywhere committed to this role for Jesus. He also plays the roles of healer, of teacher of parables. He is master over demons, lord over storms and the set, and he is the cosmic messiah of the end of time. Such roles are collected around Jesus from the poetic imagery of the psalms and the prophets. They illustrate the many hopes of the tradition that God’s kingdom, like that of Isaiah’s forgiven Jerusalem, might be realized out of a poet’s evocations. It is the theme of purification as preparation for this kingdom’ that is supported by Jesus’ role as everyman’s experience of ‘purification’ through suffering. Following Micah’s lead, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel plays a role interpreting Isaiah’s son of God. Mark thereby identifies Isaiah’s child with the suffering servant of the songs of Isaiah 42–53. Mark’s story returns to this theme at the very end of Jesus’ life when – to use the language of metaphor – Jesus makes final preparations to enter his kingdom.
The present closure of Mark’s gospel calls up a scene from Psalm 110: 1, where the royal son of God who comes into his heavenly kingdom sits at Yahweh’s right hand: ‘Yahweh said to my lord, “sit down at my right hand and I will make your enemies into a footstool for your feet.”’ The gospel presents the scene more sentimentally. Mark presents Jesus alone with God, and leaves out reference to the humiliation of the king’s enemies. The scene as Mark 16: 19 presents it, gives us the triumph but lacks the motif of divine judgement that the opening of the gospel requires. This is all the more confusing, as Mark is not much given to excessive sentimentality. He usually treats his readers’ feelings with considerable respect. One might also complain that the present closure of the gospel that we find in Mark 16: 9–20 is redundant. The gospel already knows this scene of Jesus’ heavenly glory. It has been presented in the theophany scene in chapter 9: 2–8, where Jesus was transformed into his ‘true’ and ‘eternal’ form as one who, together with Moses and Elijah, lives glorified in heaven, ‘He changed before their eyes. His clothes shone white, whiter than anything on earth could bleach them. Elijah appeared together with Moses and they talked with Jesus . . .’
In this earlier scene Mark had opened a quite significant variant of the son of God theme. This is the old mythological motif about heroes who have come so close to the divine that they themselves become immortal. The motif goes back at least as early as the Gilgamesh story’s heroes of the flood story: Utnapishtim and his wife. As a reward for their virtue, they become immortal and live undying in the ‘land of far away’. In the much later Jewish tradition, there finally develops a tradition of at least ten such men of God, allowing heaven to have an eternal minyan for their prayers. In the Bible’s stories we find Enoch, who in Genesis 5: 22 ‘walked with God’ and so was no longer on earth. In II Kings 2, Elijah is taken up to heaven in a storm. In a work called the Testimony of Moses, an extra-biblical variant of the story of Moses in the Bible, Moses does not die but is taken up to heaven. This too is Jesus’ destiny as foretold in Mark’s transfiguration scene, which shows us this heavenly Jesus.
Scholars have long been convinced that the present closure of Mark’s gospel has been added to the original work. We should better think of Mark 16: 8 (or perhaps 16: 9) as the original ending. Absent the sentimental scene of Jesus’ enthronement, the closure of the gospel brings the death scene of Jesus on the cross to the centre of Mark’s stage!
At the sixth hour, darkness fell over the whole of the earth until the ninth hour. At the ninth hour, Jesus called out with a loud shout: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani’ which means: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Some of them, who stood there and heard this, said: ‘Listen! He is calling Elijah.’ Then one ran out and brought back a sponge with vinegar, and attached it to a stick to give him something to drink while saying: ‘Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him with him.’ Jesus gave out a loud scream and let the spirit out. The temple’s curtain tore in two, from top to bottom. When the centurion, who stood opposite him, saw that he died so, he said: ‘Truly this man was a son of God!’ (Mark 15: 33–39)
It is a powerful scene without any excess of commentary. In his despairing complaint at death, Jesus is presented by Mark as God’s suffering servant. That Mark quotes the song of David from Psalm 22: 2–3 for Jesus’ dying words calls up the similar scenes of David and Jesus in their despair on the Mount of Olives. The allusion seems intentional, as the larger context of the Psalm suggests and which Mark’s Jesus echoes:
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? You are so distant from my shout for help and from my scream. My God, I shout to you by day and you answer not; and I cry to you at night, but find no peace.
We should also recall to mind the songs of the suffering servant in Isaiah 42–53 and the story of King Ahaz of Isaiah 7. Both accept their destiny, refusing to question God. Also like David on the Mount of Olives, Jesus has not put God to the test. In his humility he has followed the path of righteousness. He has put his trust in God. He was scorned and despised by men. Mark recognizes well that Psalm 22 marks this childlike submission and dependency; ‘It was you that helped me from my mother’s womb and brought me safely to her breast. I was given over to you from my birth; you have been my God from my mother’s womb.’ In verse 12, and especially in verse 19, the psalm calls upon the theme of ‘God with us’ ‘But you Yahweh do not be absent; my strength, hurry to help; save my life from the sword . . .’
In Mark, those who misunderstand Jesus’ cry of despair, thinking that his call to God: ‘Eloi, Eioi. . .’ had been in fact a call to Elijah, implicitly bring the transfiguration scene of Mark 9: 9–13 into play when Jesus meets Elijah and Moses in their shared roles of men who have overcome death. An implicit prophecy is hidden in their misunderstanding: the messiah is to be betrayed; he is to be abandoned even by God; a prelude to his heavenly role. This role of suffering servant is brought forward in the scene’s citation from yet another song of David, Psalm 69: 22: ‘They gave me poison to eat and vinegar to quench my thirst.’ Another, similar echo, from Psalm 22: 1–2 is created with Jesus’ scream at his death. Jesus, as humble servant of the tradition, calls on God to be with him. At this scream, the curtain of the temple that closes off the Holy of Holies, that separates God from man, tears in two, marking his death. God is with him!
This nearly bitter, mocking irony of Mark’s gospel finds its climax in the understanding of the Roman centurion as he hears this cry of despair and death. ‘Truly this man was a son of God,’ This officer’s commentary finds its counterpoint in the twice-repeated divine affirmation from Psalm 2: 7, ‘This is my beloved son,’1 which is quoted in the critical scenes of the gospel’s opening and in the story of Jesus’ transfiguration. Behind the centurion’s remark lies the hidden, dark side of biblical tradition: God abandons his children. It is Jesus’ cry of despair that brings conviction above all doubt. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus plays out his role of son of God. Like Israel his first-born, like Samson, Samuel and Saul, like the prophets Elijah and Jonah, and like Job in his role in this tradition, this role mediates and gives voice to the common human ambivalence about the divine in our lives. One enters the kingdom only in death.
This theme of the ambivalence surrounding the presence of God in Israel dominates Mark’s account of Jesus as a vehicle for this presence. Mark’s usage self-consciously mirrors II Samuel’s presentation of David in the role of Yah weld’s Messiah – especially in II Samuel 15 in the story of David on the Mount of Olives, but also in the use of Psalm 18 in II Samuel 22 and throughout the Psalter, where David takes up the messianic role of warrior in Yahweh’s cosmic war against the nations, as in Psalms 2, 8, 89 and 110. This role of David in the Psalms and books of Samuel is also the context for understanding how Mark uses his Jesus in the function of representative of the pious in prayer. Yet the dominant metaphor is not only far from any historicizing interests in an historical Jesus or David, it draws on the messianic mythology as well to focus on the theme of divine presence in Israel, and in the real lives of all who identify themselves as a new Israel. Israel’s divine sonship is part of their self-understanding.
In the first of the Bible’s stories about a son of God, the Cain story at the beginning of Genesis, the plot hinges upon Cain’s sacrificial offering which is unacceptable to Yahweh. ‘Do what is right’, Cain is told. ‘That is sufficient to hold one’s head high.’ The story of Saul in I Samuel opens on a related, contrasting motif. We find Saul’s tale in I Samuel 13. It is a story of a sacrifice forbidden. Saul offers it all the same, because he thinks it good to sacrifice to Yahweh before battle. For his disobedience, Saul is rebuked and rejected by Yahweh as his messiah. His kingship, which Yahweh had established eternally over Israel, is now revoked (I Samuel 13: 13–14)! Both Cain and Saul’s story illustrates the topos: God wants obedience, not sacrifice.
In I Samuel 15, we find the story’s mate, except that in this case the king is instructed to offer a sacrifice: the captured Amalekite king who had been ‘dedicated to Yahweh’. Saul, however, plays out the role of a good soldier, and spares the king’s life, the best of the cattle and all that was valuable (I Sam. 15: 9). He does what is good in his own eyes. Here too, the theme is that God will have obedience, and what Saul has done is evil in God’s eyes. He repels that he has made Saul king. Samuel, whose role in the story as son of God has been to be God’s presence in Israel, himself sacrifices the Amalekite king to Yahweh. It is obedience, not sacrifice, that matters. The demand on Saul is the same: whether he sacrifices or does not sacrifice is not the issue: obedience, to do what is good in God’s eyes, is what is demanded so that he, like Cain, may hold his head high. The philosophical principle that this brutal story illustrates is not one that a sensitive reader today can be comfortable with. It is governed by the tragic and ironic perspective of the creation story of Genesis 1: God created the world good in his own eyes. He then created humanity, which wishes the good as it sees it. What is good is good as God sees it. That is what makes it good. Saul’s story is unrelenting biblical tragedy. In doing what he sees to be good, Saul does evil in God’s eyes. The story ends with Saul’s humiliation. When Samuel, the son of God, leaves him, the presence of God goes from Saul.
The theme of obedience and sacrifice is also central to the Abraham narrative chain. In Genesis 12–22, Abraham wanders from sacrifice to sacrifice, just as he wanders from story to story, Yahweh accepts his offerings. With each successive episode in which Abraham builds an altar and sacrifices to his God, Yahweh appears to him and promises this childless man a son. Immediately Abraham has his son, however, he is told by Yahweh that he will have his sacrifice. The story has the potential of being emotionally so objectionable that the audience is told at the outset that Yahweh is only testing Abraham (Gen. 22; 1). Abraham is told to sacrifice this ‘only son, whom he loved’to test his obedience. As in the Saul story, the theme is that it is obedience, not sacrifice that matters. In this story’s illustration, the contrast of Abraham with Cain and Saul could hardly be more marked. Abraham obeys. He does what is good in God’s eyes, and holds his head high. In a sentimental though effective scene, Abraham’s son asks on the way up Mount Moriah to the sacrifice: ‘The fire and the wood is here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ Abraham hesitates not a moment. He has the philosopher’s confidence: ‘God will provide’ (Gen. 22: 8, 14). The story could as well be an illustration of the philosopher’s goal in Psalm 24: 3–5: ‘he who ascends the mountain of his God, who has clean hands and a pure heart. . . to him shall God provide his blessing; righteousness from the God of his salvation.’ In Abraham’s story, Yahweh redeems Isaac with a ram. On this mountain of God, God provides (22: 14)! That tradition places this as the site of Jerusalem’s temple is itself a major commentary on the story’s theme.
Genesis is held together in a narrative of a continuous chain of sons, beginning in chapter 5. Adam was made in God’s image and likeness, male and female (5: 1–2). Adam becomes the father of a son and that same image passes to Seth, and so to the chain of humanity. This motif implicitly understands mankind within the son of God metaphor. As we are all made in our father’s image, we are sons of God. This self-identifying chain of continuity, which embraces all humanity, is well understood by the gospel of Luke, which draws on this theology when it presents a genealogy for Jesus beginning with Joseph and tracing it back to the beginning: ‘son of Enosh, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God’ (Luke 3: 38).
As Adam was the son of God, so are we all. This is implicit in the genealogical leitmotif of Genesis: a tokdoth of God’s sons. When Abraham’s younger son Isaac displaces the first-born Ishmael, to become Abraham’s only son whom he loved, and again when Jacob takes the place of his older brother Esau, Israel fulfils Genesis’ chain of narrative in the role of God’s ‘first-born’. Within the context of the pivotal story of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 22, this reiterated role of first-born awakens unsettling echoes of Israel’s and the temple’s future fate.
In Exodus, the role of Yahweh plays out a variant of Abraham’s search for a son. This theme of Yahweh’s search for a people and of Israel as firstborn is first made explicit in the deadly contest between Yahweh and the pharaoh. It is, however, the pharaoh’s first-born who dies as the angel of death ‘passes-over’ Yahweh’s first-born.
These motifs of sacrifice and death of the first-born, as the motif of Israel as the son of God, present themselves in their greatest range of theological development in the prophets. This cluster of motifs recurs so often in the poetic narratives collected in the so-called prophetic books that it is well to speak of two further variants of this tale-type. In these stories, the role of the wives is used to illustrate Yahweh’s relationship with Israel. In the first group of tales, the children do not function as sons of God, representing God’s presence in a larger narrative. Their role as children of God itself directly expresses God’s presence in Israel’s destiny. In the second variation of this plot motif, not the sons but the wives and lovers themselves play out the primary role of illustrating Israel’s destiny.
Through its irreverent mockery, the Samson story offers a deeply critical reflection on any over-zealous piety about the tradition’s many stories of sons of God, Ironic humour is rarely far from any of our stories. Less humorous, and offering an even more trenchant critique of the pietism of divine immanence, are three dark and pessimistic closely related narrative blocks in Isaiah 7–9. They share the common motif of the birth of a child whose name is or is interpreted as Immanuel; that is as ‘God with us’. Isaiah presents the stories as a challenge to popular piety’s request that God be with Israel. ‘Do you,’ Isaiah implicitly asks, ‘really want God with you?’ Isaiah presents this small collection of variant poems and short tale segments, accompanied by interpretive comments and discussion, which play variations on the common theme of the prophet or God who has Israel for his wife. Reading these poems and stories today is much like listening to an intense discussion, with the participants all talking at the same time. Themes overlap. Points are made in variant contexts. Above all, implicit participants know more about what is going on than we do. In the structural centre of this collection of variants we have Isaiah’s two children. Both children have cue-names, positive and negative. His first child, already born., is called Shear-yashub (‘Repenting remnant’: Isa. 7: 3). This is an obvious portent of promise. The song is sung about the new Jerusalem. Isaiah’s second child is born to a prophetess. To this child Yahweh gives the unhappy name Mahar-Shalal-hash-baz (‘Quick-spoil-hurry-prey’: Isa, 8: 1, 3), The narrative interprets this awful name for the reader: before the child is old enough to say ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, Damascus and Samaria will fall to Assyria. In three stories Isaiah offers us his variations on the biblical topos of Immanuel, which in the prophetic literature takes form in two kinds of parable; of the prophet and his children and of Yahweh and his wives. The Isaiah tradition generally follows the first type.
a) The ironic story that is found in Isaiah 7: 10–17 is both an instructive and important narrative among those that use the son of God metaphor. The story begins as Ahaz,. king of Jerusalem, has been placed under strong military pressure by the kings of Damascus and Samaria. The story’s opening shows him to be a virtuous king. He refuses to challenge Yahweh by asking for a sign, even as he is invited to do so by the deity, who tells him he might ask for any sign that he might wish. Implicit in Ahaz’ refusal is the pious faith that seeking a sign implies a lack of faith in Yahweh.
In presenting Ahaz in this light, the narrative certainly evokes such moral proverbs as we find in Psalm 95: 8: ‘Do not harden your heart as you did at Meribah, as when you were at Massah in the desert, when your fathers challenged me and put me to the test even though they had witnessed what I had done.’ A contrasting text, however, found in Micah 3: 9–12 seems to be referred to directly, and offers a fitting context for Ahaz’ virtue. The kings of Jerusalem are threatened here by Yahweh for testing his patience with their belief that as Yahweh was with them in Jerusalem, no harm could come to them. ‘Because of you, Zion will be ploughed like a field; Jerusalem will become a heap of ruins,’
In spite of Ahaz’ refusal to ask for a sign, Isaiah gives him one anyway. It is entirely negative and given with biting sarcasm:
Here, House of David, isn’t it enough that you try human patience? Do you have to try my God’s patience as well? Yahweh will give you a sign! A girl is pregnant and will give birth to a son. She will name him Immanuel [i.e., ‘God is with us’]. He will live off yogurt and honey until he first understands how to avoid evil and choose good. For before the boy understands how to avoid evil and choose good the land, before whose two kings you now grovel, will be made into a desert. And over you and your people and over your father’s house, Yahweh will send days that have not been seen since Ephraim broke away from Judah: the king of Assyrial
That we find here a story intimate with the son of God birth story traditions is clear from the language of the announcement of the child’s birth, as well as from the clear reference to the Nazirite tradition. Even though the description of the impending birth does not tell us how the girl has become pregnant, the purposefulness of both of these strong elements in the account makes it impossible to read the text as if it were some historical account and such descriptions mere accidents of fact. These are classic markers of our tale-type. Finally, that the child is to be named Immanuel or ‘God with us’, with its unavoidable implication that the child also functions as this cue-name literarily requires, is convincing confirmation that the child functions as other sons of God do. They make God’s presence manifest in the world. They are Immanuels. The closing commentary on the prophecy about both Samaria’s and Damascus’ destruction, and about the terrible times ahead for Jerusalem, is also hardly an external, gloss. It points to the presence of God. It is this that the child’s name declares present. The Assyrian king’s destructive presence will be God for Jerusalem. This will occur before the child is grown. Such is Ahaz’ unwonted sign.
That the reader is invited to interpret the story’s parable in terms of Israel’s future is explicit. Isaiah tells us; ‘I and the children Yahweh has given me are signs and portents in Israel’ (8: 18). Just so, the stories receive a series of interpretations and expansions, explaining just what these signs and portents mean. Dominant are the two variant Immanuel expansions that we find in chapter 7: 11–25 and 8: 5–10. Together, they nearly overwhelm the motif of contrasting children, with which the central narrative is structured. These interpretive expansions are both negative and brutally ironic. Each is centred in the metaphor of Immanuel, the sign that God will be with Israel. In the first, we are given a story of a child born. It is a variant of Isaiah’s second child, for it too bears the same negative fate for Israel. This child is called Immanuel, ‘God with us’. Before he is grown, his name warns, Israel will be destroyed. The opening prose part of the narrative closes in verse 17 with an intrusive comment or gloss on the narrative: ‘the king of Assyria’. Immanuel is the Assyrian king! This gloss isn’t part of the narrative; nor is it intended to be part of the story. It is a theological comment, an interpretation of the story by its collector, what is seen in the Dead Sea scrolls as a pesher. It identifies the story’s cipher. It is not the child to be born who is the king of Assyria. The child is a sign of Immanuel. It is God’s presence in Israel that is the king of Assyria. God’s presence brings destruction. To this story, the editor adds a four-fold poem, each part beginning with ‘on that day’. These expand and make explicit this divine presence as destruction at the hands of the Assyrians.
The days of Yahweh – when Yahweh will be with us – are days of destruction, days to be feared. The imagery calls up war and destruction as a response of divine wrath and judgement. The development of the metaphor of the ‘day of Yahweh’ as the day on which Yahweh will come and judge Israel draws its strength most directly from a view of the past that sees the destruction of Jerusalem and old Israel as well-deserved punishments sent by God. In this view the kings of Babylon and Assyria act as God’s messengers and servants. The people of Israel have trusted too much that God will be with them in mercy. Now the day of Yahweh will be a dies irae. Only those lucky few, ‘who do no evil and tell no lies, but trust in Yahweh, need not fear the day that Yahweh, Israel’s God, is with us’ (Zephaniah 3: 7–12).
b) The foregoing story and commentary is matched by a poetic gloss attached to Isaiah’s second child (8; 5–10). In this commentary, we are presented with a quite clear variation on Ezekiel’s two sisters, Israel and Samaria, as brides of Yahweh. The first child, Immanuel, was Samaria, Yahweh’s presence in Israel brought its destruction. As it too shared the ‘quick-destruction’ motif of Isaiah’s second child, now that second child, sharing the Immanuel motif, becomes a sign of Yahweh’s presence once again: in Judah. Destruction at the hands of the Assyrians again emerges as the poem’s referent (8: 8).
This double-barrelled commentary is linked to yet a further expansive commentary on the tradition. It too is rooted in the theme of Yahweh’s contrasting children. Now, however, we return to the positive nuances belonging to Isaiah’s first child. We are offered a variant on ‘Repentant-remnant’. The contrast rests on one who curses his king and God (compare Job 2; 9). Chapters 7 and S’s Immanuel theme remains dominant, and the editor offers positive reinterpretation of the whole, as a sign of God’s saving presence in Israel. This collector’s commentary on the tradition links (and identifies) the first-born ‘Repentant-remnant’ with the saving child born for David’s throne in chapter 9: 6. True to its interpretive function, the text itself tells us how to read these chapters; ‘Bind the evidence together; put a seal on the instructions to the students.’ The hidden message – hidden in the stories of these children as ‘signs and portents’ of Israel’s fate – is one of hope. Here, from Isaiah 8: 16 on, the teacher’s pesher or ‘interpretation’ is explicit. We are given poems of hope and promise. These, the commentator explains, belong to the birth story of Isaiah’s first child, ‘Repentant-remnant’!
The birth story episode in chapter 8 is more complete than in Isaiah 7. We find a new variant of the way in which God impregnates the woman. In Isaiah 8: 1, the prophet is instructed to write down a name ‘in human words’. The form of the request is a mildly ironic play on the literary prophet’s conceit of writing down his prophecies in divine words, Yahweh wants to be understood, so he uses our language. The name Isaiah writes is a cue-name, though it is not as elegant as those in the variant stories in Hosea 1–3: ‘Quickly spoiling, hurriedly becoming prey’. This is hardly a name one would wish on a child. Leaving nothing to misinterpretation, Isaiah then takes two trustworthy witnesses with him, offering the legal equivalent of proof of this child’s divine parentage. He has sex, moreover, with t prophetess, so that Yahweh plays in this story both the male and female forms of the divine parentage. Impregnated, she bears a son. The child is given his name, one that determines Israel’s and Damascus’ destiny. It is to come about even more quickly than in the story-doublet of Isaiah 7: before the child learns to speak (Isa. 8: 4), Also again, God’s presence is Israel’s destiny at the hands of the king of Assyria.
This child too is Immanuel: ‘God is with us.’ In the two short poems that follow the story in 8: 5–8 and 8: 9–10 we come to understand what Isaiah means with this central theological metaphor of divine presence. It is well to remember that in spite of their great variety of story form and description, all of the son of God stories deal with a common thread in a wide-ranging discussion. It is a theme central to the theology of the Bible: the shared life and substance, the comparisons and contrasts, the similarities, the collating, clustering and mingling of motifs and forms relating to the divine and the human. We are dealing with a literature that is quite conscious of the fact that its language about God is human language, fatally flawed and implicitly fraudulent. Here in Isaiah, and again and again in our texts, the narrator’s voice asks bluntly what it means that ‘God is with us’. What happens when the divine becomes involved with the human? Is it really such a good idea?
c) The prose segment we find in Isaiah 8; 16 to 9: 1 is an interpretive essay introducing the poem of Isaiah 9: 2–7 as a prophecy transforming the destructive destinies determined in the prophetic tales of Isaiah 7: 1–8: 15. It opens with a declaration of the prophet’s own hope (8; 17) in contrast to the old Israel of the Immanuel stories, represented by those who consult mediums and wizards rather than God, those who, ‘cursing their king and their God’, are ‘thrust into thick darkness’ (8: 21–22). With Isaiah’s hope, such darkness and gloom is transformed into a metaphor of a woman in anguish: she is no other than Isaiah’s wife, the new Jerusalem in labour. Her darkness is not gloom, but a portent of transformation. The child, ‘Repentant-remnant’, once the Immanuel of destruction, now takes on the form of a new birth. In this striking exegetical passage, themes of destruction are radically transformed into themes of hope: ‘The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness. On them has light shined . . . Every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult, every garment rolled in blood, will be burned as fuel for the fire.’
War is transformed to hope. Yahweh and his spouse, the new Jerusalem, give birth to a wonderful child: the new Israel. The clear patterns of the mythology surrounding the metaphors of son of God and of Yahweh’s messiah are transparent throughout. The central metaphors of Israel as Yahweh’s first-born, of Samaria and Jerusalem as Yahweh’s spouse, and of the people of God as an ideal of a new Israel, are brought together here. Chapters 7 and 8’s prophecies of doom about old Israel are reinterpreted and transformed by chapters 9’s hope for the repentant remnant. Isaiah interprets these child Immanuels, with all their complex mythical echoes of the son of God and messiah traditions, very simply as God acting in this world. He defines this God as a God of mercy, a saving God. That is what Immanuel means: ‘God is with us’. The child of Isaiah 9: 2–7 is God himself. The matrix of the Old Testament’s theology about God’s presence is captured by this powerful poem. It is sung by Isaiah’s wife in labour, giving birth to the new Israel, Repentant-remnant’s destiny: the new Immanuel: God with us.
To us a child is bora; to us a son is given; governance will be on his shoulders. His name will be ‘wonderful counsellor, mighty God, eternal father, the patron of peace’, (Isa. 9: 6)
Isaiah 9, in paraphrasing the mythological and cosmic foundation of both chapter 7 and 8’s stories of a child born, powerfully conveys the seductive power of such a projection of the divine.
When the Book of Hosea is read without the bias of efforts to create an historical prophet as part of ancient Israel’s history, it emerges as a striking composition with two parts. The first (chapters 1–3) is presented as autobiographical parable, in which the prophet’s marriage with a prostitute appears as a parody of God’s relationship to Israel. Israel’s fate is determined through the names of Hosea’s children. The second part of the book (chapters 4–14) is a series of implicitly interpretive poems that offer commentary on the prose narrative. The theme is a call to repentance: ‘Turn, O Israel, to Yahweh your God; you have stumbled in your wrongs. Speak up; turn to Yahweh and say to him: “you who forgive all fault, accept what we offer”’ (Hos, 14: 2–3). The implied author, taking the role of divine teacher, addresses the audience with a riddle in closing this work: ‘I am like the evergreen cypress. From me comes your fruit. Who is wise enough to understand this, so discerning that he might know it? The paths of Yahweh are straight.1 The righteous walk in it, while wrongdoers stumble,’ (Hos. 14: 9–10) The story does not address ancient Israel of any pre-exilic time. The audience, the intended reader, is the student of philosophy, the pious adherent of the theology of the way of the Book of Psalms, the same as addressed in Psalm 1: 3–6: ‘[The righteous], he is like a tree . . . that yields its fruit in season . . . Yahweh establishes the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked perish.’ Hosea is not a man of the eighth century, scarred by a travesty of a marriage. In a tale filled with ironic undertone, he parodies God’s role of faithful husband to a faithless people. It is a romance: a tale of long-suffering patience, ending in grace.
It is also a story, self-consciously structured on a collection of tale variants, whose interaction builds a single coherent theme. Three successive stories, variants of each other, are offered in the three opening chapters of the book. The names of the characters in these tales are all cue-names, strengthening their intrinsically symbolic functions. In the opening story, Yahweh tells ‘Deliverance’ – that is, Hosea – to take a prostitute for a wife and have children by her. The audience is not left in doubt for a moment about the interpretation of these instructions, as Yahweh explains to this saving prophet: ‘The land’ [that is, Israel] has prostituted itself by turning away from Yahweh.’
Hosea marries the prostitute, ‘Destruction’ – that is, Gomer – and she bears him a son. Yahweh names the son ‘God-sows’, jezreel, which is also the name of the great valley between the highlands and the Galilee. The child’s name is a dramatic commentary on Israel’s destruction. Why is Israel to be destroyed, its kingdom to come to an end? It is to punish Jehu for the blood he shed in the jezreel (Hosea 1: 4–5). At first, the reference seems to be to the story we find in II Kings 9 and 10. However, although the story-collector of Kings hardly approves of Jehu any more than Hosea does (so II Kings 10: 31), the story we now have in Kings is entirely positive. It is Ahab and Jezebel who are bad, while Jehu ights side by side with Yahweh’s prophet Elisha. He is Yahweh’s messiah in the story; he is the one who Ights Yahweh’s wars. He is ordered to kill the prophets of Ba’al in the Jezreel, and to destroy Ahab and his family. That he carries out Yahweh’s will, is stressed in the story’s closure. Yahweh tells him: ‘Because you have done well in carrying out what is right in my eyes, and have done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart, your sons to the fourth generation will sit on Israel’s throne’ (II Kings 10: 30).
This is certainly not the story or the Jehu that Hosea knows and refers to! That Jehu, rather than being Yahweh’s faithful servant and the enemy of Ba’al, had turned Israel away from Yahweh, and for this reason had brought about the end of the kingdom. This implicit variation of the story in Kings clearly points to a theological orientation and evaluation of the Old Testament narratives. It implies a substantial indifference in both Kings and Hosea to events as historical.
While Hosea will briefly return to the story of this first child in chapter 3, the text moves on to a variation of the tale, and it is this that dominates the rest of the chapter. Gomer gives birth to two children. The first is a daughter named ‘Does-not-had-mercy’. Israel will not find mercy or forgiveness. She then bears a son, who is called ‘Not-my-people’. With an echoing denial of Exodus 3: 12’s self-identification of Yahweh as God for Israel (‘I am with you’), Yahweh addresses the child: ‘You are not my people, and I will not be with you’ (Hosea 1: 9). The message of the story is transparent: these two children’s names reiterate each other, and together determine Israel’s fate. Also implicit is an ongoing discussion that Hosea’s implied author has with the tradition of Exodus.
This narrative is as quickly abandoned as the first. Our text turns abruptly to commentary. In three short verses (Hos 1: 10–2; 1), Hosea interprets his two tales coherently. He takes an historiographical perspective that is quite breathtaking. This Israel represented by the prostitute’s children is an Israel past. To contrast this old Israel of rejection with a hope-filled present, Hosea echoes Genesis’ promise to Abraham in Genesis 13: 16. This new Israel will be ‘as numerous as the sands of the sea . . . Where once they were named “You-are-not-my-people”, they will now be called “Children-of-the-Loving-God”’. Hosea reverses time once again. His new Israel reflects the image of the united kingdom. Yahweh’s day of wrath and punishment becomes ‘a great day of the Jezreel’. This is now the good Jehu against evil Ahab. Hosea’s boy can now be called: ‘You-are-my-people’. His sister becomes ‘You-have-found-mercy’. In these few literary strokes, Hosea gives a picture of Yahweh as the divine master over history, reversing Israel’s fate and making the past present. Quite clearly, the structure of our text, with the narrative of the first chapters given a commentary by the poetry of Hosea’s second part, shows itself as discourse. It is a discussion and an analysis of Yahweh’s love-hate relationship with Israel. This is no prophecy of doom. It emphasizes rather a divine mercy without restriction, God rejected old Israel. With equal freedom Israel is now accepted. His mercy is divine, by virtue of being undeserved.
The rest of chapter 2 consists of two further variant responses. The first of these, in 2: 2–15, sets the theme of a second commentary to the story of Hosea and his wife as Yahweh and his, with the resounding echo of divorce: ‘Say to your mother, say: “She is not my wife and I am not her husband.”’ The divine poet pleads with his wife to put away her prostitution. He threatens to strip her naked. The poem presents Yahweh in a lover’s quarrel about his wife’s affairs with Ba’al and the other gods. It had always been he, Yahweh, that was her husband (i.e., her ba’al), who had given her everything she had. Yet she neglected and forgot him. In the closing verses of this poetic commentary, Yahweh confesses his enduring yet unrequited love to the reader, ‘I will seduce her; I will bring her out into the wilderness and talk to her heart.’ The wilderness holds an implicit reference to Moses and Israel in the Pentateuch. Again the poet has turned the past into a future harbinger of return to Yahweh. Jezreefs valley becomes now the valley of Akor: a gateway to hope! By this literary allusion, the author echoes the story of judgement and condemnation in Joshua 7, where Akor was the ‘valley of trouble’. The past, the history of Israel’s condemnation and rejection, has been reversed. Hosea’s implicit commentator draws a message of hope from the tale of Yahweh’s marriage to his prostitute wife.
In Hosea 2; 16–23, a third commentary completes the discussion. Picking up the ‘great day of the Jezreel’ from Hosea 2; 2, this final interpretation offers three short poems expanding this leitmotif. ‘On that day,’ says Yahweh, ‘you will call me “husband”: no longer “my Ba’al (Hos. 2: 16–23) The poet again reaches back into the past for the promise of God’s eternal covenant to Israel and brings it into the present. On that day, Yahweh establishes his covenant with Israel for ever. In the final ‘on that day’, the poem returns to Hosea’s autobiographical tale: ‘On that day, I will show mercy to Does-not-find-mercy and I will say to Not-my-people, “You are my people”, and he will answer, “You are my God”’.
This double story of Yahweh’s three children, with its triple commentary, closes here as the child ‘turns’ (implicit in the Hebrew: ‘repents’) and responds to his divine father. It is not surprising, however, that yet another commentator adds yet another variant interpretation to our text by providing us, in a very short chapter 3, with a third tale about yet another unfaithful wife for Hosea. This story also offers us an ironic caricature of Israel. The comments, with all their brutal sexism, have considerable comic merit. The woman, like Israel, had another lover and is an adulteress, so the prophet buys her for half price. He then puts severe conditions on her. She can’t have lovers any more. Nor will even her husband, Yahweh, have sex with her. The story closes with a brief commentary, giving us the story’s meaning with reference to the saving motif of the elite’s repentance. Israel will live for t long time without king or prince, without sacrifice or cult. They then ‘will turn and seek Yahweh their God and David their king’. Here again, in this last commentary, the history of the past is cast in terms of the present hope of the text’s composition.
This basic theological tale of the prophet and his wife as a lightly veiled parable of the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, with its interpretive commentaries and discussion, and its free play with the metaphors of history, is not confined to Hosea. It is basic to prophetic discourse and basic to our understanding of the books of the prophets. They are all collections of complex poetry, song and historiographical comment put together in the guise of one or other great prophet’s oracles and visions of his God. The story shows itself twice in Ezekiel.
a) The tale in Ezekiel 16 has some of the harshness of Hosea’s sexist imagery. It is, however, more openly erotic in its intimate description of Yahweh’s care for his young bride. The story begins with Jerusalem as an abandoned child. Her father was an Amorite, her mother a Hittite, She was cast out in a field, her navel cord uncut. She was unwashed, unclothed. No compassion, only abhorrence, when she was born. When Yahweh found this foundling lying in her blood, he said to her, ‘You will live. I will make you many like the plants of the field’ (16: 7). The child grew up to be a woman. Yet, ‘still naked and bare’.
With recurrent echoes of the Song of Songs, Ezekiel describes a love scene between Yahweh and his bride Jerusalem. When Yahweh passed a second time, Jerusalem, the young bride, was ready for love. And so Yahweh ‘covered her’ by taking her for his wife. He then gives her a bath, washing off her hymenal blood and pouring oil over her. The motifs of blood from the variant scenes of the baby newborn and the nubile and virginal young woman are blended together here as Yahweh takes Jerusalem as his bride. Yahweh dresses her and covers her with jewelry. Jerusalem becomes famous for the beauty and splendour which Yahweh gave her.
Then the scene shifts once again. The dramatic descriptions of the opening episodes are replaced with commentary and scolding judgement. The same patterns dominate as we find in the stories of Hosea. Jerusalem trusted in her own beauty and turned to prostitution. Inverting Genesis’ account of the creation of man in God’s image (Gen. 1; 26), Jerusalem takes her jewelry and makes gods in the image of men. It is with such gods that she prostitutes herself (Ezekiel 16: 17). In this, she forgets his care for her when she was young. Ezekiel goes quickly through a history of Jerusalem as a history of prostitution: with the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Yahweh will strip her naked and leave her at the mercy of these ‘lovers’. Yahweh compares Jerusalem to her ‘sisters’, Samaria and Sodom. Then, much like the stories of Hosea, Ezekiel has Yahweh abruptly change. Instead of condemnation, he speaks of restoration. He will restore Sodom and Samaria, and he will restore Jerusalem. Again, as in Hosea, Ezekiel closes the story with a contrast of temporary punishment with an eternal covenant. This last, he will give to Jerusalem when he forgives all that she has done.
A variant of this motif of Jerusalem’s sisters is taken up in Ezekiel 23. In this story, the introduction is offered in rapid sketch. There are two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah. They were prostitutes in Egypt when they were young. Yahweh married them, and they bore him children. Oholah is Samaria and Oholibah, Jerusalem. Oholah was unfaithful, and had the Assyrians and their gods for her lovers. Because of this, Yahweh handed her over to her lovers, who killed her and took her children. This, of course, is a transparent reference to Samaria’s destruction and to the deportation of its inhabitants. Oholibah saw her sister’s punishment but ignored it. She too took the Assyrians and their gods for her lovers, and even ‘prepared a lover’s bed’ for the Babylonians. Yahweh then declares that what was done to Samaria will be done to Jerusalem, Her children will be killed and her houses burnt. Finally, echoing Hosea 3, this ironic story tells us that Jerusalem might yet learn to ‘recognize God’.
This dark story closes in condemnation and punishment. It is followed by two expansive commentaries. The first of these (Ezekiel 24: 1–14) develops the theme of Jerusalem’s siege at the hands of the Babylonians. It mixes a metaphor for Jerusalem as cooking pot, in which Jerusalem’s best are boiled, their bones used for fuel. The second commentary (24: 15–27), parallels the metaphor of Jerusalem as the prophet’s wife in the person of the prostitute Oholibah, Ezekiel’s wife is to die. Ezekiel, however, is instructed not to mourn her. This ‘sign’ draws the story in chapter 23 to its proper conclusion. Yahweh’s temple, ‘the delight of your eyes’, will be destroyed. Jerusalem’s population, Ezekiel’s children, will be put to the sword. This is no cause for mourning, because it will lead to what is good in God’s eyes. ‘The one who escapes will return . . . and they will know that I am God.’
As in Hosea, this entire discussion that we find in Ezekiel is harsh and insensitive, even brutally so, to the past. As an evaluation of Jerusalem’s past, or of the sufferings involved in any city’s destruction, it is heartless. But neither Hosea nor Ezekiel is centred on the city of the past, with its sufferings at the hands of the Babylonians. That is rather obviously far in the past. Jerusalem’s end, like Samaria’s before it, is likened to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a warning, a time of testing. The implied contrast is with the Israel and the Jerusalem that now turns towards Yahweh and is understood as a new Israel and a new Jerusalem. This Jerusalem is not governed by harsh prophets of doom, but by hope.
b) The parable of Yahweh and his wives is also played out in Jeremiah 3–4, and its theme referenced frequently throughout this book, Jeremiah presents his metaphor in the voice of the aggrieved husband. His Jerusalem has become another man’s wife. Should Yahweh take her back? He cannot. Jerusalem is pictured in the role of a whore (Jeremiah 3: 1–2). A third image: she stands on the roadside, waiting for her lovers (3: 2). Yahweh has sent drought in punishment. In 3: 6–11, a prose commentary interprets this opening with reference to II Kings’ stories of Josiah. After Israel had played the prostitute, Yahweh had divorced her. Judah is given the role of Israel’s sister. She too was shameless, false, and a whore, only pretending to return to Yahweh. Yahweh now regrets the mercy he showed Josiah.
An interesting variation of the divine mercy is used here. In contrast to his anger with the hypocritical wife Judah, Yahweh chooses to forgive Israel and asks her to return to him. And then, blending Israel and Judah, Yahweh speaks of both as his children: ‘Return, faithless children; I am your husband.’ It is a post-exilic remnant he addresses: ‘I will accept you: one from out of a city, another chosen from an entire family; I will bring you up to Zion’ (3: 14). Jeremiah enters the theme of return: a husband begging his faithless wife to change. He asks now, in the language of pietism, for a circumcision of the heart, a moral and spiritual commitment (4: 4). In 4: 22, Jeremiah returns to the theme of his children. Now, they are foolish and lost: ‘My people are foolish; they do not know me; they are stupid children, without understanding. They are clever at evil and do not know the good.’
In closing this metaphor of Israel and Judah as God’s wives and children, Jeremiah looks on the earth in the desert nothingness of the exile, the tohu ma-bohu of the creation story of Genesis 1. Jeremiah plays a variation on Isaiah 9, Yahweh hears the screams of his daughter Zion. She is in labour trying to give birth to a child, but – echoing the bride of the Song of Songs threatened by the watchmen – is surrounded by her lovers, who are trying to kill her. Much like overlooking Sodom with Abraham in Genesis 18, Yahweh tells his prophet to run through Jerusalem’s streets to find a single person who walks in righteousness and seeks truth. Then he can pardon Jerusalem (5: 1). It is from, this desert that Yahweh will bring the new creation of a new Jerusalem.
In chapters 30 and 31, Jeremiah will have Yahweh return to these lovers of his youth and change their destiny. He will bring them back from the north. Again, the metaphors mix. Yahweh declaims; ‘I am Israel’s father; Ephraim is my first-born’ (31: 9). Like a loving father, Yahweh forgives their guilt and forgets their sin (31: 34).
The stock story of Yahweh and his wives as it is played out by Hosea, Ezekiel and Jeremiah is a rough and pointed parable, that deals with the divine presence in Samaria and Jerusalem. But such critique and judgement is only half the potential of this powerful metaphor in biblical literature. The Song of Songs and Isaiah take the parable in a quite different direction.
Isaiah first introduces the metaphor of Jerusalem as Yahweh’s wife in a song in chapter 5: 1–7, in a way that follows the pattern of Ezekiel so closely that the main outlines of the parable are clearly marked. The song has two voices. At first, it is the voice of a psalmist who sings to Yahweh, addressing him with the epithet ‘my beloved’. This divine epithet, dwdy, echoing the name of Jerusalem’s legendary King David (dwd), is closely linked to the temple on Mount Zion, Associated with these metaphors is the image of Jerusalem as Yahweh’s garden on earth. It is just such a metaphor that is drawn on here. The song is about Yahweh and his vineyard.
My beloved had a vineyard on a very fruitful hill. He fenced it, cleared it of stone, and he planted it with grapevines. He built a watchtower on it and carved out a press. He waited: expecting grapes from it, but it bore wild grapes.
In a reversal of the proverb of the sour grapes eaten by the father cited in Jeremiah 31: 29–30 and Ezekiel 18: 2, these grapes wait for the divine teeth to be set on edge. The metaphor is a variant of Yahweh with his prostitute and errant wife. This becomes explicit as the song in Isaiah 5 changes voice with Yahweh singing his complaint to the people of Jerusalem. With all the confusion of the hapless cuckold, he asks the audience to judge between him and his vineyard: ‘What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done?’ Yahweh goes on to describe his vindictive anger, much in the manner of Hosea and Ezekiel: how he will remove the vineyard’s protective wall and allow it to be destroyed. He will let weeds grow and forbid it to rain. In the parallel structures of verse 7, Yahweh interprets the song for us. The vineyard is the house of Israel; the grapevine the people of Judah. This song with its commentary is followed in verses 8, 11, 13,20 and 26 by a number of other voices, each commenting on the story. The entry of these voices shows that our biblical narrative is built from and has its context in a discussion about tradition. Sometimes, as in verse 13, the interpretation sticks to the point of Jerusalem and its destruction. Other times, however, as in verse 11, the discussion wanders among barely related social evils of the city, such as the dangers of drink. Quite impressive are the ‘woes’ that have been added in verses 20–23 by one of the discussion’s participants. These try to turn the commentary to one about universal ethics. The discussion never does get back to the vineyard or to its disappointed gardener.
The motif of Jerusalem as Yahweh’s spouse, together with that of the temple as his garden, appears again in the Song of Songs. There, it is a clear variant of the texts we have seen. In the Song of Songs, however, this motif has every positive nuance. The love of God for Jerusalem is compared to the erotic love of Solomon for his mistress. It is in the opening song of chapter 6 that the garden shows itself. The song sings of lovely Jerusalem’s fretful longing for its God. ‘Where has your beloved gone, you most beautiful among women? Where has your beloved taken himself, that we might seek him with you?’ As the voice of the song shifts with verse 2’s response, the singer is Jerusalem and Yahweh is her ‘beloved’ (again, dwd as in David). The response is filled with a rash of erotic innuendo: ‘My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the garden, and to gather lilies.’ This is the garden of 4: 16 and 5: 1’s sexuality, as Jerusalem sings to its beloved God: ‘Arise, north wind, blow wind of the south, let your spirit into my garden that the balsam may flow. May my beloved enter his garden and feed on its delightful fruits,’ Yahweh responds: ‘I am come into my garden, my sister, my bride, I have gathered my myrrh and my balsam; I eat the honey cake with its honey; I drink wine with my milk. Eat friends, drink, be drunken you lovers.’
It is this explicit, erotically metaphorical play on the theme of God’s presence in the new Jerusalem that offers a powerful counterpoint to the Bible’s literary world about old Jerusalem and the stories of its apostasy and destruction. Unquestionably, Solomon’s Song of Songs offers us the most intense of the Bible’s many variants on the theme of Yahweh’s marriages.
1 Throughout, Mark, like Matthew, emphasizes Isaiah’s theme of forgiveness of sin as the heart of the concept of salvation.
1 That Mark adds the word ‘beloved’ may emphasize the association of Jesus’ role with the Old Testament figure of David that can be seen in many places of this gospel, as the Hebrew name dwd, which lies at the origin of David’s name, means ‘beloved’ and David is known as Yahweh’s beloved.
1 A pun on the name Israel: in Hebrew, the word for ‘straight’/‘correct’ is yesh arm.