Tangled

Last updated on: December 2, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Emma Tarlo’s recent Entangled is a study of the global market in human hair. In a TLS review, Kathryn Hughes describes a “multi-billion-dollar global hair market.” Tarlo explores “the processes by which the greasy hairballs unpicked in Mandalay get refashioned into ‘frothy toppers’ and ‘dome bowlers’ in New York” and asks “What does it mean exactly that the poker-straight hair of women from mainland China become Afro weaves in Dalston, east London, or Jackson, Mississippi? And why do the darkly... Read more

Feast of Kingship

Last updated on: December 2, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nathan MacDonald (Not Bread Alone) argues that “The description of the feast in [Isaiah] 25.6–8 is usually taken to be of a coronation meal or a meal to celebrate YHWH’s kingship. Although this idea has been related to theories of an enthronement festival in pre-exilic Israel, it is independent of those theories because the identification of YHWH as king in 24.23–5 is clear. The alternatives to YHWH’s lordship of the earth are imprisoned and punished and YHWH takes over direct... Read more

Lovers and Silent Women

Last updated on: December 2, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Dympna Callaghan points out in her Shakespeare’s Sonnets that “Petrarchan love was always unrequited and unconsummated, like Romeo’s love for the ‘fair Rosaline’ who has taken a vow of chastity in Romeo and Juliet.” Thus, the Canzoniere “detail the poet’s tormented love for Laura. Her trademark unavailability becomes crystalized when she dies, an event which does not end the sequence but simply shifts it to another register. Even before her death, the poet-lover is melancholy to the point of psychological... Read more

Lovers and Silent Women

Last updated on: December 2, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Sources of Apocalyptic

Last updated on: December 1, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his 1892 Lectures on the Apocalypse (29–30), William Milligan argues that “the symbolism of the Revelation is wholly and exclusively Jewish.” He illustrates: Even “the crown of life” in chap. i. 10 is not the wreath of the victor in the Grecian games, but the Hebrew crown of royalty and joy—the crown of “KingSolomon, wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.” The “white stone,” with... Read more

House of Wisdom

Last updated on: December 1, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

1 Chronicles 22 records a lengthy speech from David to his son Solomon. The very setup suggests an analogy with the book of Proverbs, in which Solomon gives instructions to his son the prince. For the Chronicler, Solomon learned to teach wisdom by receiving it from David. That formal hint of the Wisdom literature is supported by the speech itself, which is full of wisdom terminology. David exhorts Solomon to be wise (sekel, used 8x in Proverbs) and to pursue... Read more

Church With Soul of America?

Last updated on: November 30, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The paragraphs below are taken, with slight changes, from a column I wrote at Firstthings.com in July 2015. The questions are even more pressing since Trump’s election. Immigration has always roiled under the surface of American politics. It’s the price of being America, a land subdued by outcasts and transplants, first from Western Europe, then from the world. Every fresh wave of immigrants is an American identity crisis. Are we a Protestant nation, or can we make room for Irish... Read more

Limits of Pen and Tongue

Last updated on: November 30, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 103 laments the limits of language to capture the thing it describes. “Look in your glass,” the poet says, and you will see a face that overwhelms “my blunt invention quite.” The reality dulls the poet’s lines and disgraces him. And it would be a sin to mar the subject of his poem by striving to mend it, a subject that was perfectly well before he began. In short, there is “more, much more” in the face itself... Read more

Love Well What You Leave

Last updated on: November 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 embodies the excessiveness of poetry. It’s possible to summarize the poem in a brief statement: “I’m getting old. I’ll die. Love me while you can.” Why so belabor the point? One effect of belaboring through fourteen lines of iambic pentameter is to link aging with cosmic cycles and natural elements. The first quatrain operates mostly within the framework of seasonal change. The addressee can behold a “time of year” in him, the time of year when leaves... Read more

A House by and for Nations

Last updated on: November 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

After David sinfully takes a census of Israel (1 Chronicles 21), the threshing site where he builds the altar that arrests the plague becomes the temple site (1 Chronicles 22:1). David begins preparations for the temple. First, he gathers the “strangers” (Heb. ger), non-Israelite residents of the land or from territories David has conquered, and puts them to work hewing stone (22:2; cf. 8:29–40). He mines iron for nails and clamps, and smelts so much bronze that it cannot be... Read more

How many seals, trumpets, and bowls of judgment are there in Revelation?