Part II—of III!
Following up from Friday’s post—and the first textual note turned out to be so long, I’ve had to split it again. I’ll reproduce the text in this post and the next, with the superscriptions for the notes. As I touched on in my last, even more so here, I’m indebted to Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper (which is about reading Revelation as an essentially liturgical book), and also to his introduction to Scriptural Mariology in Hail, Holy Queen.
Revelation 11.19a, 19b, 12.1-6a, 6b-9, 10a, 10b-12, RSV-CE
Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenanta was seen within his temple; and there were flashes of lightning, loud noises, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail.
And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve starsb; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon,c with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days.d
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed
With the Sun (Rev. 12.1-4),1 William Blake, ca. 1805.
Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angelse fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancientf serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan,g the deceiver of the whole worldh—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.i Rejoice then, O heaven and you that dwell therein! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath,j because he knows that his time is short!”
Revelation 11.19a, 19b, 12.1-6a, 6b-9, 10a, 10b-12, my translation
And the temple of God which is in heaven opened, and the Ark of his Testamenta was seen in his temple; and there were bolts of lighting and voices and thunderings and an earthquake and great hail.
And a great sign was seen in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was underneath her feet, and on her head was a crown of twelve starsb; and she was with child, and cried out in her labor and was tormented to give birth. And another sign was seen in heaven—and behold, a great fiery dragonc with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads; and his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and they fell to the earth. And the dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore, he could devour her child.
And she bore a son, a male, who was going to shepherd all nations by an iron rod; and her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the desert, wherein she has a place made ready for her by God, so that he can feed her there for a thousand, two hundred, and sixty days.d
The woman clothed with the sun and the dragon
as depicted by Beatus of Liébana (mid-to-late
eighth century).
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his messengerse waged war on the dragon. The dragon too began waging war, and his messengers, but they were not strong enough—their place is no longer found in heaven. And he was cast out, the great dragon, the primordialf serpent, who is called the Accuser and Šâṭân,g who wanders around the whole inhabited worldh—he was cast down to the earth, and his messengers were cast down along with him.
And a great voice was heard in heaven that said: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingship of our God, and the authority of his Anointed, because the slanderer of our brothers is cast out, he who slanders them in front of our God day and night. And they defeated him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their witness, and did not love their life to the point of deathi; rejoice over this, O heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the Accuser went down to you in a great rage,j seeing that he has little time.”
aNotes on the Ark
The Abbey of the Dormition (a term used for
the “falling asleep” of Mary by both Catholics
and Orthodox) on Mt. Zion. Photo by Tango7174,
used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (source).
This note is about the single phrase “ark of the covenant” (in the RSV) or “Ark of his Testament” (in mine), though it’s also relevant to the rest of the text. Three minor points about this phrase can be disposed of up front:
- The capitalization is an interpretive choice (inevitably, since case distinction in letters did not exist in the ancient world).
- “Ark,” though now obsolete except in reference to the arks of Noah and the Covenant, refers to a box or chest specifically with a flat lid. (It comes ultimately from the Latin arca, of similar meaning; however, while a vast majority of Latinate English vocabulary was either adopted into English via French, or taken directly from Latin during the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, arca was borrowed into Anglo-Saxon, as ᛠᚱᚳ [earc] or ᚫᚱᚳ [ærc].) The lid of the Ark of the Covenant—called the כַּפֹּרֶת [kapporeth] in Hebrew, which may simply mean “covering” in the same sense as any lid, but was at any rate understood later to mean “propitiatory covering, atonement,” and is therefore known in English as the Mercy Seat—was not strictly flat if you want to be pedantic, since two sculpted cherubim were attached to it, but you get the idea.
- “Covenant” or “testament” translate διαθήκη [diathēkē], the word for a will. “Covenant,” like “perfect” in note h of this post, is one of those words that used to be a good translation, but has taken on a different primary meaning: nowadays, people think of it as an old-fashioned synonym for “contract.” The Biblical usage originated in the Bronze Age. A covenant established kinship between the parties that swore it—not only were there attendant duties, but it could not be dissolved even by mere mutual consent, as contracts normally can. Given our main current usages of “testament” (either the Old and New sense, or in the fossilized phrase last will and), it therefore struck me as technically a very accurate rendering of διαθήκη.
The אֲרוֹן הַבְּרִית [‘Arôn Ha-B’rîth]2
Depiction of the Ark of the Covenant on
the Anikova Dish, a piece of Central Asian
silversmithing, probably of Nestorian3
Christian make, ca. eighth century.
What’s really interesting about this passage, though, is the mere presence of the Ark. See, the Ark of the Covenant—containing a golden pot of manna, a copy of the Decalogue (or possibly the whole Torah) inscribed on stone tablets,4 and Aaron’s blossomed staff—was the greatest relic in Judaism. It had been in the first Temple, Solomon’s; it was not there in the second. The Menorah, the Table of the Showbread, the Altar of Incense, and the other sacred vessels and instruments for attending to them were there, either because they had been brought back from Babylon or because replicas of the originals had been created. But there was no replica of the Ark, though it was the very throne of God’s presence.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that, when the vessels of Solomon’s Temple were carried off to Babylon, the Ark went with them and was in all probability destroyed. That is possible.5 Nonetheless, there’s a very old tradition that the Ark was not destroyed or even captured, but was removed before the fall of Jerusalem. This could originate in Ezekiel 10-11, which describes the Lord, in the form of the שְׁכִינָה [Sh’khinah] (the bright cloud of his glory over the cherubim), dramatically departing from the doomed, corrupted Temple. However, Ezekiel does not describe the Ark departing, only that Presence which the Ark symbolized and enthroned. The book of II Maccabees is more explicit.
It was also contained in the same writing, that the Prophet being warned of God, commanded the Tabernacle, and the Ark to go with him, as he went forth into the mountain, where Moses climbed up, and saw the heritage of God. And when Jeremiah came thither, he found an hollow cave wherein he laid the Tabernacle, and the Ark, and the altar of incense, and so stopped the door. And some of those that followed him, came to mark the way, but they could not find it. Which when Jeremiah perceived, he blamed them, saying, “As for that place, it shall be unknown until the time that God gather his people again together, and receive them unto mercy. Then shall the Lord show them these things, and the glory of the Lord shall appear, and the cloud also as it was showed under Moses, and as when Solomon desired that the place might be honorably sanctified.”
—II Maccabees 2.4-8
The New Jerusalem—I don’t know if you could
tell but I’m really enjoying the illuminations
from the Beatus Apocalypse.
The Ark of the New Covenant
In short, the Ark of the Covenant has been missing for six hundred years, and the author of the Apocalypse has declared it found … and then he just changes the subject, apparently? Not according to the mainstream Catholic interpretation. In the same sense that Jesus is the Temple (“Destroy this temple, and in three days I shall raise it up”), and also is the manna which the Ark contained (“I am the living bread which came down from heaven”), so likewise, on this interpretation, the Ark of the Covenant is the Mother of God.
This is what a lot of Protestants might describe as a hard sell. How on earth do you get there from here!—other than maybe the analogy of the manna being inside the Ark and Jesus being, for a time, inside Mary’s womb; but that really doesn’t seem like enough!
Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t dismiss that analogy too casually, in much the same way I wouldn’t casually dismiss the fact that, since Jesus must have sat in his Mother’s lap many a time, we can draw another analogy to the cloud of the divine glory resting on the Ark. That said, I certainly wouldn’t try and build an argument on these analogies either! But there is actually a good deal more to this interpretation of Rev. 11.19 than these pictorial metaphors. I don’t just mean the tradition that lies behind the interpretation is ancient; there is specifically better Scriptural backing for it than meets the eye.
Part of the Hazon Gabriel, a (disputed)
artifact from ca. the 1st cent., with
prophecies attributed to St. Gabriel; its
medium, ink on stone, is highly unusual.
To start, the text of the Apocalypse itself does hint at this idea. Remember that this is the transition from the third cycle of the book to the fourth—the Seven Trumpets are progressing into the “Great Interlude”—and that the final flowering of each successive cycle is the seed of the next. So we go from this revelation of the Ark at the seventh trumpet, to the “woman clothed with the sun,” who to my mind is so obviously Mary that (even when I was at my most rabidly anti-Catholic) I’ve always struggled to have patience with people who say it isn’t.6 This suggests a link between the Ark and the Woman; that by itself is not identification, but it is association.
Furthermore, I tend to agree with Hahn that it would be extremely anticlimactic, not to mention mystifying, to reveal the Ark and then say nothing more about it. I do mean “nothing,” by the way. The Ark is never so much as named elsewhere in the Apocalypse. The Woman, on the other hand, does recur. Later in this chapter, she (like the Ark) is hidden by God; when she reappears, now titled “the Bride, the Lamb’s wife,” she has the form of a city, the New Jerusalem (confirming what the astral imagery had already told us, that this is “the daughter of Zion” from the prophets—we’ll get to it). Both the Tabernacle and the Temple are invoked in the description of this city, where “the dwelling of God is with men,” yet there is no faintest hint of the Ark of the Covenant: unless, perhaps, in the facts that the city is “pure gold” and flanked at all its gates with angels. If this Woman who is the city were also the Ark, then the unveiling of the Ark in ch. 11 is not a dropped thread, and God dwelling forever in this city that is its own Temple makes perfect sense.
One Who Knew the Time of Her Visitation
However, the texts most often interpreted as identifying Mary mystically with the Ark come not from the Apocalypse, but the Gospel of Luke. I mentioned in my last post that the Gospel passage for the Assumption is the episode called the Visitation, or occasionally “the quickening of St. John the Baptist.” This is the third pericope of Luke: it is preceded by the Annunciation, which is itself preceded by the vision of Zechariah, the Baptist’s father. Let’s briefly review both.
A Russian ikon of the Nativity of the Baptist;
St. Elizabeth is in the center, with St. Zechariah
(note the writing tablet) to the right of her.
In that first pericope (1.5-25), Zechariah is serving in the Temple, in the fifth of its six discrete courts, when he is confronted with a message about a miraculous pregnancy, delivered by St. Gabriel, in the place7 where the Ark of the Covenant used to be. Aside from natural parallels to stories like the conception of Samuel, the Biblical references here mostly evoke the book of Malachi. Hijinks duly ensue.
On the other side of the year and at the other end of the country, the same angel then appears a second time, with an almost identical message, though this time to someone who wasn’t even allowed further inside the Temple than the second of its courts. Obviously the two events differ, and not just due to the differences in the children. Unlike Zechariah, whose question (judging from the angel’s response) was incredulous, the Blessed Virgin appropriately challenged the spirit that came to her, but was prepared to accept its answer when it referred itself to the power of God rather than, e.g., to some bending of normal moral rules for a “higher purpose.”8 But take note of further differences in the language. “The Lord is with thee … The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee”—this is how St. Gabriel addresses her. His words evoke the descent of the שְׁכִינָה upon the Tabernacle and the Temple, and the Presence resting upon the Mercy Seat between the cherubim; compare them with Exodus 40 or II Chronicles 5-6.9
“The Letter Killeth, But the Spirit Giveth Life”
Twelfth-century fresco of the Visitation,
from a church in North Macedonia.
Mary, having just learned of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, rushes from the Galilee to the Judean hills to see her cousin. The Judean setting—while obviously far from unique in the Jewish Scriptures!—does allow us to draw a few interesting parallels to another episode which took place in this region, namely II Samuel 6.2-19 (here abridged):
David arose to bring up from thence the ark of God, the Lord of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims. And they set the ark of God upon a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab: and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, drave the new cart. And Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.
David was afraid of the Lord that day, and said, “How shall the ark of the Lord come to me?” So David would not remove the ark of the Lord into the city of David: but carried it aside into the house of Obededom the Gittite. And the ark of the Lord continued in the house of Obededom three months: and the Lord blessed all his household. And it was told king David. So David went and brought up the ark into the city with gladness.
And David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet. And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart. And they brought in the ark of the Lord, and set it in the midst of the tabernacle. … And as soon as David had made an end of offering burnt offerings and peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts. And he dealt among all the people to every one a cake of bread, and a good piece of flesh, and a flagon of wine. So all the people departed every one to his house.
Now, take the phrases I’ve obnoxiously color-coded in that passage, and compare them with their correspondingly-colored phrases in this (abridged) version of Luke 1.39-56:
Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda; and entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth. And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost: and she spake out with a loud voice, and said, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.”
And Mary said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. … He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; as he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.” And Mary abode with her about three months, and returned to her own house.
Though, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, even all these verbal parallels contain something less than the more literal parallel. Here, in both cases, we had a “chosen vessel” which no man had a right to touch, carrying the person of God toward Jerusalem.
Et Puis Après?
Adoration of the Lamb on Mount Zion
(Rev. 14), from Beatus of Liébana.
Still, as Wash10 put it, “Do we … care? Are we caring about that?”
So there are textual parallels between the Ark of the Covenant and the person of Mary. Is this proof that the Blessed Virgin Mary is what the Ark of the Covenant, I don’t know, means? Is it proof that she is the Ark of the New Covenant?
No. But I do think it’s well in line with the way the Apostles interpret Scripture. Look at Galatians 4 or I Corinthians 9; or look at some of the “fulfillments of prophecy” cited in the Gospels themselves, which are usually more literary in style than directed at anything you could call a qualification for the Messiah, laid down clearly and in advance. Given what Christians believe about the New Testament, and that Luke also tells us Jesus instructed the apostles in the interpretation of the Bible after the Resurrection? I’d go so far as to say we’re meant to read the Bible this way, i.e. typologically. That’s part of the reason I value this interpretation: by highlighting the method, it encourages us to use it.
In a related vein, relationships like this between the New Testament and the Old help to illuminate both. The Christian theology of the Old Testament is that it exists for the sake of the New: it created the ritual and theological “language” in which the gospel was to be conveyed, while at the same time defining and guiding that people from and among whom the Anointed would come. Therefore, when we read about the Ark in the Old Testament, we are, allegorically, reading about the then-future role of the Mother of God. That title is her role in the history and economy of salvation. There is no lesson about her that is not also, ultimately, a lesson about Christ.
Because remember, for the first decade or two at least, the Old Testament was all the Bible the infant Church had: aside from the still-orally transmitted memoirs of the Apostles, everything they learned about their Savior and the new life was typologically derived. I don’t think I understand all the implications of the idea “Ark = Mary”; but if it’s how to understand the spiritual significance of the Ark, it’s how to understand the spiritual significance of the Ark, and I’ll certainly gain nothing by ignoring it. One day I might grasp what, or who, is signified by the Menorah or the Brazen Sea or the ‘Urim and Thummim.
It also stands out to me that where the original Ark was an object, the New Ark is a person. This, too, aligns with other parts of Scripture. It seems to me to fit in with the pattern of creation in particular: we begin with the most amorphous stuff, and the first distinctions are the most general, but as God continues to fashion the world and increase its goodness, we get more and more like, and ultimately meet, human beings. I’d be extremely surprised if the scenario C. S. Lewis suggests at the close of Perelandra came true of us—that eventually even things as cosmic as the planet’s orbit were subjected to human supervision; but apparently “we shall judge angels,” and I’m confident that whatever that means, it means something.
The Creation (1534); though my source said
this is by Lucas Cranach, it didn’t specify
if it was the Younger or the Elder, and of
course the date and style seem to suit either.
Footnotes
1Blake (whose vocation on earth was apparently “being difficult”) produced another painting of the same name, treating the same subject, and dating to around the same time! The distinction between the two is that, where this depicts the Dragon and the Woman from behind the former, the other Blake painting of this name depicts them viewed from above—both very unusual perspectives from which to view their subjects.
2This is the most common Hebrew name of the Ark (which I mention because I am nothing if not That Guy). It literally means “ark of the covenant.” The names אֲרוֹן הַעֵדוּת [‘arôn ha-3edhûth], “ark of the testimony,” and אֲרוֹן הַאֱלֹהִים [‘arôn ha-‘elohîm], “ark of God,” are also used.
3“Nestorian” may not be the right word here; a better term might be Church of the East. This Church’s history centered on the peoples of the Persian Empire, rather than the Roman. It broke communion with the rest of Christianity in response to the Council of Ephesus in 431 (the details of which need not detain us here). The Church of the East went on to have an impressive history in Asia, establishing sees as far afield as Mongolia and China—the court, and harem, of Genghiz Khan had a large number of Christians of this communion, and the famous Mar Thoma Christians of India overwhelmingly belonged to the Church of the East right down to the seventeenth century. However, its numbers were devastated by the Black Death: nearly all its provinces were thoroughly depopulated of clergy, laity, and monastics, except around Mesopotamia and in a few parts of India. A surviving segment of the Church of the East in modern Iraq entered full communion with Rome in the sixteenth century, forming the Chaldæan Catholic Church, which exists to this day. Two other bodies, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, maintain the anti-Ephesian lineage.
4I wonder whether “stone” is really the material that we were meant to understand the tablets to be made of, or if they were in fact fired clay.
5I gather that, unlike vessels such as the Menorah or the Table of Showbread, the returning exiles were in no position to build a new Ark. The principal materials of which the vessels were made (mostly acacia wood and gold) were of course still available, but the manna, tablets, and staff were—if my understanding happens to be correct—neither dispensable nor replaceable. However, I couldn’t track this understanding of mine to a source; so, you know, grain of salt here!
6Not that the Woman here isn’t other things as well. My impatience is not with those who add that she is Israel, the Church, etc. (I’ll be doing that myself in Part III), but with those who say that she is not the Mother of God.
7I.e., the inner courts of the Temple—not the Holy of Holies itself.
8Mary’s question (“How shall this be, since I know not a man?”) is much odder than it may seem. Luke just told us she’s betrothed to Joseph; the obvious assumption for her to make would surely be that her fiancé is going to father the child. My theory, which admittedly goes beyond the text, is that this points to the Virgin having made a vow of perpetual continence at some point, and that she was entering this marriage on the understanding with Joseph that it would not be consummated. If so, this makes her question quite shrewd: she’s been approached by a spirit, but what kind? Any answer that didn’t involve her keeping her vow would expose an evil spirit for what it was. Why she would have made such an unusual vow in the first place is harder to say, but the conduct and preaching of the Baptist (ascetic, apocalyptic, using baptism as a purifying rite) may indicate an Essene influence on the family, and they are one of the few Judaic sects in history to take a high view of celibacy.
9I’m also struck by the fact that, while St. Gabriel—seemingly by way of “producing his credentials”—identifies himself to Zechariah, he never tells Mary his name in the text. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this! Had she met St. Gabriel before?
10Ooh, the nerd with extremely niche interests who grew up in the 1990s was a Firefly fan, how original
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