Obviously, Aristotle is talking about the pleasures we derive from beautiful landscapes, sunsets, paintings; the ecstasies of listening to a string quartet; the transport of aroma; the sensuality of taste and touch.   Our most common and basic knowing of the world is all bound up with delight.

Isn’t this reason enough to be suspicious of – if not to reject outright – any epistemology that puts desire and pleasure on the back burner?

So, begin with eschatology.

Augustine would have approved the gloss on the white teeth of the bride, which are “the Priests and Levites who offer up your offerings, and eat holy flesh, tithe and heave-offering, which are pure from any violence or robbery.”  The temples like pomegranates are like the “King, who was their head” and “as full of precepts as a pomegranate” – understood, I expect, to mean “as a pomegranate is full of seeds.”  The eighty wives and sixty concubines inspire an allegory of a Greek invasion and siege of Jerusalem: “the Greeks arose and gathered together sixty kings from the sons of Esau, clad in chain-mail and mounted on horses, and cavalry, and eighty commanders from the sons of Ishmael, riding on elephants, not to mention the rest of the nations, peoples and tongues that were without number, and they appointed the wicked Alexander as head over them, and they came to wage war against Jerusalem.”

A number of the basic moves in the Targum, though, are defensible and illuminating.  For instance:

1. The temple is at the center of the Targum’s interpretation of the Song.  Many modern commentators have noted the link between the temple and the palanquin of Solomon in Song 3:6-11, but few have noted what the Targum notes, that the armed men who precede the palanquin are “Priests and Levites, and all the tribes of Israel.”  That is, the priests and Levites stand guard at the “coach” built by Solomon.  When incense is mentioned, the Targum immediately turns to the temple setting.

2. The Targum takes the references to “daughters of Jerusalem” and other maidens as references to other nations and cities.  If (as Revelation asserts) Jerusalem is the harlot city that reigns over the kings of the earth, it seems plausible that she was once the bride-city surrounded by an international company of bridesmaids/attendants.

3. The Targum takes the entire Song as the story of Israel – her captivity in Egypt, the marriage covenant at Sinai, the coming of Yahweh in the Shekinah, Israel’s painfully inconsistent love for Yahweh, her temple and her exile.  Though the Targum is often Procrustean with this scheme, finding a place for Daniel and for the Maccabees toward the end of the Song, it’s on the right track to see Israel’s history as the sounding board against which the Song resonates.

4. Some of the specific interpretations are, I think, quite good.  Many waters cannot quench love is expounded as these words from Yahweh: “Even if all the nations, which are likened to the waters of the sea, which are many, should gather together, they would not be able to quench My love for you.  And if all the kings of the earth, which are likened to the waters of a river that flow strongly, should assemble, they would not be able to blot you out from the world.”  Still too schematic, but the thrust of the comment is just right.  On 4:13, which compares the bride to a paradise of pomegranates, the Targum says that when Israel obeys, when young men love their wives and raise righteous sons (!), “their scent is like the sweet spices of the Garden of Eden, cypress and crocus.”  This gets two things right, I think: First, that the faithful obedience of the bride is the aroma, and second that this aroma arises from the bride as if from Eden.  When the lover is compared to a tree in whose shade the woman finds refreshment, the Targum thinks of the Shekinah, the shade of Yahweh over Israel.  The “house of wine” in 2:4 is Sinai.

This is not cultural but natural: “Though men like to court, they do not like to be courted; and while they think it cruel to be rejected when they could, they without mercy reject her who courts them. . . . No man, therefore, in his senses, would think to compliment his fair one by writing of her, to her, as if she had lost her retiring modest, her female dignity, and degraded herself by doing that for which every man would despise her . . . . Till fishes mount to sing with larks on the shady boughs, and nightingales dive to the ocean’s depths to court the whales, no man, of any age, of any clime, of any rank, can be supposed to write ordinary love-songs in such a style.”

Nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators, working from the sharply defined sexual roles of the Victorian era, recoil against the confusions of the allegorical method, and turn the Song into a celebration of heterosexual love.  Moore nicely shows, however, that this quickly turns into a new allegorism of its own, as each metaphor is unpacked as a euphemism: “these ‘new’ allegorists give a sexual reading even to details that are ostensibly nonsexual.”

“By grace of the ‘flesh,’” he argues, Being is always sensed prior to any clear theoretical ontological understanding.  A “felt sense” provides “our pre-ontological attunement.”  As a result, “we are never completely ‘in the dark’” as regards Being.  This sense is not complete: It “calls for a deep commitment to questioning and exploring its implicit potential: it needs to be recognized, made explicit, conceptually articulate, and clear.”  But our embodiment means that we always already have a sense of Being and of transcendent being, and therefore “our pre-ontological understanding . . . is not totally reducible to the understandings imposed by our historical life.”  Heidegger could have seen this had he not overlooked “the natural body, the wild body of metaphorical existence.”

A very Augustinian, covenantal question.

That last sentence seems to me a fine way of stating the Protestant doctrine of justification.  And I cannot see how Levin’s is/is not self can be anything but another, more intense form of nihilism, unless it is an eschatologically shaped doctrine of justification.  That is: I am declared to be, and therefore I am, what I’m not yet.

Essentially, subjectivity inverted into objectivity, and objectivity meant the destruction of subjectivity:

“When subjectivity triumphed, it imposed its will on things and brought into being a world ruled by objectivity.  But in a world of objectivity, there is no place, no home, for the subject, whose subjectivity – that is to say, experience – is denied value, meaning, and ultimately any truth or reality.  This triumph of subjectivity has been self-destructive; we can now see how the subject falls under the spell of its objects; how it becomes subject to the objectivity it set in power.  The subject is in danger of losing touch with itself.  When reason turned totally instrumental, a function solely of power, it legitimated the construction of a totalitarian state and engineered a Holocaust.  The legacy of humanism is terror.”

To gloss that: Modernity opens up a gap between subjects and objects, subjects standing above and surveying passive objects before them (the philosophy of vision implicit there is the subject of Levin’s book).  But if we’re going to have a comprehensive gaze, then we have to be included in that comprehensive gaze.  Subjects have to be objectivized in order to fit into the picture.  Once objectivized, subjects can be treated as objects, manipulated and controlled for supposedly rational purposes.

The big difference between the passages has to do with the king whose kingship is being acknowledged.  Numbers 1-2, 7 are part of the ritual of Yahweh’s coronation; 1 Chronicles 12 is about David’s coronation.  Since David is Yahweh’s prince, His son, the ceremonies are naturally similar.  The tribes offer Yahweh vessels for the service of His house; the tribes offer David weapons and men of war for the service of his house and the land.

A. Jesus’ burial, 27:55-61 (itself a chiasm, as I showed in a post last week)

B. Jews request a guard on the tomb to avoid deception, 27:62-66

C. Jesus rises from the dead, 28:1-10

B’. Jews perpetuate a deception about the resurrection, 28:11-15

A’. Jesus meets with His disciples in Galilee and commissions them, 28:16-20

Several notes on the structure:

First, the A and A’ sections both include references to Galilee (27:55; 28:126) and both use the word “disciple” (27:57; 28:15).  The A section mentions the mother of the sons of Zebedee, while the sons of Zebedee are themselves implicitly present in A’.  Second, the B sections are ironically juxtaposed.  The only alternative to belief in the resurrection is fraud, the kind of fraud that the Jewish leaders say they wanted to prevent.  At the center, appropriately, is the account of Jesus’ resurrection itself, the angel’s appearance to the women, and Jesus’ appearance to the disciples.

Alternatively, chapter 28 can be broken down into two sections: 28:1-8 and 28:9-20.  Each of these has an internal structure of its own.  28:1-8 is chiastically arranged:

A. Women go to the tomb, 28:1

B. The angel’s descent with an earthquake, 28:2-3

C. The guards “die,” 28:4

B’. The angels speaks to the women, 28:5-7

A’. The women leave the tomb to report to the disciples, 28:8

Jesus’ appearance interrupts their flight to the disciples, and He reiterates the angel’s instruction to tell the disciples to gather in Galilee (vv. 9-10).  Verse 11 begins “while they were on their way,” referring to the women heading to meet the disciples, and the episode of the chief priests is embedded within the story of their report to the disciples.  Thus: Jesus commissions the women –> women go to the disciples –> interlude: the Jewish reaction –> disciples (who have heard from the women) gather in Galilee –> Jesus commissions the disciples.  Or, arranged as a chiasm:

A. Jesus greets the women, they worship Him, He instructs them to tell the disciples to come to Galilee, 28:9-10

B. Guards report to chief priests, 28:11

C. Chief priests decide to say that the disciples stole the body, 28:12-14

B’. Guard paid to tell the lie, 28:15

A’. Jesus greets His disciples, they worship Him, He instructs them to go to the Gentiles, 28:16-20

Along with Paul (1 Corinthians 15:4), we confess Jesus’ burial as an essential part of the gospel.  What does the burial of Jesus add to His death and resurrection?

THE TEXT

“And many women who followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to Him, were there looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons. . . .” (Matthew 27:55-66).

MANY WOMEN

In Psalm 22, David is surrounded by raging bulls, dogs, and lions (vv. 11-21), but when the Lord hears his prayer, that bestial community is replaced by a company of brothers, the seed of Israel (vv. 22-23).  During His trial and sufferings, Jesus is surrounded by raging Jewish leaders, the mob clamoring for a cross, scornful Roman soldiers, but at His death that changes.  Roman soldiers confess He is the Son of God (Matthew 27:54) and women watch at the cross and the tomb (vv. 55-56, 61; cf. 28:1-8).  Women have been in the background of Matthew’s gospel (14:21; 15:38; but cf. 9:20-22; 15:21-28; 26:6-13), but now they come to the forefront.  In Matthew’s account, James and John are not at the cross, but their mother has followed Jesus there to serve Him (27:56), ironically enough given her earlier ambitions for her sons (20:20).  Jesus reconstitutes an Israel in which there is neither “male nor female” (Galatians 3:28).

THE RICH DISCIPLE

Earlier in Matthew, Jesus commented on the difficulty of a rich man entering the kingdom (19:16-24), but at His burial a rich man comes forward to offer a tomb (27:57).  As Isaiah predicted, the Servant who suffers alongside transgressors is with a rich man in His death (Isaiah 53:9).  Receiving permission from Pilate, Joseph personally prepares Jesus’ body and lays it in the tomb, and rolls a large stone in front (vv. 58-60).  Jesus has already broken rocks and opened tombs by His death (vv. 51-52), so it’s unlikely that this tomb will hold Him.  The last time the names Jesus, Joseph and Mary appeared, the Father delivered the infant Jesus from death at the hands of Herod (Matthew 1-2).  A Joseph and several Marys reappear at the tomb, and the Father is again going to call His Son from Egypt.

SEAL ON THE TOMB

No disciples sit waiting at the tomb of Jesus.  The priests and Pharisees take Jesus’ prophecy of resurrection seriously, more seriously than the disciples (Matthew 27:63-64).  They gather before Pilate (v. 62), as they had gathered before him in his court (27:17), forming an infernal “synagogue.”  Their professed desire to avoid deception and fraud (v. 64) is ironically overturned later when they themselves perpetuate a false report about the resurrection (28:11-15).  Pilate is in form. “You see to it,” he said during the trial, foisting responsibility onto the Jewish leaders (27:24).  He does the same here: “You have a guard,” adding, as if he knows it won’t work, “make it as secure as you know how” (v. 65).

BURIALS AND RESURRECTIONS

The Jewish leaders want the dead to stay dead.  They want to maintain the status quo.  Killing and burying is the extent of human power.  If tombs are going to be opened, God is going to have to do it.  And He has; He does.

“It is as though God has revoked the rule over time that in Genesis 1 was delegated to the sun and the moon. While ‘darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples’ (v. 2), Israel is to dwell in the “everlasting light” of God’s direct rule over Israel’s times. One is reminded again of how, in Deut 32:8-9, God had delegated rule over the other nations to the gods whom those nations worshiped; how, in Psalm 82, that delegated rule is revoked as God assumes direct rule over the whole world; and then again, how the geopolitical arrangements in place for so long in the ancient Near East are brought to judgment in the cosmic trial scenes in Second Isaiah. That the image in Isa 60:19-20, in which God replaces the sun as Israel’s light, remains alive as an eschatological trope is evident from its reappearance in Rev 22:5, which says, ‘Night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.’”

Jesus is on the cross, on a mountain that is a “place of the skull.”  He cries out in a loud voice, and gives up His Spirit (pneuma).  There is an earthquake (he ge eseisthe) and graves open (ta mnemeia aneoxthesan) so that the dead can climb out and visit the holy city.  Thus are Israel and Judah again called from exile.

“the group who celebrate his deliverance with him have a theological spiritual identity. They are not simply family, friends, and neighbors, a company constituted by natural and accidental relations. They are brothers (v. 22) in a religious sense. All the different designations refer to this fraternal company: ‘fearers of the Lord’ (w. 23, 25), ’seekers of the Lord’ (v. 26), ‘the lowly’ (Hebrew ‘ânâwîm, RSV ‘afflicted’ or ‘poor,’ v. 26), ‘descendents of Jacob/Israel’ (v. 24). This last designation does not mean that Israel as a nation is the lowly, but rather that the lowly, seekers, fearers are the true Israel, the real congregation who live by the praise of the Lord.”

David is among the lowly in order to form a society of the lowly: “The language of the hymn reflects a group who without separating themselves from the national society in a social way are thinking and speaking about themselves and their relation to God in a way that is beginning to redefine what it means to be Israel. They are the people who in an intentional and public manner ‘commit their way to the Lord,’ the stance for which the figure was scorned and mocked (w. 7-8). The figure is by self-understanding and confession one of the lowly, an ‘ani. It is not his affliction that has made him a lowly one, but rather he has undergone his affliction as one of the lowly.

In the final analysis, the lowliness and affliction of the lowly King is not a reason for scorning Yahweh’s favor to him.  On the contrary, the affliction provides the occasion for Yahweh to demonstrate that favor: “People despise the lowly in his affliction. They take his affliction as a reason to scorn dependence on the Lord (w. 6-8). But the Lord makes the affliction an occasion for giving a signal that it is the lowly in whom he delights. So the company of brothers in faith celebrate not only the salvation of the figure, but the good news for them in his deliverance. The satisfaction they find in the todah meal is far more than physical; it nourishes their spirit. (Note the connections with Isa. 55:lff.) The salvation of the figure is the ground for faith for all the lowly.”

The result of this re-constitution of an Israel of the afflicted will be global faith.  In the last part of the Psalm, David expresses the hope that “Everyone—everywhere, of every condition, in every time—will join in the worship of those who recognize and rejoice that universal sovereignty belongs to the Lord. This will all take place through the proclamation of the salvation of the afflicted one as the righteousness (v. 31 sedaqà, RSV ‘deliverance’) of God. That deed of righteousness will become the basis and content of the nations’ worship; they will ‘remember,’ that is, evoke an event of the past as the significant reality of the present.”

Even those who are “going down to the dust” and the one who cannot “keep his soul alive” will “eat and worship” (v. 29).  This is a remarkable hope, since several Psalms question whether the dead praise God.  Psalm 22 says that they do, and this is likely the prophetic hope fulfilled in Matthew 27:52-53, where the saints rise to join those who are in the holy city.

Mays concludes that the Psalm “interprets Jesus’ passion and resurrection as a theodicy for those who commit their Way to the Lord. The Gospel accounts make it very clear that he suffered and died as one of the ‘lowly.’ In the psalm, it is the dying of one who trusts in the Lord that raises the question about God, and it is his salvation that leads to the knowledge that God ‘has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted’ (a very real possibility to Old Testament people and to iftoderns). Jesus’ enactment of the scenario includes the affliction to death, and is ground for knowledge that whatever the anguish caused by the conflict of faith and experience may mean, it does not mean that God has failed those who cry to him. For the lowly, the passion and resurrection Of Jesus is a justification of God in whom they trust and a vindication of their trust.”

In fact, it hardly takes Him that long.  Three hours is enough.  Darkness falls, and three hours later Jesus speaks twice in a thunderous voice, and the veil of the temple tears.  That’s the end of the temple, since there’s no use for temples without doors and boundaries to keep people out.

But then there’s the ambiguous 27:50.  When Jesus dies, He lets go of, sends out His pneuma.  This could simply be a way of describing death, but in the presence of references to Elijah it seems plausible that Matthew intends more.  The verb (aphiemi) might also suggest something more deliberate.

If so, then we’ve got 13 references to the Spirit, rather than 12.  Number 12 is at 27:50, when Jesus dies as King of the Jews and releases His Spirit.  Use number 13, which breaks out of the twelve tribes, is in the great commission, the command to disciple all the ethnoi in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, with the assurance that Jesus, who yielded His Spirit, is with them to the end of the age.

He cries out again with a loud voice (Matthew 27:50, and then Jesus gives up, or sends away, His spirit (Greek apheken to pneuma).

So too Elijah: At his sacrificial ascent in fire, he gives up his spirit to Elisha, as the Spirit of Jesus will clothe the disciples not many days after.