Fairer than the Children of Men

I. A heart that overflows

The last of the four songs does not begin in heaven.

Psalm 110 opens with a divine oracle, and the court holds its breath. Psalm 45 opens in a chest. A man sits at a writing table, somewhere in the centuries of the royal house, and he can no longer keep it inside:

"My heart overflows with a good word; I say: my works are for a king; my tongue is the stylus of a ready scribe."1

Wells over. Once in all Scripture does something bubble up so, and it is here — like water in a spring that does not ask whether it may rise, like something boiling under a lid that is too light.1 The poet has seen something, and the seen is greater than he; he cannot keep it, he can only be rid of it. And then that third line: my tongue is the stylus of a ready scribe. Not his hand — his tongue. He speaks as fast as a professional scribe writes, or he writes as fast as he speaks; the distinction no longer matters, for the word is ahead of him, and he runs after it with a reed pen.

For seventy-five words he will presently not let the King go — from the third verse to the tenth there is nothing but "you," unbroken — and then he turns around to a girl in gold.

For he has seen a wedding.

II. A song of love

Above the song stands, as an address above a letter, the heading: for the choirmaster, on "Lilies," of the sons of Korah; a maskil — and then the genre name, two words: a song of love.2

The lilies first. That flower grows in the canon in two places close together: in the Song of Songs, where the beloved is a lily among the thorns and the bridegroom pastures among the lilies — and in the house of God, where the capitals of the two temple pillars were wrought as lily-work and the rim of the bronze sea opened like a lily-cup.2 Before a single line has been sung, then, the melody is already tuned to a flower that is rooted in love poetry and cast in the sanctuary.

And then "a song of love." There is in all the canon one other song that opens so, with the word of the beloved in its first line, and it is the song of the vineyard: let me sing for my beloved the song of my dear one about his vineyard.3 That song began as tenderly as this one — a fruitful hill, a tower, a winepress — and it ran dead into a judgment: He looked for justice, and behold: bloodshed; for righteousness, and behold: an outcry. The tenants have beaten servant after servant, and at last the son; the love song of the vineyard has become the darkest song of the prophets. And now, on the other side of all that blood, the canon opens its second song of love — and this one does not run dead. The same word above the door, the other ending behind the door: where the vineyard song ends in an outcry, this song ends in shouts of joy.

III. Beauty and a sword

Then he strikes up, and the first thing he says of the King is not that he is mighty.

"You are fairer than the children of men; grace is poured out on your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever."4

Fairer — the Hebrew here doubles the word, as if "fair" in the singular is too small for what the poet sees; the language stammers with beauty.4 And the grace on his lips is poured out, as one pours oil, or metal: whatever this mouth says, it flows, and it overflows.

Then, without transition, the steel:

"Gird your sword on the thigh, hero — your majesty and your splendor. And ride on in your splendor, for the sake of truth and meekness and righteousness, and your right hand shall teach you awesome things. Your arrows are sharpened — peoples fall under you — in the heart of the enemies of the king."5

Majesty and splendor: the radiance-pair of the coronation lies here on a hip, as armor.5 And the campaign has aims that no army ever wrote on its banners: truth, meekness, righteousness. In the history of the world no one has ever ridden out for the sake of meekness. And there it stands, beside the sword.5 Once this Rider has already been seen meek, on the colt of a donkey, while a city spread its cloaks before him; the sword stayed in its sheath that day.6

Beauty and a sword in the same strophe, grace on the lips and arrows in hearts — the poet sees no contradiction in it, and he is right. With this King the beauty is no court decoration that stays home when there is fighting. It girds itself on; it rides.

IV. The throne in the wedding song

And then he says, in the middle of a wedding song, the weightiest sentence that the Old Testament ever addressed to a king:

"Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever; a rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness."7

In the throne room the Father spoke these lines Himself, as the fifth of the seven words with which He crowns the Son. But this is the ground from which they were dug up: a banquet hall, and a man with an overflowing heart, who looks at his king and uses words that no king can bear — and does not take them back.

The Hebrew of this line allows more than one reading; the grammar does not compel. But whichever reading you choose, there stands in a wedding song a throne that is for ever and ever, and an addressee who must be able to bear that. And the canon did not leave the open sentence open: the Greek Bible chose the address, and the letter to the Hebrews reads that choice out at the sharpest edge — but to the Son: your throne, O God.8 What the Hebrew left open has been closed. Upward.

And there is a second word in this verse that the whole book already knows. The rod of uprightness — שֵׁבֶט, the same word that in Psalm 2 is of iron. Two rods, one word, and each has traveled into the New Testament by its own way: the iron one through the vision, three times, each at a hinge of the drama; the upright one through the letter, in the fifth word of the coronation.7 What shatters and what keeps upright lies in the same hand.

V. The oil of gladness

Three times this song hangs a consequence on a "therefore": therefore God has blessed you; therefore God has anointed you; therefore peoples will praise you. Blessed, anointed, praised — and the middle of the three is the reason for the whole feast:9

"You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness, above your companions."9

Therefore. The gladness here is no adornment of power; it is reward. There has been Someone who loved righteousness — not tolerated, not enforced: loved — and hated wickedness, and the oil on this head is the consequence of it.

And that oil has a name rarer than it sounds. "Oil of gladness" — the combination stands twice in the whole Bible. The second place is Isaiah 61: ornament instead of ashes, oil of gladness instead of mourning — and that chapter opens with the same anointing: the Spirit of the Lord YHWH is upon me, because YHWH has anointed me.10

What happened to that second place stands in Luke. A Sabbath in Nazareth, the synagogue of the village where He was raised. The scroll of Isaiah is handed to Him; He unrolls it and searches, and He finds the place, and reads: the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me. Then He rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant and sits down — and the eyes of all in the synagogue are fixed on Him. In that silence He says: "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your ears."11 He opens the only text that names the oil of Psalm 45 by its name, and He applies it to Himself. No evangelist says aloud that the psalm and the prophet touch here; the words themselves do it. And Luke writes one more sentence after it, about the people in that hall: they marveled at the words of grace that came out of His mouth — a village full of witnesses who do not know that they are echoing a line of a psalm: grace, poured out on his lips.11

Above your companions. In the accentuation of the Masoretes this is the most isolated word of the song — one word, one verse-part, set apart.12 Who are they? In the Song of Songs the companions are the friends of the bridegroom, the men who belong to him on the day of his joy. And the letter that reads this verse out to the Son calls its own readers, three chapters further on, with precisely that word: we have become companions of Christ.12 So there is gladness-oil on more heads than one — but it was not poured out there separately. Israel sings elsewhere how that goes: like the precious oil on the head, which runs down into the beard, the beard of Aaron, and runs down onto the hem of his garment.13 The oil is poured on one head, and all that belongs to him becomes wet from what runs down. Above your companions — the ranking stands in the verse itself: their joy is real, and it is derived, from his; none of them becomes the Anointed One.

And about the joy of the Anointed One Himself the letter has one sentence that sets everything on edge: for the joy that lay before Him, He endured a cross and despised the shame.14 The oil of gladness is poured out after a cross. That is the price of this feast, and the psalm sings the reward.

VI. The Bride is led in

Then the doors of the hall open, and the first thing that comes in is fragrance.

"Myrrh and aloes and cassia are all your garments; out of ivory palaces stringed music gladdens you."15

You smell this King before you see him. And the fragrances come from somewhere: myrrh and aloes lie together in exactly two other places in the canon — in the garden of the bride in the Song of Songs, and on the bed of the temptress in Proverbs.15 This is wedding fragrance; whoever smells tabernacle incense here smells something that is not there, for the holy anointing oil is mixed from other spices.15 The sanctuary is coming presently — but not by way of the fragrance.

Then the gold.

"Kings' daughters are among your precious ones; the consort stands at your right hand, in gold of Ophir."16

She is already there. The poet has not yet turned to her — he does that only a verse later — but she already stands in his strophe, at his right hand, as if the text itself could not wait. And the gold in which she stands is the farthest and heaviest that Israel knew: gold of Ophir, the gold that Solomon's ships fetched across the sea, three years' sailing for one cargo.16

Only then the turn, and it is the hardest seam of the whole song: the poet lets the King go and addresses, with three imperatives in a row, a girl:

"Hear, daughter, and see, and incline your ear; and forget your people and the house of your father. And the king will desire your beauty; for he is your lord — bow down before him."17

Every wedding begins with a leave-taking. Forget your people and the house of your father — someone in this canon has been called so before, away from his land and his kindred and the house of his father, and the whole people of this psalm is born of that one departure.17 Now the call sounds again, to a daughter, on the threshold of a banquet hall. And then the sentence the text does not reverse: the king will desire your beauty. He, fairer than the children of men, longs for what he sees in her — as if the fairest of all still had something to receive, and she is it. And in the same breath the limit: he is your lord; bow down. Desire and authority in one verse. This bride is desired and she bows, and the one does not undo the other.

"All glorious is the king's daughter, within; her raiment is of gold filigree."18

Within — the word that Scripture keeps for the innermost of houses and of the temple. Her glory sits where, in a building, the holy place sits. And her raiment is gold filigree. Of the nine times this word stands in the Bible, eight stand in two chapters of Exodus, and they all describe the same thing: the gold settings on the shoulders and the breastpiece of the high priest — the mountings in which the stones are set that bear the names of the sons of Israel, engraved as seals, carried on the heart, into the sanctuary. The ninth time is here, and here it is no mounting on a garment but the garment itself. The Bride is clothed in sanctuary language.

And then the procession begins to move.

"In many-colored embroidered garments she is led to the king; virgins behind her, her companions, are brought to you. They are led with gladness and rejoicing; they enter into the palace of the king."19

She is led; they are brought. No one in this procession walks in on their own authority — there is carrying, leading, handing along, from the first to the last. And the sound is noted: gladness and rejoicing, a procession you hear before you see it. The Song of Songs preserves of such a day one more image: a king with a crown that his mother set on him, "on the day of his wedding, on the day of the gladness of his heart" — a coronation not after a battle but at a wedding.20

And there is celebrating. In the last book of the Bible a voice breaks loose like the sound of many waters and heavy thunderclaps: let us be glad and rejoice and give Him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready; and to her it is given to clothe herself in shining pure fine linen.21 To her it is given — there too the quiet passive of the procession: the Bride wears what has been handed to her, down to her garment. Whoever hears that rejoicing and knows this song recognizes the procession.

VII. One step lower

One thing strikes only whoever hears the two songs side by side.

In Psalm 110 God says to the Son: sit at My right hand. In Psalm 45 the consort stands at the right hand of the King. The same place — and one step lower. First the Son at the right hand of the Majesty; then the Bride at the right hand of the Son. Even the verbs hold the order fast: He sits, the finished work in one posture; she stands, led in, arrayed, in the gold of Ophir.22 The highest place does not shift on: her place is beside Him, and for a creature there is none higher.

And the letter that read out the coronation turns here to its readers, in the middle of the argument, and speaks in a perfect tense that takes the breath away: you have come — not: you will one day come — to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and myriads of angels, a festal assembly.23 The invitation is no longer a prospect; it is an address. And whoever is addressed so travels differently: we have here no abiding city, but we seek the one to come.23 The bride's "forget your people and the house of your father" is the travel rule of everyone who is expected at this feast — and what there is to forget does not weigh against Who is waiting.

They enter into the palace of the king — and the song is not yet over.

Source-text footnotes. All translations are the author's own, concordant working translations; in the typeset edition the notes appear at the foot of the page.