Friday, June 9, 2023

Some Notes from Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story (2023)

 

 

John saw the waters of life flowing again from the holy of holies, around or from the Tree of life, perhaps from the throne beneath the Tree. On the throne was the One who was both divine and human—‘God-and-the-Lamb—the temple idiom found also in the account of Solomon’s coronation: he sat on the throne of the LORD as king, and the people worshipped the LORD-and-the-king (1 Chron. 29.20-23). In Revelation, the servants worship him, singular, and see his face, singular, and wear his Name, singular. The time of wrath described in the Damascus Document, when the LORD his face, was over. (CD 1.5) This began in the time of Isaiah, when the people rejected the gentle waters of Shiloh and all they represented, when Isaiah sealed up his teaching among his disciples, and the LORD hid his face (Isa. 8.1-17). ‘Wearing the Name’ meant that the servants were high priests, and according to John, this was the vision. Jesus had prayed for his disciples: ‘Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which thou hast given me in thy love for me before the foundation of the world’ (Jn 17.24). (Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 281-82)

 

 

In Proverbs 8.30-31 Wisdom describes her place and role in creation. She is beside him, suggesting a shared role as Creators. She is also ‘mwn, a word with many meanings.

 

First we note that this was a self-description of the LORD in the letter to Laodicea: ‘I am the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation’ (Rev. 3.14). ‘Amen’ here semes to be the āmôn of Proverbs 8.30, the witness of creation and its beginning. The other imagery in the letter is from Wisdom: true wealth, white garments and oil to restore sight. The problem is that here the Amen figure is male, and the form āmôn is also masculine. Justin equated Wisdom with both the Son and the Spirit, (Trypho 61) but Philo explained:

 

Let us pay no heed to the discrepancy I the gender of the words, and say that the daughter of God, Wisdom, is not only masculine, but father, sowing and begetting in souls aptness to learn, discipline, knowledge, sound sense, good and laudable actions.

 

He adds to the confusion by stating in the same treatise that the Father of the high priest is God and his Mother is Wisdom ‘through whom the universe came into existence’. His head was anointed with oil and what guides and leads him was illuminated with a brilliant light. (On Flight 52, 110.)

 

Wisdom at the side of the LORD was ‘mwn.

 

·       Read as āmôn the word means the one who joins together in harmony, which is how the LXX understood it, harmozousa. This ‘joining’ derives from the word ‘firm’, and was used, for example, of establishing the covenant: ‘My steadfast love I will keep for him for ever, and my covenant will stand firm for him’ (Ps. 89.28).

·       Read as āmûn the word means a foster child, a suckling. In the overall picture of the Great Lady as the Mother, this would mean that the āmûn was the LORD beside his Mother; or read as ōmēn the word means wet nurse (Num. 11.12; 2 Sam. 4.4), and so Wisdom is feeding her ‘sucking’, yōnēq. The sun goddess of Ugaritic was the heavenly wet-nurse of the crown prince. (KTU 1.15.ii.27-28) The ‘suckling’ was a title for the son of the Great Lady: the sucking ‘delighted’, š”, over a whole of the asp after receiving the Spirit of the LORD (Isa. 11.8), and the Servant grew up ‘like a suckling’ (Isa. 53.2). The word also means young plant, a sapling of the Great Lady’s tree.

·       Read as ēmēn the word means ‘I was at the right hand’, from the related verb ymn. The Great Lady appeared at the right hand of the LORD (Deut. 33.2), and the Queen was at the right hand of the king (Ps. 45.9).

 

The enigmatic ‘mwn probably meant all these things: the one who holds all things together, the nursing mother set at the right hand. We must bear in mind the warning of Ben Sira’s grandson, who translated his book of Wisdom teachings into Greek: ‘What was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language’ (Preface to Ben Sira). A great deal has been lost in translating ‘mwn. (Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 411-12)

 

 

 

The Hebrew word for tree, ēṣ, a masculine noun, also meant wood, and the feminine form of the word, ‘ēṣâ, meant wise counsel, plan, or design. This gave rise to wordplay. Job, who debated with the wise men of Edom, lived in the land of Uz, ‘ūṣ, another related word. When the LXX translated Isaiah’s oracle of the throne names (Isa. 9.6), it gave a single title rather than the four that are familiar with the English versions based on the MT. Instead of ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’, the LXX has megalēs boulēs aggelos, ‘Angel of great counsel’. Sometimes it is possible to see how a different word in the LXX came from another way of reading the Hebrew text, but this ‘angel of great counsel’ cannot have come from the Mt. There must have been another version of the Hebrew text at this point, ml’k ‘ṣh gdlh. Since the text was written without spaces between the words, the translator of the LXX would have had ml’k ‘ṣhgdhl, ‘angel of great counsel’, which could also be divided as ml’k ‘ṣ hgdlh, and read as ‘the angel/messenger of the tree of the Great Lady’. This is how the risen LORDS appears at the beginning of Revelation: the shining heavenly Man in the midst of the sevenfold menorah which was the golden Tree (Rev. 1.12-16). (Margaret Barker, The Great Lady: Restoring Her Story [Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2023], 240)

 

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