Last week, we began our examination of how the biblical characters of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene recall and parallel the iconic pairing of David and Solomon from the ancient Hebrew histories. This week, we’ll conclude that examination with a few, shall we say, more esoteric points.
The last post ended with a discussion of King David’s ecstatic (one is tempted to write “triumphal”) entry into the holy city of Jerusalem, at the head of the procession for the Ark of the Covenant. This post picks up from that point and explores what happened thereafter — the crowning of Solomon and the construction of the First Temple to house the sacred artifact. This monumental task proved beyond David’s ability, despite his considerable accomplishments; thus it was left to his son and successor, Solomon, to complete.
The Significance of the Ark
As a child in Sunday School, I sometimes found myself bewildered at the equivocation of the Old Testament on the subject of the Ark. There were definitely two — Noah’s Ark as well as the Ark of the Covenant — and they didn’t seem to have very much to do with one another.
At first, anyway.
In my adulthood, after a few years of studying etymology, I came to understand the connection. The English word “ark” derives from a Sanskrit word, argha, which means “womb”. In such a context, the image of Noah’s Ark makes much more sense to me: a creche of all life, surrounded by allegorical waters, holding the Earth’s animals safe until time for their birth into the wider world. But while the Genesis story is a relatively literal, zoological myth of beginnings, the meaning of the Ark of the Covenant is more occluded.
Whereas Noah’s Ark supposedly held the world’s animal diversity (“two by two”), the contents of the Ark of the Covenant were comprised of two slabs of inscribed stone: the Ten Commandments, the second Covenant between God and the Israelites (the first was God’s promise to Abraham, after he’d proven himself willing to sacrifice his only son on the peak of Mount Moriah, AKA Mount Zion). As compared to the story of Noah, the “release” of these commandments out into the world is much more allegorical — and instead of happening once in the distant past, it symbolically occurred once per year, when the High Priest of the Temple was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies to stand in God’s ineffable Presence and then to carry His spiritual blessing out of the Temple to share with all of the Israelites for the year. Thus, through the power of the Ark, the Covenant was annually renewed.
In both cases, the imagery of the Ark is highly erotic. The story of Noah’s Ark is rather explicitly about sexual reproduction (“two by two”), while the story of the Ark of the Covenant concerns a spiritual Eros: the Covenant as a hieros gamos (“sacred marriage”) between God and His chosen people — thus Jeremiah’s whining about the Israelites acting like a faithless slut, and thus God’s multiple and constant references to His own, very human, jealousy.
From Ark to Temple
The Bible claims that David, for all of his famous yet flawed righteousness, was simply ineligible to build the Temple of which he had dreamed. Though his violent warrings were not ultimately his fault (King Saul, after all, was out to kill him), the taint of blood on his hands nonetheless disqualified him from the sacred task of building the most holy structure in Judaism. That job befell to his son Solomon, whose personal motto may well have been something like “Make love, not war.”
Solomon, who reigned in a time of superlative prosperity and peace, had plenty of opportunity and resources to get the job done. He was also a man of extreme erotic appetite: according to the Bible, he kept a harem of 600 women and married multiple foreign princesses, including even the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh — the finest catch of the ancient world. These erotic connections offended the monotheistic authors who, looking backward from a later date, condemned Solomon for allowing himself to be influenced by his “foreign wives.” During his mythical reign, according to the sources we have, the Israelites worshipped polytheistically, recognizing both a male God and a female Goddess in heaven.
Even before Solomon built his famous Temple on the rock at the peak of Mount Zion, the situs was held sacred by the followers of Yahweh as the place of the original Covenant between God and Abraham. At the same time, and only a short distance away, the Israelites also worshipped the Queen of Heaven, Asherah, at Her shrine in the Kidron Valley, where the lower slopes of Mount Zion meet the Mount of Olives. There stood an ancient pomegranate grove known as the Garden of Gethsemane. Thus, before the building of the First Temple, the Hebrews who made the pilgrimage to this holy place would usually honor both Yahweh and Asherah — presumably, they would first climb Mount Zion to worship at the shrine of the Father God on the hill’s peak, before descending to leave their offerings for the Mother Goddess at the garden in the valley below. (Interestingly enough, this is the exact same location where, by tradition, Jesus was tempted by the diabolos to throw himself down from a great height — in his time, there was a sheer drop from the Temple portico on the Mount above to the deep and shaded Kidron Valley below.)
An important point about Solomon’s First Temple, usually missed by modern biblical scholars, is that its floor plan closely resembled the same kind of allegorical womb that was evoked by the two biblical Arks. As Israelite pilgrims made their way toward it, they would pass through two gates and two courtyards (representing the outer and inner labia of female genitals), then into the inner court which represents the vagina; and if they were the High Priest, they could then proceed from there to the Holy of Holies, the womb. There, if the surviving sources are correct, they would find the holy cherubim of the Ark holding one another in mutual erotic embrace, symbolic of the hieros gamos which not only created all life but also blessed the chosen people with their spiritual mantle.
In other words, in Solomon’s time, the Temple was an integrated place of worship where God and Goddess were not only worshiped side by side, but together as an erotic couple. Thus, the patriarchal-monotheistic authors of later Judaism looked back at this Golden Age and decried Solomon’s “defilement” of the Temple with the presence of an Asherah pole/tree as well as the kedeshas/kedeshim, the sacred prostitutes who inhabited the Temple grounds.
Jesus/Mary as Restoration
King Josiah, reigning a few centuries after Solomon, put a stop to all of that. He ordered the Asherah cut down from the Temple Mount and expelled all the kedeshim, before taking the same show on the road and murdering as many of the priestesses of Asherah that he could get his hands on. After such violent crackdowns, the worship of Asherah and the hieros gamos continued in Israel, albeit underground and in the shadows.
The New Testament stories about Jesus and Mary recapitulate this history and reframe it as a restoration/reclamation of ancient, Solomonic tradition. In the Passion week, Jesus follows in David’s footsteps to triumphally enter Jerusalem, from whence he heads directly to the Temple, which he violently attacks (“Tear down this Temple,” he declared, “and I shall rebuild it in three days”). From there he descends the Temple Mount into the Kidron Valley, where he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Although the Gethsemane story is apparently heavily redacted, its erotic elements nonetheless shine through. According to the gospels, Jesus invites a few of his disciples aside for more intimate time — what happens there isn’t clear, though afterward an unnamed young man ends up naked and very close by Jesus as he’s arrested. The erotic undertones are made more explicit by the reappearance of this same naked young man at the site of Jesus’ tomb in Mark chapter 16 — Jesus’ tomb, as I’ve already noted, symbolizes the same kind of womby “ark” which twice before represented the Covenant between God and His people.
Jesus’ ascent/descent along these sacred paths foreshadows his spiritual ascent and descent which will shortly occur thereafter: he is lifted up on the cross before descending, with his death, into the underworld. But then he integrates both experiences into one as he, carrying his triumph over Hades with him, he ascends one final time into the highest heaven.
I need to wrap up here, so I’ll conclude by simply pointing out how Jesus plays the role of David, while Mary plays the part of Solomon. Jesus, like David, had the honor of bringing the new Covenant into the holy city; but also like David, his legacy could not be made permanent until after his death. Thus, just as Solomon did for David, so too does Mary Magdalene serve the role of the one who remains behind, to establish and make permanent what Jesus/David had initiated. This is what makes Mary Magdalene the “pleroma of the pleroma,” the greatest of the Christian disciples.
These days, when I consider the Holy Land and especially the status of Mount Zion, I see violent conflict — evoking the warring days of David. Only when the feminine is integrated back into all three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — will the conflict actually end. On that glorious day, all three religions will be able to see themselves as brothers and sisters of the same holy marriage: they will beat their swords into ploughshares, and every child of god and goddess will sit under their own fig tree, and enjoy peace once again.