Peter J. Leithart

The word for “bride” ( kallah ) has a strange career in the Old Testament.  Up through 1 Chronicles 2:4, it exclusively means “daughter-in-law.”  In the six uses in Song of Songs, it is translated as “bride,” and after the Song the prophets use the word . . . . Continue Reading »

Twice the Song of Songs uses the phrase “breath of the day” to describe daybreak (2:17; 4:6).  Literally, this perhaps refers to the breezes of dawn (cf. Song of Songs 4:16). More theologically, though, the coming of daybreak means new life and breath for the world.  As the . . . . Continue Reading »

The bride’s neck is a “tower” (4:4), and her temples are like a “slice” of pomegranate (4:3).  There is only one other place in the Old Testament where those two words occur together - the story of Abimelech’s death in Judges 9, where a woman pushes a . . . . Continue Reading »

The Bible first mentions pomegranates in connection with the priestly garments of glory and beauty.  Bells and pomegranates alternate along the hem of the priest’s robe (Exodus 28:33-34; 29:24-26), the bells sounding to “warn” Yahweh of the priest’s approach.  In . . . . Continue Reading »

Israel enters a land of Canaanites, seven nations of them, stronger than Israel (Deuteronomy 7:1; Acts 13:19).  Taking down seven nations is a sevenfold decreation. But the land also contains seven fruits - wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, honey (Deuteronomy 8:8) - so a new . . . . Continue Reading »

John Paul II points out that Jesus encourages us to penetrate past the boundary of the fall to the state of innocence: In the beginning it was not so.  How can we do this? John Paul II suggests that the “redemption of the body” gives us this access.  If it were not for the . . . . Continue Reading »

Why is it not good for man to be alone?  John Paul II said it was because Adam needed an other in order to realize the relation of mutual self-gift that is the fullness of humanity’s imaging of the Triune life.  In the process he suggests a kind of theistic proof from sexual . . . . Continue Reading »

In the Metaphysics of Morals , Kant defines sex as “the mutual use which one human being makes of the sexual organs and faculty of another.”  This mutual use aims at pleasure.  He acknowledges that in using the sexual organs of another, one is acquiring use of the whole . . . . Continue Reading »

John Paul II warned in his Letter to Families about the neo-Manichaean perspective that has infected modern views of sex.  According to this view “body and spirit are put in radical opposition; the body does not receive life from the spirit, and the spirit does not give life to the body. . . . . Continue Reading »

Descartes aimed for an objective science, not the science of the scholastics.  And that meant, especially, the deletion of final cause from science: “The entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in . . . . Continue Reading »