Category Archives: Theology

Book Release Day: Perpetual Fire

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Today, my new book is being released! The title is “Perpetual Fire: Temple, Ritual, and Biblical Theology.”

What is Perpetual Fire about?

I am proposing the book as a motif study in biblical theology. It seeks to answer “What is the ritual and theological meaning of the perpetual fire on altar?” It focuses on the ever-burning fire on the altar of sacrifice at the heart of the Temple. The story of the fire is a long story–from the theophany experiences of God-as-fire in the story of Abraham and the Burning Bush scene in the life Moses to the fire that descends on Mount Sinai at the giving of the Law to the fire that comes forth from the sanctuary of the Tabernacle in Leviticus 9:24. God reveals himself as “a consuming fire” (Deut 12:29). In Leviticus 6, the priests are charged by God with keeping the fire on the altar of sacrifice perpetually burning: “it shall not go out.” But why? I take a winding tour through the early cultic legislation, prophetic metaphors for divinity as brightness, through the meaning of the Wood Offering, the significance of darkness as shrouding the brightness of divine light and the cultic meaning of radiance. As the book comes to identify the ritual significance of ever-burning fire as representing the dynamism of God, truly being a “cult image” of the Lord, it then moves onto theological considerations. If “brightness” characterizes God, then what should we make of the legends that portray Adam and Eve as “bright” or “glorious” before the Fall? How do these themes come together in the New Testament where John the Baptist promises that “one is coming who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”? I examine the Transfiguration scene alongside the scenes of Uzziah’s failed offering of incense in the Temple and Herod Agrippa’s failed apotheosis (reported both by Acts and by Josephus). I argue that the Transfiguration scene presents Jesus as a “restored radiant Adam” that becomes the archetype for the new creation and for resurrected humanity in Christ. Eventually, the book gets into the dual nature of the fire of God–as both a source of purification for the righteous and of destruction for the unworthy, the fire is cultic and centered in the Temple sanctuary, but it also consumes the enemies of God and burns up what is worthless (wood, hay, stubble). The book works with these themes to make sense of the New Testament’s theology of fire, or at least, its fiery theological themes that have to do with both divine presence and divine judgment.

Who endorsed it and what did they say?

I am very grateful to the two scholars who offered their endorsement of the book. Check out what they have to say:

“The ritual laws that are at the heart of the Pentateuch are a puzzle for many readers of the Bible. Despite their importance, they often play little role in biblical theologies. Mark Giszczak’s stimulating study of the perpetual sacred fire challenges the marginalisation of biblical ritual that has characterised much theological reflection. Tracing the unquenchable fire across Old and New Testaments, his book will help readers see fresh and under-appreciated connections across the canon.”
— Nathan MacDonald, Professor of the Interpretation of the Old Testament and Fellow of St John’s College

“In this innovative book we see biblical theology at its finest, solidly anchored in rigorous historical scholarship and providing clarifying insight into one of the most important ways God revealed himself to Israel and to the world. Mark Giszczak?s wide learning, sound judgement and balanced scholarship shine through on every page as he reveals the central importance of the sacred, ever-burning altar fire at the heart of Israelite sacrificial worship. The fire on the altar constituted a continuous theophany, effected the transfer of sacrificial gifts from the earthly to the heavenly realm, and served as an image of testing, purifying and sanctifying God?s people. Christian readers will find here the biblical background of the promised one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire and who came to cast fire upon the earth and wished it were already ablaze.”
— Stephen D. Ryan, O.P., Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies

What are some other books about fire in the Bible?

In my research, I was inspired by a handful of other books that treat fire in the Bible. One older book that is hard to find now is The Fire Upon the Altar by Julian Morgenstern (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963). Morgenstern was a fascinating mid-century Jewish thinker–very creative and boundary-breaking in his own way. No, not all of his theories are convincing, but he has a way of seeing things that pulls together. From my own water-damaged copy of the book, check out his interpretation of the relighting of the altar in the time of Nehemiah as reported by 2 Maccabees: Morgenstern writes, “The legend implies further that the sacred fire was latent in the liquid, and that it needed only the application to it of a proper kindling force or essence to burst again into the sacred flame. Here this kindling force was supplied by the rays of the sun, bursting forth from the enveloping cloud and falling upon the wood upon the altar upon which the thick liquid had been poured” (p. 63). I love this episode and interpret it in detail in my book.

Two relatively recent books also treat the sacred fire. The first is Daniel Frayer-Griggs dissertation-turned-book: Saved Through Fire: The Fiery Ordeal in New Testament Eschatology (Pickwick, 2016). While Frayer-Griggs, a Protestant thinker, is primarily interested in how to interpret Paul’s cryptic saying that Catholic tradition regards as indicating the existence of purgatory, he ranges far and wide not only in biblical literature but in contemporaneous apocryphal literature as well. Here is a quote from his discussion of the River of Fire in apocryphal literature, “in many of the later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic visions the river of fire performs a dual function. It is an ordeal that must be endured, and those who are righteous will be saved while the wicked will be destroyed” (p. 141). By the end of the book, we find him saying some pretty compelling things that sound like exciting (and quasi-Catholic?) developments in his thought. For example, he says, “While our exegesis in no way confirms the doctrine of purgatory, it may open avenues for discussion of the origins of this doctrine and facilitate a Protestant reevaluation of the purificatory function of fire in New Testament eschatology” (p. 246).

The other recent book that examines the divine fire is “Your God is a Devouring Fire”: Fire as a Motif of Divine Presence and Agency in the Hebrew Bible (CBQMS 57; 2019) by Michael R. Simone, SJ. This book is deep and detailed study of the Hebrew passages that discuss the fire on the altar. Simone himself regards his main inspirations as Benjamin Sommer’s famous book Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2008) and Shawn Zelig Aster, Unbeatable Light (Ugarit-Verlag, 2012). He works through passages, translating from the Hebrew, interpreting carefully and drawing from contemporary scholarly discourse. One of his main conclusions is that “Cultic fire did not represent a divine body, but it did represent divine agency sent out from Yhwh to accomplish his divine will. The primary purpose of cultic fire was the transmission of offerings to the divine realm” (p. 96). I interact with Simone’s work in my book, but Frayer-Griggs gets mentioned a bit more. Both of these books are important contributions to this scholarly discussion.

Where can I buy a copy of the book?

You can find my new book, Perpetual Fire: Temple, Ritual, and Biblical Theology at the Baylor University Press website: https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481323222/perpetual-fire/

It is also available at

Of course, I hope that you read my new book and I hope you enjoy what you read, learn something new about the ancient Temple, the worship of the Lord, and the power of fire as a sacramental symbol for divinity.

My New Book – Perpetual Fire: Temple, Ritual, and Biblical Theology

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Mark Giszczak - Perpetual Fire: Temple, Ritual, and BIblical Theology book coverI am very happy to announce the release of my new book: Perpetual Fire: Temple, Ritual, and Biblical Theology.

Ten Years in the Making

Years ago, I found myself intrigued by the many mentions of fire in the Bible, but most of all by the strange law mandating the maintenance of a perpetual fire on the altar of sacrifice: “it shall no go out!” (Lev 6:12). But why not? This question led me on a winding journey through many corners of ritual theory, biblical theology, temple history and even eschatology to produce this book. Why does Levitical law mandate that altar-fire be kept always burning? What does the fire symbolize? How was it understood in biblical times?

A Ritual Question with Theological Consequences

The book addresses two main ideas: 1) What is the ritual meaning of the ever-burning fire on the altar of sacrifice? and 2) What is the enduring theological significance of this fire? The first half of the book explores the ritual question, while the second half works toward a constructive biblical theology of the sacred fire. It turns out that a long and complex development of ritual symbols undergirds the Transfiguration scene, Jesus’ words about fiery judgment and fiery assimilation to divine life, but also St. Paul’s theology of resurrection. The perpetual fire on the altar has a significant theological afterlife in the New Testament.

Table of Contents

I wanted to give you a sneak preview of what’s in the book, so here’s the Table of Contents as you will find it

  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction: A Fire Moving Through Time
  • Part I – Ritual Fire
    • 1 The Fire and the Second Temple: A Crisis of Legitimacy
    • 2 The Origin of the Fire on the Altar: Law and Tabernacle, Tradition and Influence
    • 3 The Cultic Fire: Function and Representation
    • 4 The Wood Offering: Maintaining the Unquenchable Fire
    • 5 The Sin of Kindling Fire: Violating the Boundaries of Cult
    • Kindling: Preliminary Conclusions
  • Part II – Theological Fire
    • 6 The Brightness of God’s Body of Fire: Darkness, Theophany, Radiance
    • 7 The Fiery Son of God: Jesus and the Restoration of Adam
    • 8 The Body of Glory: Paul and the Transformation of Believers
    • 9 The Fire of the Word: Torah and Revelation
    • 10 The Fire of Encounter: Purification, Punishment, Vision
    • Conflagration: Final Conclusions
  • Bibliography
  • Index

When Will the Book Be Released?

The book will come out on September 1, 2026 from Baylor University Press. I am grateful for BUP’s partnership in putting this together. Their editorial guidance and production process has improved the book and prepared it for this moment. You can pre-order the book now from these sites:

My Hopes for the Book

I hope that you will enjoy reading Perpetual Fire! Beyond that, I hope that it will give scholars and serious Bible students alike a new appreciation for the depth of ritual symbolism, the centrality of the altar fire in the cultic thinking of the Old Testament and the theological thought of the New. I hope that it will bring about a reappraisal of certain stock images from biblical vocabulary–whether fire, brightness, “unquenchableness,” radiance, darkness, and the meaning of biblical metaphors for punishment. It draws lines of connection from Levitical law all the way through to the final resurrection of the dead.

What is the Sin of Curiosity?

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I have always been curious (pun intended) about sins that take place only in the mind. It is very strange to think that a violation of God’s command could happen within your neurons. In other contexts, I’ve discussed before the interior nature of the sin of coveting and the interior sin of lust and whether it needs a purpose clause or not. Of course, “to covet” and “to lust” are very similar sins that have external objects of desire. What about a more purely intellectual kind of sin where the object of the mind is not external but internal? Can a mind sin by desiring knowledge?

The Short Answer

The short answer is “yes.” Curiosity  about forbidden knowledge–e.g. knowledge of witchcraft or knowledge of what it feels like to commit a horrendous crime–leads the mind astray, and left unchecked can prompt a person to descend into sin. Not all knowledge is innocent. Seeking out forbidden knowledge is a sinful pattern, where the intellect is not being used for its intended purpose (to contemplate God), but rather is indulging in its own self-interested designs.

Wait, But Isn’t Curiosity a Good Thing?

It’s hard to find books that warn about curiosity. Typically, in our apathetic age, teachers, pastors and leaders encourage people to stop scrolling their social feeds and “get curious” about important and interesting topics. This kind of intellectual inquiry is not just harmless; it’s actually essential to our intellectual development. If we are not interested in things that matter, then we won’t bother learning about them and if we don’t learn about them, we will be less than we could have been. So some curiosity is a good thing, it’s true. We want to be intellectually interested in learning about the truth.

Some Definitions

The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not spend much time on this, but allows that the Gospels were not written to satisfy human curiosity (CCC 514, 548), warns us against “unhealthy curiosity” about the future (CCC 2115), but it does not say much about the sin of curiosity. Fr. Jordan Aumann’s Spiritual Theology warns of “vain curiosity” and also “Morbid curiosity. This is characteristic of those who eagerly seek out the esoteric aspects of mystical phenomena or have a fascination for the occult or preternatural.” Even Tanqueray doesn’t talk about it much. St. Bernard of Clairvaux says that curiosity is the “first step of pride,” defining it as “when the eyes and the other senses attend to what is not one’s concern.” St. Thomas goes even deeper on this point and teaches that:

For the knowledge of truth, strictly speaking, is good, but it may be evil accidentally, by reason of some result, either because one takes pride in knowing the truth, according to 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Knowledge puffeth up,” or because one uses the knowledge of truth in order to sin.

So here, we see two potentially sinful results of a desire for knowledge: 1) pride, 2) knowledge used to sin (e.g., knowing recipes for poison). Pride, in this way, is a “sin of the neurons”–in that it is an inflated self-regard. The second kind of curiosity though really only becomes sinful when it is used for some further aim.

St. Augustine on “curiositas”

Here is a tidbit on St. Augustine’s teaching on the vice of curiositas:

“Augustine also included curiosity in a triad of sins (along with pride and carnality) which constitute the roots of the soul’s sinful movement from God….Like every expression of lust, curiosity disrupts the soul’s proper mid-rank position between God and lower bodily natures. It thereby prompts the soul to submit itself to the very things it should govern, to love what it should use for the love of God, or to become engrossed in acts proper to itself, to the neglect of universal laws common to all.” (N. Joseph Torchia, “Curiosity,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald [Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999], 260.

So, curiosity is disruptive. It leads the human soul into error, to love itself too much rather than to love what is good for it, namely God.

The Longer Answer: The Purpose of the Human Intellect

Curiosity itself is hard to classify as a sin. It is more of a vice, a tendency toward sin that can lead to sinful seeking out of forbidden knowledge, seeking knowledge for the wrong reason (pride), or seeking knowledge in order to commit sin. It’s interesting that St. Thomas actually struggles with the thought that maybe the original sin of Adam and Eve was curiosity: they desired knowledge of good and evil, a kind of knowledge that they should not have desired, and so disobeyed God (Thomas asserts though that it was out of pride that they sought this forbidden knowledge). But if we reduce things to their basic essentials, we can consider why we human beings were given an intellect in the first place. What’s the ultimate aim of all our minds? Well, God, of course. God is the aim. So anything that is diverting us from that kind of ultimate truth-seeking is leading us astray. If our pursuit of knowledge is leading us away from God instead of toward him then we are succumbing to the sin of curiosity rather than embracing the path to Truth.

It’s still hard for me to think of Curious George as an archetype of evil, but…

For further reading, check out: Paul Griffiths, The Vice of Curiosity: An Essay on Intellectual Appetite (2006).

Myths About the New Evangelization

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ehrmannJust yesterday, Church Life Journal released my new article entitled
“The Strange Myths of the New Evangelization.”

I analyze and debunk four myths:

  • Myth #1: Half of All RCIA Converts Are Missing a Year Later.
  • Myth #2: The New Evangelization Is All About Re-evangelization.
  • Myth #3: The Catholic Church Is Sliding into Oblivion.
  • Myth #4: It’s All our Fault!

Then I propose four “shifts” to our approach:

  • Shift #1: Schmoozing Is a Contact Sport.
  • Shift #2: Do Not Focus on “Drag Back” Programs.
  • Shift #3: Get Away from Apologetics and Go Toward Witness.
  • Shift #4: Get Better Data!

So, read the article and let me know what you think!

St. Augustine and the Memory Palace

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I have talked about memory and memorization before, but not about the Memory Palace. What brought it to mind was this passage from Book X of St. Augustine’s Confessions:Illuminated_Manuscripts_(Middleton)_figure00

And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses.

While St. Augustine is waxing eloquent about the beauty and power of memory, he drops this line which contains a relatively inconspicuous idea that is incredibly profound: the Memory Palace.

Several writers have explored the concept of the Memory Palace, how and why to build one, but let me simply just get at what it is: A Memory Palace is an imaginary building you can make in order to store information. Think of it as a mental hard drive from the Middle Ages. Hard drives have sectors where information is stored in chunks, all the way down to bits and bytes. Similarly, human beings can only store information by breaking it down into pieces and filing it away in our minds.

Unfortunately, most of us were never taught how to memorize, we were just given a pile of information and told to memorize it. Memorizing without any technique is what we call “rote” memorization, where a person simply repeats and repeats the information until it sticks. Because rote memorization is so difficult and seemingly fruitless—most of us lose whatever we had memorized in a couple days—a lot of schools have simply given up on memorization altogether. But this is a mistake.

The ancients and medievals had to memorize loads of information because few knew how to read and write proficiently and of those who did, writing utensils and parchment were expensive and hard to come by (kind of like how a pack of sticky notes will cost you ten bucks now, only worse!). So, these people had to compensate with the only computer on hand: the brain. But they weren’t lazy about it. They didn’t just throw their heads at information and hope that the two would stick together. No. They developed battle-hardened techniques over a long period of time. The essential technique is the Memory Palace.

It starts with associating an idea with a physical object like a door, or a chair. One then can “walk” through say, your own house or apartment and stow pieces of information “in” different objects. There are two themes to the technique. One is the word-object association, the other is proceeding through the palace in a certain order.

800px-Hans_Vredeman_de_Vries_(Nachfolge)_Ideale_Palastarchitektur

For example, imagine you had been asked to give a speech on the classification of living creatures. If your house has five rooms, you could put each the five kingdoms in a separate room (Bacteria, Protozoa, Plants, Fungi, Animals) and then each piece of furniture in the room could represent the phyla within that kingdom. As you proceed through this Memory Palace, you could recall each of the phyla of all five kingdoms as you give your speech. In fact, the Memory Palace was the origin of speakers saying “in the first place…” and “in the second place…” The “places” they refer to are the rooms within their memory palace.

I have found it to be a very helpful memorization technique, especially when paired with the link system and other memorization aids (e.g., making exaggerated and silly word-pictures). As our generation copes with information overload (deluge, tidal wave), we have to find ways to remember the information that is important to us, the information we need to use, connect and synthesize, not the trivia we can look up. If we want to avoid becoming Google Glass fixated cell phone addicts who can’t hold a coherent conversation because we’re so distracted with looking things up online, we might need to recover the Memory Palace that St. Augustine stood in awe of and thanked God for saying, “Great is the power of memory; very wonderful is it, O my God.”

Were You Made for Greatness or for God?

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One of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s most often quoted lines is this:

 “The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness.” (Sources: 1 2 3)

It’s a good line, but did he ever really say it? Well, I’ve been doing some digging to try and track down this line (Others have tried too). To me, it looks like he never actually said it. However, he said a couple things that were close. In a visit with German pilgrims in the first month of his pontificate, back in April, 2005, Benedict said:

“Christ did not promise an easy life. Those who desire comforts have dialed the wrong number. Rather, he shows us the way to great things, the good, towards an authentic human life.” Source

The original German reads,

“Wer Bequemlichkeit will, der ist bei ihm allerdings an der falschen Adresse. Aber er zeigt uns den Weg zum Großen, zum Guten, zum richtigen Menschenleben.”

The main difference here is that Benedict is saying that he’s saying that Jesus is showing the way to great things, away from the false temptations of comfort. Here the focus is on Him, not on us.

This next quote, from the same speech is the closest thing:

 “The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness.”

Original German: “Bequem sind die Wege des Herrn nicht, aber wir sind ja auch nicht für die Bequemlichkeit, sondern für das Große, für das Gute geschaffen.”

The first key word in the German is “Bequemlichkeit,” which can be translated as “convenience, comfort, ease.” The second key word is “Große,” which is hard to translate. It is a substantival adjective in the neuter singular, so we could translate we were made “for the great, for the good.” The Vatican translators opted for “great things.” Since translation is always an art including interpretation, we could even render it “you were made to do great things.” It seems to me that the “famous quote” is really an alternate translation/expansion/interpretation of this last example.

But wait! Maybe Benedict said something somewhere else that sounds like his famous quote, non-quote. In fact, he did. In his Encylical, Spe Salvi, he says, “Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched” (sec. 33). Here the official Latin reads, “magnam realitatem,” which could more literally be rendered “a great reality.”

What’s the point of all this translational nit-picking?

The point is that when we read, especially when we read something authoritative, it is very easy for us to import our pre-conceived notions into what we’re reading. Benedict’s point is simple enough—that a life of ease and convenience, a selfish life of me-pleasing, is not what God has for us. Instead, God offers something so much better—something great, in fact. But he is not saying that we were all made to be rich, famous, powerful and “great” in a worldly sense–as would be suggested from a typical use of “greatness.” In fact, notice that in each of the quotes, Benedict is pointing not to human attributes (like “being great”), but to the destiny to which God invites us, the magnam realitatem, He Himself. The great thing we’re made for is God.

“Feeling” in Biblical Times

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The Catechism offers guidance on how to interpret the Bible, explaining that we must take into account the “modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current” (CCC 110). This idea of “feeling” struck me as kind of strange since the other verbs have to do with expressing ideas, not one’s inner emotions. And besides, don’t all writing professors get upset when students write, “I feel…”? So, I thought this might be a translation issue. In fact, it is.

This Catechism paragraph is based on Dei Verbum 12, which in the Latin uses the phrase, “sentiendi, dicendi, narrandive modos” to indicate the teaching. Well, the idea of “sentiendi” is translated in the Abbot translation of Dei Verbum as “perceiving,” which is much preferable to “feeling” in my opinion. The verb underlying this participle is “sentio” which can mean “feel, think, perceive, sense, judge, observe.” The Council fathers seem to be getting at the way that the ancients apprehended ideas and expressed them, not at the way they “felt” in terms of their emotions. We’re after how they thought, not how they “felt.” Notably, the official Latin version of the Catechism agrees with Dei Verbum: “modorum sentiendi.”

Is it a mis-translation? No, not really, but I think that one of the other translation choices for the Latin sentio, would be preferable. We want to think hard about how the ancient biblical authors understood and explained ideas, not in how they felt emotionally.

Editing Encyclicals

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In John Paul II’s encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, was originally published with this sentence addressed to women who have had abortions:

You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord. (Section 99; hosted at EWTN)

But if you check out the edition on the Vatican website it says:

To the same Father and his mercy you can with sure hope entrust your child. (Section 99; hosted at Vatican.va)

The official Latin text, which agrees with the edition on Vatican.va, says:

Infantem autem vestrum potestis Eidem Patri Eiusque misericordiae cum spe committere. (vatican.va)

It’s not the end of the world, but it’s interesting to see papal self-editing in action. The big issue here is the fate of aborted babies (and others) who die without baptism and therefore in a state of original sin. The International Theological Commission recently did a study on this question so I won’t try to solve it here. The point is that JPII seems to have originally over-stated his case by teaching that all aborted babies were in Heaven and then edited out this statement so that it would not pre-empt the doctrinal development that is on-going. I am very curious as to how this question will eventually be resolved or if it will be.

A Catholic Theology of the Old Testament

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One of my friends mentioned to me a couple weeks ago, “No one has written a Catholic theology of the Old Testament in over 40 years.” I took a look and well, he’s right. In fact, if you type “catholic old testament” into Amazon, almost nothing comes up. There have been lots of Old Testament theology books from Protestant scholars, famous ones too: Childs, Goldingay, Waltke/Yu, and of course, Brueggemann.

The exact goal of an Old Testament theology is a little hard to define, but it comes around to explaining how the Old Testament portrays God and man’s relationship with Him. Of course, Christian writers are interested in how the Old Testament prepares the stage for Jesus and the New Testament as well.

A specifically Catholic theology of the Old Testament should contribute all these things, but should add a lot on how to integrate Old Testament teachings with the official doctrine of the Church and her theology. This is not easy to do. Significant changes in Catholic theology have unfolded over the last 50 years, so the task has become even more complicated.

So, what old Catholic Old Testament theologies are there? Well, I just checked out one called Theology of the Old Testament by Paul Heinisch (originally written in German around 1940; published in English in 1965; Review here). Another one was Theology of the Old Testament by Paul van Imschoot (original in French? 1954; vol. 1 English translation in 1965)–three volumes were planned; two were published in French, only one in English.

Perhaps it is time for a new Catholic theology of the Old Testament.

UPDATE:

I found a couple more Catholic theologies of the Old Testament in Frederick Prussner’s book, Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development. Here they are:
Cordero, Garcia. Teologia de la Biblia: vol. 1, Antiguo Testamento. Madrid: Editorial Catolica, 1970.
McKenzie, John L. A Theology of the Old Testament. Garden City: Doubleday, 1974.

Did Mary Crush the Serpent’s Head?

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If you go to any Catholic Church or bookstore, you’re likely to see a statue of the Virgin Mary standing on a snake. A statue of the Virgin makes sense, but why does she always have a serpent underfoot? Well, it’s a long story.

The story begins with Gen 3:15, some of the words that God speaks to the serpent after deceiving Adam and Eve, inducing their Fall, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (RSV). So, you’re probably thinking, “I don’t see the connection. It says ‘he shall bruise’ not ‘she’.” And you’re right, for the RSV. But if you look at the Douay-Rheims version, it says, “she shall crush thy head.” What’s going on?

Well, what we have here really is a text-critical problem.

Hebrew Masoretic Text: הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ֣ רֹ֔אשׁ  (hu’ yeshuphka rosh, “he will crush your head”)

Greek Septuagint: αὐτός σου τηρήσει κεφαλήν (“he will watch your head”)

Latin Vulgate: ipsa conteret caput tuum (“she will crush your head”)

Nova Vulgata (1979): ipsum conteret caput tuum (“it will crush your head”)

In the Hebrew, the masculine pronoun hu’ is referring back to the noun zera‘, which is a masculine noun. The other thing to mention is that the verb form, yeshuphka, is third person masculine singular with a second person singular pronominal suffix.  And the vowel pointing could not change it to feminine—the feminine form would include one different letter, not just vowel points. It would be תָּשׁוּפְךָ* (tashuphka). The masculine is not just in the pronoun, but is embedded in the verb.

In Greek, the masculine pronoun autos is used even though the antecedent (spermatos, seed) is neuter. It seems that the masculine is preferred here by the translator because the seed/offspring of Eve would presumably be a person, not a thing.

The Nova Vulgata uses ipsum, a neuter pronoun referring to a neuter noun (seed, semen). But St. Jerome’s Vulgate is the outlier here, reading ipsa, which here is the feminine nominative singular (not the nom/acc neuter plural) and the Douay-Rheims version is based on the Vulgate. I should also add that the Nova Vulgata is the current official version of the Bible promulgated by the Vatican.

The old Catholic Encyclopedia defends the Vulgate text of this passage thusly:

The reading “she” (ipsa) is neither an intentional corruption of the original text, nor is it an accidental error; it is rather an explanatory version expressing explicitly the fact of Our Lady’s part in the victory over the serpent, which is contained implicitly in the Hebrew original. The strength of the Christian tradition as to Mary’s share in this victory may be inferred from the retention of “she” in St. Jerome’s version in spite of his acquaintance with the original text and with the reading “he” (ipse) in the old Latin version. (emphasis added)

This explanation is rather generous, but it’s more helpful than saying that we just don’t know why Jerome translated this way.

Interestingly, Jerome’s translation made it into a very important papal statement, the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in Pope Pius IX’s Apostolic Constitution, Ineffabilis Deus:

Hence, just as Christ, the Mediator between God and man, assumed human nature, blotted the handwriting of the decree that stood against us, and fastened it triumphantly to the cross, so the most holy Virgin, united with him by a most intimate and indissoluble bond, was, with him and through him, eternally at enmity with the evil serpent, and most completely triumphed over him, and thus crushed his head with her immaculate foot.

I like the idea of the Virgin Mary having an “immaculate foot,” but I still think this statement is based on a flaw in Jerome’s translation. Interestingly, when John Paul II took up the Protoevangelium in his audience on Dec 17, 1986 he regards Christ as the agent of “crushing” not Mary.

Now, of course, from a theological perspective, every Christian shares in Christ’s victory over sin and the devil. The New Testament substantiates this: But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. (1 Peter 4:13 RSV) “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith.” (1 John 5:4 RSV) Mary, as the most Christian Christian, is as JPII teaches in the above-cited text, “the one who first shares in that victory over sin won by Christ.” So all Christians get to “crush the serpent’s head” through Christ’s victory on the cross and the Virgin Mary is the first to share in that victory. Are the statues based on a faulty translation? Yes. But are they still theologically correct? Yes.