The Son and the City

The Man and the Mountain

Photo by Khamkéo Vilaysing on Unsplash

In my last Substack, I began to share the research which has shaped my understanding of gender as an unfolding biblical-theological paradigm. As I mentioned, Vos has taken us a long way down the road to understanding ourselves as male and female by shepherding us to set our minds on things above. He writes,

“In heaven are the supreme realities; what surrounds us here below is a copy and shadow of the celestial things. Because the relation between the two spheres is positive, and not negative, not mutually repulsive, heavenly-mindedness can never give rise to neglect the duties pertaining to the present life. It is the ordinance and will of God, that not apart from, but on the basis of, and in contact with, the earthly sphere man shall work out his heavenly destiny . . . In the heart of man time calls for eternity, earth for heaven . . .”¹

It is just this “positive relation” that I believe God reveals in Genesis 1:27, through making mankind male and female. An earthly people under testing, represented by the man, is working out its heavenly destiny, represented by the woman. Embedded in the heart of the man, molded from earthen dust, is the calling, drawing power of the woman constructed from his sacred side. This longing for a feminized city, whose builder and maker is God, is found in the Psalms: “How lovely is your dwelling place, LORD of Hosts. I long and yearn for the courts of the LORD; my heart and flesh cry out for the living God” (Ps 84:1, 2). For Vos, “the transcendent beauty of the other shore and the irresistible current of our deepest life lift us above every regard for wind or wave.”² It drives us to leave and cleave to Christ in hope, extending our arms toward what awaits us.

I mentioned the research of John Schmitt on gender in the Old Testament. In his article, “Israel and Zion—Two Gendered Images: Biblical Speech Traditions and their Contemporary Neglect,” he draws attention to the masculine, singular Israel distinguished from the feminine, singular Zion as recurring objects of God’s love in the Hebrew Scriptures.³ In the opening chapter of Exodus, the patriarch Jacob, whose renaming as Israel is mentioned twice in Genesis, becomes the masculine, singular, collective identity of God’s people as they are called out of Egypt to sojourn to the land of promise. The man has become a nation, and the nation is God’s first born son (Ex 4:21-23). They are a masculinized people pressing forward to a land consecrated for rest from their enemies (Ex 33:1, 14; Deut 12:9; Josh 1:1; Ps 95:11, etc.). 

Schmitt argues that although God is jealous for Israel, and though Israel may rebel and break God’s covenant, feminine and marital metaphors are not used for God’s relationship with Israel. Schmitt tries to make a watertight case for this, arguing that in other examples when Israel is spoken of as a “virgin,” as in Amos 5:2, specific cities in Israel, may be in view (5:3).⁴  Schmitt argues that even Hosea, who portrays Israel as an unfaithful wife, could be said to be part of the prophetic tradition referring to cities of the land as unfaithful wives (cf. 11:6), distinguished from God’s first born son (cf. 1:10; 11:1). It is true that cities are part of the picture from the beginning. For example, Hosea begins with a promiscuous land committing indecent acts and is told to name his first son after the bloodthirsty city Jezreel (1:2, 5).⁵ More remarkable to Schmitt is that although Hosea’s adulterous wife “Israel” is a proper noun whose gender could be either masculine or feminine, Israel is always grammatically masculine in Hosea. Schmitt is emphatic, “the Hebrew Bible does not know a feminine Israel.”⁶  He argues that when marriage imagery is used to speak of God’s relationship with his people, Israel’s cities, not Israel as a collective people, are in view. Israel is God’s first born son, and God’s love for him is paternal. The covenantal bond is between father and son, not husband and wife.

In contrast to Israel, God’s first born son, Schmitt speaks of cities being feminized in the Old Testament. He writes, “Thus, within the Hebrew Bible, there are two traditional ways of speaking: one about Israel, another about cites. God is depicted as married to cities but not to Israel.”⁷ This symbolism comes out most explicitly in the prophets. In Isaiah 40-66. God is married to Zion. Her husband is her maker, the Lord of hosts. Set beside Zion, feminized as God’s wife and a mother, is God’s Servant, always masculinized, sometimes explicitly called Israel, in the Servant Songs (Isaiah 42:1–9; 49:1–13; 50:4–11; and 52:13—53:1). In fact, throughout chapters 40-66, Isaiah goes back and forth between Zion and his Servant.

Both the son and the city go through judgment and restoration in the prophets. Jerusalem, the city, is rejected and stripped in Jeremiah 13 and Ezekiel 16 and 23. Samaria, the city, is a harlot in Micah 1:7, and she is made into a heap of ruins. The same is true of God’s son Israel in the prophets. He is brought low for his sin and yet redeemed because of God’s loving kindness. The paradigm is not that God (masculinized) stands over and against a feminized people and city, but rather that God, wholly other, stands over and against (1) a rebellious and restored masculinized people, a nation, and (2) a rebellious and restored feminized city and her inhabitants.⁸ God’s people have two identities in the Hebrew Scriptures: (A.) members of a person, a people (masculinized); (B.) members of a city (feminized). Though translations and commentators can obscure this dichotomy, Schmitt is certain that it carries in Hebrew from beginning to end. 

In almost all of Schmitt’s articles on gender, he traces his interest in the subject to very practical problems —the wrong ways we think about one another and how that affects the way we treat one another. We need to be willing to consider whether the ways we see our differences are faithful to the Scripture. For example, Meredith Kline writes, “Wherever the man (husband)-woman (wife) relationship is used in the Hebrew Bible as a figure of a divine relationship, the relationship is always one between God and man . ..”⁹  For Kline, Adam is the prophet, priest, and king of Eden, the image-likeness of God. He alone directly reflects the glory of the “Creator-Spirit.” He thinks that the woman bears a derivative glory, under Adam’s authority. Kline thought that when male and female images are juxtaposed in the Hebrew Scriptures, the male represents divine Creator, and the female represents the creature. Is it true that in the Hebrew Scriptures God is perceived as masculine over and against feminized humanity in her derivation, creatureliness, weakness, and rebellion? Or could it be that what masculine and feminine both represent are images that lead us to humility for what we all have received from God, sonship and a city (1 John 3:1; Hebrews 12:18-29). What fascinates me is that on that same page in Images, Kline gets close to what Schmitt has come upon when he says that sonship and “womanhood” are two parallel images of mankind. Again, could it be that what the man and woman both represent points to God’s covenantal condescension to prepare a pilgrim people and a mountain-city for the ineffable glory of the age to come?

It is simply not true that male and female are superficial constructs in the Scriptures, understood primarily as they relate to order in the home and church for our flourishing here. Gender is part of the Deeper Protestant Conception, which according to Tipton “(lays) the creational background for the Christ-centered character of the gospel and union and communion with Christ.” In that brief statement, I believe that Tipton implies the two gender paradigms Schmitt found in his research: (1) a son (Christ-centered) and (2) a city (union and communion with Christ).  If I had to come up with an alliterative subtitle for the Scriptures, I would have a tough decision:  “The Man and his Mountain” or “The Son and his City”? Schmitt found the Old Testament saturated with this gender paradigm.

Next Substack, I hope to continue looking at the typology of the man and the woman in the Old Testament because I think that when we begin to think of ourselves in terms of these paradigms, sonship and city, we will find encouragement that “lifts us above every regard for wind or wave.”

1. Geerhardus Vos, “Heavenly Mindedness,” accessed here.

2. Ibid.

3. John J. Schmitt, “Israel and Zion—Two Gendered Images: Biblical Speech Traditions and their Contemporary Neglect,” Horizons, 18/1 (1991), 18-32. See also “The Gender of Ancient Israel,” JSOT, 26, (1983), 115-125. 

4. Schmitt believes that the “Virgin of Israel” is Samaria in Amos. See Schmitt, Israel and Zion, 21. 

5. See also Schmitt, “The Wife of God in Hosea 2,” Biblical Research, XXXIV (1989), 5-18.

6. Ibid. 20. Schmitt devotes an entire article to the phrase “virgin of Israel,”  בְּתוּלַ֖ת יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל, used in Amos 5:2 and three times in Jeremiah (18:13; 31:4, 21). See Schmitt, “The Virgin of Israel: Referent and Use of the Phrase in Amos and Jeremiah,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 53, (1991).

7. Schmitt, “Israel and Zion,” 20.

8. Schmitt applies his research, “One effect of making Israel ‘she’ is to project the feminine quality on the whole of the human reality. Thus, many writers say that in the divine-human encounter, humans as related to God are always feminine—with the correlative that in that relation God is always masculine, the actor and never the acted upon, while the human being is the passive recipient. Sandra Schneiders describes the implications of this attitude thus: ‘Because God was imagined as a great patriarch in relation to a subordinate humanity, all people were imagined as feminine, that is as weak, worthless, and sinful in relationship to God.’ . . . that application can easily come close to an acceptance of the saying, ‘If God is male, male is God.’ Such a proposal is not just idolatry. It also offers males the opportunity to vaunt their divinity over females. Perhaps worse for women, it suggests that women are to relate to men in the way humans relate to God” (Ibid., 27). Perhaps it would be worth thinking about whether our doctrines of the munus triplex, Calvin’s sacramental view of preaching, and clericalism image just such a rendering of our differences.

9.  Meredith Kline, Images of the Spirit, 34, footnote 54.