The Sons of Korah Speak to Twisted Conceptions of Male and Female

The Son and the City in the Second Korahite Collection

Photo by Juvian Duff on Unsplash

Recently, I wrote about the Son and Spirit-city in the first collection of the psalms of the sons of Korah. In the twelve psalms of the Korahites, four are Zion songs and one is a wedding song. An astounding half of the Zion psalms of the psalter are attributed to the sons of Korah, and one third of the Korahite psalms are Zion songs. Also attributed to the sons of Korah is the only wedding song of the psalter, Psalm 45. This “song of loves” is addressed to one who appears to be a human king, most handsome of men, but he is not merely human. He is understood as divine with these words: “Your throne, God, is forever and ever.” The warrior-king does not stand alone, but with his companion, the queen of Ophir gold (Ps 45:9).

Many commentators have noted Psalm 45’s striking resemblance to the Song of Songs. Just as the shepherd-king of the Song stands with the shepherdess, the divine warrior stands with his intimate companion, his shegal. “Solomon,” the Son of shalom, stands with the “Shulamite,” the Spirit-city of shalom. It is worth noting that Solomon, Shulamite, and shalom share the same Hebrew root, communicating that shepherd-king and his shepherd-bride share the same mission of peace. I have argued that this queen of purest gold in verse 9 is a place. She is the city of Sabbath rest first revealed in Genesis 2:1-3. She is heavenly Zion, the city of the great king, the “embodiment” of the Spirit of God.¹ If we remember that all theophanies, whether the throne or his Spirit-city at the beginning of time . . . or the embodied Son and his Spirit-bride at the end of time . . . are permanent and enduring creaturely manifestations of God, it is easier to understand the rest of the psalm. The Korahites call us (and themselves) to leave our fathers and cleave to the divine warrior to become his city bride. I suggest that the sons of Korah see themselves as that called-out bride who leaves and cleaves to the king to become his dwelling at the end of time.

Can we consider whether this aligns with the finale of Scripture? In Revelation 21:9-27, the final word concerning the Son and his Spirit-city, we get a vision. The wife of the Lamb, the holy city Jerusalem, comes down out of heaven from God. The city is arrayed with God’s glory, pure gold, clear as glass. She is a city — a creature — an image of the invisible divine Spirit, which aligns with her identity at the beginning of time.² And yet she is also a called-out people, which aligns with her identity at the end of time. Both Spirit-tent and Spirit-bride beckon God’s people onward and upward with this word, “Come.” They are inseparable but distinguishable as they fuel endurance and fortify the obedience of faith.

In the beginning, the heavenly Son was first revealed as enthroned from the Father. The Spirit was first revealed as “endoxate” of the Father and Son, an outpouring of the glory of the Lord seated on his throne. These are important insights from Lane Tipton, building on the work of Meredith Kline on the Trinity: (1) The manifestation of the Son in heaven is as enthroned of the Father who begot him before the creation of the world. (2) The manifestation of the Spirit in heaven is as “endoxate,” the radiant splendor proceeding from the throne of the Father and Son.³ The outpouring of that glory forms and fills the royal chambers of heavenly Zion. This is the revelation of our triune God in the angelic realm, presently veiled from our eyes.

As we lower our eyes to the realm of mankind, what our eyes can see and our hands can handle, the Son revealed himself in many ways in the Old Testament, but finally as a flesh and blood man. Using the words of Genesis 1:27, Jesus became adam (mankind) and zakar (male) to save us. The manifestations of the Son on earth, the Christophanies of the Old Testament, culminate in the gospels with the Son permanently enfleshed as a male human being. Together with the Son, the manifestations of the Spirit on earth, the Pneumophanies of the Scriptures, are also many, but they culminate in the book of Acts with an enduring “embodiment,” the endoxate (glory-filled) church, who is also adam (mankind) but revealed in contrast to zakar as nekivah (female). The church is a corporate adam and also a female.

What Kline missed, and what Tipton underemphasizes and has not accounted for in his written work, is that the first and final manifestations of the Son and Spirit on earth are gendered images in the Scriptures: (1) the Son enthroned and enfleshed; (2) Zion, an endoxate city and church bride. This is why from the starting gate we are given our oneness as one mankind and our twoness as male and female. Our differences are not bound up in male superiority and female inferiority made clear by “nature,” nor in the much more superficial category of gender “roles” which are said to serve the flourishing of our earthly societies, but rather in essential distinctions within God himself and his manifestations of himself for his glory and our joy and endurance.

Our existence as man and woman is not arbitrary or self-evident. It is not “just the way things are,” as I was once emphatically told. God does not create male and female in a vacuum, but in the context of the first two chapters of the Bible. He forms Adam from the dust and then builds the woman from his sacred side in Eden. They are given life and called to enter the realm of everlasting Sabbath rest. God is revealing himself through gender. He reveals himself because he is bestowing himself on them— the throne and the city, the Son and his citadel, a king and his kingdom, our very great reward. This is what is being communicated through our differences in Genesis 1-2, and it comes with implications for how we are to live together today, loving God and neighbor. If we extrapolate the ethics of a trinitarian understanding of gender, this is what we have: (1) Those who love the Son love the Spirit who encircles him. (2) Those who love the King love his city, Zion. (3) Those who love Jesus love his body and bride, his church. (4) Those who love their male neighbor also love their female neighbor. We find help in obeying the greatest commandment if we begin with the Son and Spirit, equal in power and glory, in procession and embrace, our inheritance through covenant by nature in Genesis 1-2 and by demerited, superabounding grace in Genesis 3-Revelation 22.

Before I move on, I want to say something about those who have led me down this path of thinking, Kline and Tipton. Kline’s final work, published a year before his death, was God, Heaven, and Har Magedon. Kline at this point in his life was physically declining, yet he was ever reaching for the Son and the City.⁴ He had spent his lifetime, half a century, as an Old Testament scholar teaching at perhaps the most outstanding conservative American Reformed institutions of his day — Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Westminster Seminary California, also Reformed Theological Seminary and the Claremont School of Theology, and he had published many books and numerous articles. Kline did not rehash the thoughts of others. Like Geerhardus Vos, his inspiration, he was on the frontier of Reformed theology, pressing ever deeper into what had yet to be explicated, which compelled him to make up new words as he went. He indeed was a tour de force. If transparent, I would say that no one awakens my love for Son and the City like Vos and Kline and Tipton, and yet with that, I find myself perplexed that they cannot account for our existence as male and female within a redemptive-historical framework, even though those images saturate the beginning and end of our Scriptures.

With the Roman Catholic John Schmitt, who sees the foundations of gender in terms of sonship and cityhood, I believe that Kline lays bare the trinitarian foundations of our maleness and femaleness.⁵ Schmitt and Kline together pave the path forward. And yet even as Kline uncovers the crux of our gendered existence with his work on the Spirit (Images, 1980) and the mountain of the Lord (God, Heaven, and Har Magedon [GHH], 2006), he never saw the application of his work to gender. In GHH, Kline writes 45 pages on Zion, a city personified in the Scriptures, always feminized when personified, and yet Kline does not think it worthy of mention. Kline hardly finds it remarkable that Mount Zion is a she, and thus he takes almost no pains to account for it. To be more specific, 30 times Kline references Revelation 21, the consummation of our desire in the city-bride, and yet he is not able to sustain interest in the feminization of the Spirit-city. He writes a whole book on the mountain of the Lord, revealed as bride in the finale of human history, and yet he only mentions bride three times in GHH. Why?

To be clear, Kline associates the Spirit with the Isaiah 6:1 train or robe that proceeds from the divine throne.⁶ Kline further associates the divine train or robe with the heavenly city. Kline even further links the Spirit-city to the “Big Blaze” of glory, the “Alpha Radiation” of the Creator Spirit in Genesis 1:1-2. And even further than that, Kline ties the sacred earthly mountains of Scripture, beginning with Eden, with their archetype, heavenly Mt. Zion. He traces these mountains all the way through Scripture until their telos at the end of time, when the heavenly city descends to the earthly city in a second big blaze which shakes heaven and earth. Kline, however, does not tie our significance as male and female in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:22 to this unfolding chain of typology. He does not associate our differences with the heavenly manifestation of the Father and the Son as a throne contrasted with the heavenly manifestation of the Spirit as a city. In fact, Kline omits the feminization of the city in his chapter on Zion and waits until chapter 11, the very end of GHH, to write about the city as bride. On page 218, he finally remarks, “The city of cosmic plentitude is Christ’s bride, the church.” For Kline, the female image exists only as it relates to the incarnate Jesus Christ at the end of time. For Kline, woman as a symbol comes into being at a very late stage in the history of heaven and earth. She stands for the earthly, post-fall, by-grace “fulness” of Christ in Ephesians 1:23. Not to diminish or detract from that, which is sufficient in itself to fill our hearts with a lifetime of joy, but I suggest that we find her where God puts her, in the beginning.

At this point, it occurs to me to say something like, “Come on, team.” For those steeped in the thought of Vos and Kline, this seems like organic development. We are dealing with 2 symbols or images introduced on the first page of our Bibles that have yet to be clearly accounted for. It seems to me that as long as the prevailing anthropology of the Reformed world is a natural law understanding of the woman as “weak,” with the primary “virtues” of silence, passivity, and domesticity, there can be no “team.”⁷ It grieves me that in the institutions and forums where I have learned biblical theology, only one has shown interest in the application of Vos and Kline to gender, even though it holds promise of awakening love for God and has implications for how we see half our neighbors.

Returning to Kline, after he equates the bride with the final “cosmic pleroma,” he then mixes metaphors and pivots to Christ as the father, not husband, of this pleroma: “As second Adam, Christ . . . fulfills this kingdom mandate by “generating a cosmos-filling family.”⁸ For Kline, the God-man (“theanthropic”) Christ begets the bride by fathering her by the Holy Spirit. Kline then introduces Ephesians 1:21 headship into his discussion. The counterpart of Kline’s father, Jesus, is Kline’s generic “descendants,” not bride; and for Kline, sons and bride indicate “under authority” according to Ephesians 1.⁹ This aligns with what Kline wrote 25 years before in his Images of the Spirit, “Womanhood is thus viewed in Scripture as another analogue, along with human sonship, of mankind’s image status as derivative and consequently subject to authority.”¹⁰ Can I mention here that Christ subdues all things under his feet for his body in Ephesians 1? The church is not singled out as subdued under his feet in Ephesians; but rather, for the sake of his church Christ subdues all of his and her enemies. Neither father nor authoritative head over his church reflect Christ as the Ephesians 5 husband of his own body, the wife who is mystically united with him, mirroring the indwelling of Son and Spirit.

Kline’s categories of fatherhood and Ephesians 1 headship do not do justice to the natural (Genesis 1) or covenantal (Genesis 2) identity of the man and woman, one mankind, male and female, in procession and embrace. Neither do they do justice to the Ephesians 5 Christ and his bride. For Kline, femaleness in general, or the “bride” more specifically, can only represent the “human pleroma,” God’s footstool, while maleness can represent the “divine pleroma,” God’s throne, as well as be tied to the Mediator of the divine and human pleroma on the last day. This is Kline's application of covenant theology to gender, which aligns with the general demotion of women in the Reformed tradition.

Even as I critique Kline, I do not want to detract from the significance of what he discloses. He nails the manifestations of the Son and the Spirit-City. They are front and center. On pages 218-220, which I find the most thrilling pages of the entire book, Kline directs our eyes to the glory that awaits us, which Kline understands as God's revelation of himself as triune. While careful to retain the Creator-creature distinction, he magnifies our consummate union with God in bridal terms. He understands that we are brought into this glory revealed in the heavens and are united with the Son in the Spirit-city. What he does not see is that our creation as male and female directs our eyes to God, not the infinite, unfathomable distance between God and man. The man and the woman of Genesis 1-2 represent the glory that awaits them with the Son in Sabbath rest. Kline has missed that gender is above all trinitarian and eschatological representation. Kline misses that the woman is the typico-symbol of the “Glory-heaven,” which he defines as the “embodiment of the Spirit.” I suggest that Kline cannot go there because of his presuppositions about the woman of Genesis 1-2. Kline finds the significance of the female as the representation of the creature over and against the representation of man as the Creator.¹¹ With that starting point, he will never see the glory attached to Eve, which I believe is why he understood the Song of Songs primarily in terms of the fleeting institution of earthly marriage, not the consummate union of Christ and his church. For Kline, the Song was foremost a “dwelling with joy upon conjugal love” in earthly marriage.¹² I believe that if Kline had been able to see gender as trinitarian and eschatological representation, his work on the Song would have penetrated the Song’s depths and the church would have reaped a harvest of encouragement.

He cannot see the glory of the woman as an image of the Spirit. I suggest that he is blinded by a tradition which has bound femaleness to creatureliness and weakness. So, for example, when Kline comments on Revelation 12, he amplifies the woman of the wilderness as “vulnerable” and “threatened,” needing to be “protected and preserved,” and yet he says nothing about the opening verses of that chapter where we find “a great sign, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.”¹³ The Reformed stream of the church never reformed the medieval (Aristotelian and Thomistic) understanding of our differences as male and female. Our tradition continues to see the man-woman distinction as representing the Creator-creature distinction. The historical understanding of our differences is that the man mirrors the immortal Creator and the woman mirrors the mortal creature. In Reformed circles, this distinction accounts for the woman of Genesis 1-3. She represents what is created, mutable, and dependent — in other words, all that is not God.

For Kline, the church is female from the vantage of her inferiority, vulnerability, and need. She stands over and against the male in his superiority and strength. Although Tipton rejects the woman’s all-inclusive weakness in contrast with the man, he still ties femaleness to the pilgrim creature in deprivation and need in his sermons on 1 Peter 3.¹⁴ Like Kline, Tipton understands Sarah as a type of the church, wavering in faith, contrasted with Abraham as a type of Christ whose faith is mature. However, he cannot connect Sarah to Zion, imperishable in beauty, an impregnable fortress before her disobedient husband.¹⁵ I have found that in the Reformed interpretation, the man in his weakness will always outshine the woman in her glory because he represents God and she does not. Her existence and glory are thought to be derivative and to the end of magnifying the glory of her husband, mere man, not God.

As I return to the Son and Spirit in the Psalms, the Sons of Korah seem captivated with the City of God. They introduce the city to us in Psalm 45 as the “Queen of Ophir gold.” She stands at the right-hand of the King, a position synonymous with power, authority, honor, and the execution of justice. In our understanding of the Trinity, “right-hand” language is also processional language, as we confess in the Nicene Creed. For over fifteen centuries the church has spoken of the Son, who is from the Father, as exalted at the right-hand of the Father. And here we have a Queen at the right-hand of the divine warrior-king, the Son. In other words, if Psalm 45 is understood in terms of the Trinity, the relation of the king and queen of Psalm 45:9 does not introduce degrees of power and glory between them. They appear parallel in being and inseparable in their missions. The Divine Warrior is never alone. He has an ezer kenegdo, even as they exist apart and together as the one divine essence whose power and glory belong to the Lord God who is one.

The second Korahite collection at the end of Book Three of the Psalms (73-89) centers on Israel's sin, the decline of David's dynasty, and the people’s exile from God. The second Korahite collection gives words to the faltering and despairing, just as the first collection gives expression to the steadfast and confident. Together, the two Korahite sections direct the eyes of God’s people in all circumstances, in all frames of mind, to the Son and the City. Regardless of how the psalmist feels, the Son is there within his Spirit-tent. With the Son, that tent is the psalmist’s hope and stands as the satisfaction of his desires, even in the moments when the King and his citadel are completely obscured from the psalmist’s view.

Michael Goulder in his book, The Psalms of the Sons of Korah, suggests that the two Korahite collections show remarkable similarities. Psalms 42/43 and 84 show longing for Yahweh’s tent. Psalm 44 and 85 are national laments. Psalms 46/48 and 87 are “Songs of Zion.” Goulder writes, “Psalms 45 and 47 have no counterpart in the 80’s, but the parallel ordering of the remaining psalms can hardly be accidental.”¹⁶ Psalms 84 and 87 are well known as Songs of ascent or “Zion psalms,” but I suggest that Psalm 88 also magnifies the city by presenting her antithesis.

Looking at these in order, the context of both 42/43 and 84 is profound longing in the face of suffering. Psalm 42 opens with

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so I long for you, God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I come and appear before God?”

Similarly, Psalm 84 begins with,

“How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord of Armies. I long and yearn for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh cry out for the living God.”

For the Korahites, better a day in the Lord’s courts than a thousand anywhere else. What answers the psalmist's longing is not the Son alone, but the Son and Zion. The sons of Korah desire the Son dwelling within his Spirit-city. With Meredith Kline’s insight, we understand that this desire for the courts of God is a yearning for no mere creature, but God himself. The psalmists long for the life-giving Son and Spirit of Genesis 1 and the resurrection-life giving Son and Spirit of John 11:25 and Romans 8:11, magnified by David in Psalm 36,

How priceless your faithful love is, God!

People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They are filled from the abundance of your house.

You let them drink from your refreshing stream.

For the wellspring of life is with you.

By means of your light we see light. (vv. 7-9)

The parallel Korahite laments, Psalms 44 and 85, call on God to turn to his people, to not reject his nation. In Psalm 44, the sons of Korah give us a King, who ordains victories for his people, so that he might plant and settle them in the land. The antithesis of the land is “exile,” being “scattered among the nations,” “covered with deepest darkness,” “sinking down to the dust,” and “clinging to the ground.” The antithesis of the life-giving land, a replica of the Spirit-city, is a return to darkness, dust, and the ground. This is also prominent in Psalms 85, and above all, Psalm 88. These psalms give us the same antithesis to the life-giving land, the Spirit-city. The Korahites ask God to show favor to his land, an image of the Spirit, and to restore the fortunes of Jacob, an image of God’s first born Son. God’s salvation of his people will demonstrate his faithful love or hesed. God will not allow them to go back to their foolish ways, “so that glory may dwell in our land . . . the Lord will provide what is good, and our land will yield its crops.” The Lord will abandon his displeasure and not prolong his anger so that his people may rejoice in him and glory might dwell in the land. The life-giving Son will assure the fruitfulness of the life-giving land, a promise to his people.

Before I go on to the last parallel, I would like to say something about the “Prayer of David,” Psalm 86, which stands prominently in the center of the second Korahite collection. The Messiah stands with David in the longing of his heart for the Spirit-city. He desires to be heard on the day of his distress and rescued from the “depths of Sheol.” David writes, “Turn to me and be gracious to me. Give your strength to your servant, save the son of your female servant. Show me a sign of your goodness . . .” I suggest that the sign of God’s goodness that David asked for in Psalm 86 is given to his descendant Ahaz, a sign “as high as heavens,” a virgin who will conceive and have a son and name him Immanuel. The female servant who gives birth to the Messiah is Daughter Zion generally and Mary, the mother of Jesus, more specifically. David’s greater son, Jesus, born from above, son of Zion, son of Mary, was delivered over to evil men, but God answered his prayer, this prayer, and “did not abandon (him) to Sheol or allow (his) faithful one to see decay.” (Acts 13:37).

Psalms 46 and 48 have their parallel in Psalm 87, which magnifies the city as the birthplace of the nations. God has recorded and registered the nations there: “This one was born there.” Singers and dancers alike will say, “My whole source of joy is in you.” This is God’s decree, a consummation which is not the earthly utopia of the American Christian nationalists but rather a heavenly city confirmed in joy which will descend on the last day. When personified, the city is always feminized, the birthplace of the nations, set apart as his own possession. This is why love of your neighbor, who is a woman, and love of the foreigner who lives among you, go together. The nations are registered in Zion, Christ’s pan ethnic, transcultural bride. Like their Savior, they were born in her heavenly chambers, and they will find their end in her as well. Singers and dancers alike will say, “My whole source of joy is in you.” That “you” is feminine, a city founded in the heavens, our alpha and omega as God’s beloved.

The Korahite collection ends with Psalm 88, the only exhaustive lament of the entire psalter. In that chapter, the psalmist seems almost completely oblivious to the hope he found in the first collection. I say “almost” because the psalmist addresses his lament to the “Lord God of my salvation,” even as he asserts God’s absence. The Lord of Hosts and his City are found nowhere on his horizon. The place where the psalmist finds himself is the antithesis of Zion: Sheol, the dead, the grave, cut-off, lowest part of the Pit, darkest places, the depths, Abaddon, darkness, land of oblivion. The psalm starts with “I am like the slain lying in the grave, whom you no longer remember, and who are cut off from your care,” and it ends with “darkness is my only friend.” The psalmist gives us the converse of the Spirit-dwelling of God, perceiving himself spatially as if he is in the grave, not the tabernacle. He is surrounded by darkness, not the city illuminated by the Lamb’s radiance. He is there alone. The God of Psalm 45 who embodies his hope is absent. There is no dwelling place and no light. No King upon his throne. No Queen city of Ophir gold. The Lamp is extinguished, and the only thing that remains is darkness, personified as his “only friend.”

Though the Korahite collection ends with darkness, Book 3 does not. It has one final psalm, a maskil of Herman the Ezrahite, declaring God’s faithfulness to all generations. The faithful love of God (hesed) is built (banah) and established in the heavens. It is worth noting that the first use of banah in the Hebrew Scriptures is Genesis 2:22. The woman who proceeds from Adam is built (banah) by God from his sacred side. God’s hesed is displayed not only in David’s anointed offspring, God’s firstborn (v. 27). Not only in the throne and the king. Not only in Yahweh Sabaoth, the divine warrior, but also in the light and truth that proceed from him, which are with him and go before him. That hesed will be demonstrated in a time and place beyond the grave and Sheol. Following the final psalm of the second and last Korahite collection, Psalm 89 rekindles hope of a Son and city on the other side of the exile. Combined with the Korahite psalms, Psalms 89 bridges despair and hope, leading us to see God’s sovereign hand at work despite our sin and sorrow as he brings us to the end he has determined, the Son and Spirit beyond the grave.

In the Korahite psalms, we have one confidence, one hope, whose substance is two divine persons. To be with the Son is to be in the Spirit-city. The Son and the Spirit-city are the one vision of the sons of Korah. In the songs of the Sons of Korah, when you come to words like “shield,” “fortress,” “ever-present helper,” “dwelling place,” and “city,” these are Zion words. They are Spirit words, yet they comprehend the throne of the Son. When you come to words like “anointed,” “warrior,” “throne’” and “king,” they are distinctly Son words, yet they comprehend the Spirit-city, the tent encompassing the divine throne. The royal Son and the royal city are distinct yet inseparable. The Lord of Angelic Hosts is the God of Jacob . . . is the Son clothed with the Spirit . . . is the Spirit-city in whom dwells the Son . . . is Israel’s one hope. The second Korahite collection, no less than the first, sets our sights on the Son within his divine citadel, exalted above the heavens. There his throne is established forever (Ps 45:6).

Thanks for reading along with me as I trace the unfolding of the Son and the Spirit-city. I hope to look at Zion in the book of Isaiah in upcoming months. I welcome any comments.

1. Meredith Kline, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, 13.

2. Ibid.

3

4. M. M. Kline, “Meredith G. Kline: A Biographical Sketch,” in Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2017), xxiii.

5. https://www.marquette.edu/theology/faculty-emeriti-john-schmitt.php

6. GHH, 8-9; 35.

7. For women called to the “participation of silence,” see https://opc.org/GA/unordained.html#Minority2. For the veiling of women in public and private assemblies, see Calvin’s Commentary on I Corinthians 11:1-16 (https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom39.xviii.i.html).

8. GHH, 218.

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

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. https://www.meredithkline.com/files/articles/bible_book_of_the_month_song_of_songs_kline.pdf

13. GHH, 169.

14. For the “participation of silence, see https://opc.org/GA/unordained.html#Minority2. For “unseemliness,” see Calvin on 1 Cor. 14.

15

16. Michael Goulder, The Psalms of the Sons of Korah, 12.