Hebrews 1:5

This is the second post sourced from the translation of the NT into Hebrew in the mid-19th century cantillated by Ezekiel Margoliouth. You can find it here.

Hebrews 1:5 

For to whom among the messengers did he ever say, My son you are. I today have given birth to you.
And further, I will be to him a father, and he will be to me a son.

The NT has no embedded music in the Greek. Many cantillations have been used of course for gospel readings, but it is uncommon in the churches. The Psalm that the text quotes here is expressed with music in the Hebrew of the Tanach. In the Tanach, it uses the poetic te'amim. Margoliouth of course uses the prose accents as he reports verse 7 of the poem. I expect that he never uses the poetic accents at all. Here is the tri-colon from the Psalter:

Psalm 2:7

The use of this verse raises a lot of questions. When it was written, the world worked the same way it works today - rich and poor, coercion of empires, excessive taxation, and so on. Whether the time of the exile or earlier, or the time of Jesus, or today, the human condition, for all the generosity of God, is a mess. The king of psalm 2 is part of the mess. His throne was not a cross. So: Hebrews quotes Psalm 2 not to import its old royal ideology into Christology, but to expose how that ideology collapses in the face of the incarnation, and what remains is the pure divine address to the Son who suffered as the world suffers under the turmoil of competing kingdoms. But that's to get ahead of the homily.

By the way, it seems to me that the whole question of pre-existence must be reframed, time being what it is, that fourth dimension of reality in which we are caught by the second law of thermodynamics. The eternal Son is clearly outside of time, present to our faces as creator, as much as present to any other era before or to come. Did they know, were they known, do we know, are we known? Of course. How else could they (the ancients who wrote Tanach) write of their love on our behalf who now inhabit the globe? 

In Proverbs 8 before the foundation of the world, Wisdom says: In the establishing of the heavens, there am I, when he engraved the ambit on the face of the abyss. And a few verses later, the same voice presents itself present לפניו (lpniv). This is a word whose root we have already encountered in the first few words of this epistle.

Proverbs 8:30-31 Wisdom gamboling with the children of humanity

God is present to us today, yesterday, and forever.

In this step I evoke Proverbs 8, a chapter I arranged to its music which you may be able to process more directly, though mechanically, in my oratorio, Unleashing Leviathan, here.

To repeat, 'before the foundation of the world' (this is not my translation -- discordant with respect to glossing, but not inaccurate as to intent or paraphrase), 

Proverbs 8:22

Wisdom says:

Proverbs 8:27

And a few verses later, the same voice presents itself as present לפניו (lpniv) a word whose root we have already encountered in the first few words of this epistle. Wisdom - face to face with God, without giving a timeline is gamboling in the world of his earth, reveling with the children of humanity.

This Christ who is our Wisdom -- according to Paul somewhere (1 Corinthians -- must read this someday) -- Yes, I identify Christ with the Wisdom of Proverbs 8. Christ and Wisdom share function and identity: creative agency, presence, delight, engagement with humanity, there they are before the ordering or foundation of the world.

You will note I write Christ and not Jesus. In these two words I separate the human lifetime, bound by entropy, from the divine unbound presence. Remember God is spirit, the One who is, who was, and who is to come. It's not a matter of counting three coins in a fountain. The same Spirit still broods over the turmoil of the waters. And we have this treasure in clay vessels.