Happen to have seen the Brooklyn Museum's version of Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" (c. 1834) in their Visible Storage yesterday (we'd gone for the unconvincing "Monet and Venice" blockbuster), just in time for the Old Testament reading for Advent 2. As ever, I'm caught short that it nowhere says "the lion shall lie down with the lamb," but this time I was reeling at all the predatory pairings it does mention.
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed[b] together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
9 They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9, NRSV)
This year, since we are in a time of predators' revachanchism (cf. esp: Hegseth, Pete), it came to me that none of these pairings is arbitrary. Each must recall a time when a leopard actually killed a kid, a bear mauled a cow, a lion attacked an ox, children were killed by snakes. (It was like the moment you realize that the curious details in monastic and legal codes like the Vinaya and Benedict's Rule are reports of actual episodes.) The sheer volume of cases overwhelms, as does the almost deluvian mixed metaphor of a mountain covered by the sea.
We had a guest preacher in church today, who focused on this reading to complement the gospel account of John the Baptist's call to repent - for the kingdom of God is near. Repentance means turning away, she explained, but you can't change course unless you can imagine an alternative. It seems more urgent than ever to imagine a world without normalized, even celebrated violence. Delightfully, she had learned to feel the nearness of the kingdom through reading Ed Yong's wonderful An Immense World.
