The Canaanite as Allegory of the Unfaithful

He is addressed as such, because regarding sensible things it is not possible for the lamb of the one presenting him to God to be both high priest and to be called a shepherd of the same. For the high priest is to the altar and the shepherd is to the sheep. And if this is so, then the basin, allegorically, is the same as the bowl.

Concerning the spiritual bowls, in the Song of Songs the divine bride says concerning her brother: 'My sister has come down into his garden to shepherd the bowls of fragrance in gardens and to gather lilies' (Song of Songs 4:12). Some ask whether the bowls of fragrance into which the brother has descended are the divinely inspired writings, or rather their divine thoughts, in which the one who descended shepherds in gardens and gathers lilies bearing a spiritual fragrance of lilies being presented.

When the basins become bowls of fragrance before the face of the spiritual altar, then in this way every basin shall be holy in holy Jerusalem and in Judah. In this, Jerusalem is to be understood as the glorious Church, and Judah as he whom his brothers praise and whom the sons of his father worship. Who this is, is said in those things previously read from the prophet.

'And all those who sacrifice shall come and take from them and eat from them. And there shall no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord of the Universe on that day' (Zechariah 14:21). All those performing the sacrifice of righteousness and the sacrifice of praise shall come to the one being worshiped and whom they serve, in order to glorify him, who exhorts them to this. For he says: 'A sacrifice of praise shall glorify me' (Psalm 50:23).

And they shall come together in mutual accord, with harmonious purpose, to perform the priestly service together, taking from the sanctified basins set around the altar [...] so as to boil the victims' meat in them, as already said. And since the service of the basins in question is accomplished with discourse and learned contemplation, they are rightly called bowls. For that this figure signifies discourse is proclaimed in the Song of Songs: the bride, revealing in her soul the beauty and loveliness of the beloved she loved, says, 'His cheeks are like bowls of spice, yielding perfumes' (Song 5:13).

It is said. For the bride makes known the beauty and the loveliness which she loved as a sister in her own soul: 'His sideburns, growing fragrant like the vessels of ointment' (Song of Solomon 4:2). The sideburn is a sign of the word of the source: even as the source dies, it flows and grows fragrant.

This mystical, intellectual worship being performed by those arriving to perform the spiritual liturgy, having cast the meats taken by analogy—namely those from calves and rams—into the holy vessels, a Canaanite shall no longer be in the house of the Lord Almighty on the day when the restoration of those [who were...] has occurred. For a Canaanite is the stranger from the womb as one being outside of piety; and he shall not be, either by changing into Israel, 'the true one not having deceit,' or by being cast out of the house of the Lord Almighty. A Canaanite is to be accepted allegorically even if he has fallen out of the Israelite state. Such was the other, according to Sossannus, a man staying as an elder, to whom the most wise Daniel says: 'Seed of Canaan and not Judah, your beauty has deceived you, and desire has turned your heart; thus you did to the daughters of Israel, and there they fear to consort with you, but a daughter of Judah did not endure your lawlessness' (Daniel 9:7). Hosea also agrees regarding the lawless ones, as if they were Canaanites having such a condition: 'Ephraim has set himself a stumbling block as a companion of idols. He desired Canaanites; by committing fornication, he has become a fornicator' (Hosea 4:17).

And since the lawless one is, according to tropology, a Canaanite, he is cast out of the holy house of the Lord Almighty, so that he may no longer be in it. The divine apostle Paul fulfills this in his letter to the Corinthian Church: 'For it is heard among you that there is fornication, and such fornication, which even is not among the Gentiles, that a man has the wife of his father. And you are such, and should not rather have mourned, so that the one who has done this thing might be removed from among you' (1 Corinthians 5:1, 5). And he has been cast out of the assembly of the faithful, so that, having perceived himself to be such an evil, he might come by his own intention to receive the penalty of his error, which indeed has happened, so as to be driven into...