Foreplay
God moves in a mysterious way. Very often, in the midst of hardship, we don't understand why God is "so far off." Why does He come, and then seemingly go? We know that we are pilgrims on earth, groaning for Christ's final return when all creation will be made new. Perhaps this is God's foreplay. He is preparing to return, and indwell the earth. In that day, Christ will know his bride.
From Peter Leithart's exposition of the Song of Songs:
"Why didn’t the Son come in the flesh just outside Eden? The erotic theology of the Song of Songs provides a possible hint. Throughout the Song, the lovers admire each other’s bodies and express their longing desires to be together. Union comes at the end of reciprocal arousal. ”Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” the bride says at the outset. ”How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are!” says the bridegroom. But the bride doesn’t get her winekiss until later, until he takes her to his “house of wine” (2:4) and until his enters the locked garden and drinks of the wine, milk, and honey of her lips and mouth (4:11-5:1). A period of intensifying desire precedes tasting and touching; distance, approach, distance, approach, repeated again and again before consummation.
The history of Israel is God’s foreplay with His bride, bringing her to a pitch of desire before He takes flesh and dwells with her. Perhaps too this provides a way of describing the frenzy of Messianic excitement that Israel was undergoing in the first century.
God waits to send His Son because He is a good lover."
Anglo-Saxon vs French roots of English
A further and rather telling example [of difference in English word origins between Anglo-Saxon and French] is the fact that the English words for many animals (such as ‘cow’, ‘sheep’, ‘boar’, ‘deer’) refer to the living creature in the hands of the farmer or herdsman, while once slaughtered, cooked and served to the Norman barony they acquire a French-based culinary name: ‘beef’, ‘mutton’, ‘pork’, or ‘venison’.
Stephen Pollington, An Introduction to the Old English Language and its Literature, 8.
Knowledge of One’s Language
Educated speakers are notoriously unreliable in analyzing their own language. If Chrysostom weighs two competing interpretations, his conclusion should be valued as an important opinion and no more. If, on the other hand, he fails to address a linguistic problem because he does not appear to perceive a possible ambiguity, his silence is of the greatest value in helping us determine how Paul’s first readers were likely to have interpreted the text.
Moisés Silva, Philippians, 27.
Illuminated Manuscripts
This brings us to the true function of decoration in a twelfth-century book. It was clearly not just because it was pretty. The twelfth century was an age which delighted in classification and ordering of knowledge. Its most admired writers, men like Peter Lombard and Gratian, arranged and shuffled information into order that was accessible and easy to use. Twelfth-century readers loved encyclopedias...Les us then consider book illumination in these terms. It suddenly becomes easy to understand. Initials mark the beginning of books or chapters (PL.85). They make a manuscript easy to use. It helps classify the priorities of the text...A newspaper does this today with headlines of different sizes...any reader of a modern newspaper will fiercely defend his choice of paper by praising the text, not the layout or illustrations. It is not surprising that the twelfth-century chroniclers from St. Albans, Lincoln, and Canterbury complimented the accuracy of manuscripts when what they meant was that they liked using them.
Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts 99.
Amo, Amas, Amat
Amo, amas, I love a lass,
As a cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip's grace
Is her nom'native case,
And she's of the feminine gender.
Rorum, corum,sunt Divorum!
Harum, scarum, Divo!
Tag rag, merry derry, periwig and hatband!
Hic hoc horum Genitivo!
-John O'Keeffe, Agreeable Surprise II.ii
