The Blessed Mary Prefigured in the Old Testament
In the Old Testament, there are many images or persons that prefigure Christ.
Likewise, the same is true of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Augustine puts it for us, “the Old Testament is the New concealed, but the New Testament is the Old revealed” (Catechising of the Uninstructed 4:8).
To grasp this point clearly, we first need to understand that the Old Testament, in light of the New Testament, identifies several events and figures as clear Prefigurations of Christ. I will list a few to help us grasp this point.
I will list a few and offer a quick clarification to help you understand the deeper point here.
1. Adam – The First Man and Christ the New Man (Rom 5:15)
1. Adam – The First Man and Christ the New Man (Rom 5:15)
How Adam prefigures Christ:
Adam represents fallen humanity, while Christ restores it.
2. Abel – The Innocent Victim - Hebrews 12:24,
How Abel prefigures Christ:
· Innocent shepherd - Offers a pleasing sacrifice to God
· Murdered by his brother
3. Isaac – The Beloved Son Offered by Abraham. - Hebrews 11:19
Isaac – The only son of his Father, carries the wood to be offered in sacrifice.
Christ – The only son, His eternal Carries the cross to Calvary
4. Joseph – The Rejected and Exalted Saviour of his people.
Joseph ultimately saves the very brothers who rejected him,
Christ, who was sold for 30 pieces of silver, is the saviour of the world.
5. Moses – The Great Deliverer
Moses is one of the clearest Old Testament types of Christ.
6. David – The King After God’s Heart
Shepherd who becomes a King – Defeats Goliath – And establishes a Kingdom.
Christ is repeatedly called “Son of David.” – Establishes an eternal Kingdom.
7. Jonah – The Sign of Resurrection – Matt 12:40
8. Melchizedek – The Eternal Priest - Hebrews 7:17
Now, from the above, I think you get the idea. Now all this is to show us that Christ prepared us for his coming – He prepared us by means of these things to understand him and to receive him. – God doesn’t do anything in relation to us without preparing us.
Mary – In type and reality.
Well, the same is true of Mary, the only difference is that in Mary’s case she did none of the preparation. Those things were done by God.
Bp. Fulton Sheen once said that if you and I could create our own mother, well, we would naturally make her the best woman that ever existed. Because she is our mother. – We would make her better than everyone else who ever was or would ever be. And well, that is exactly what God did. He made her the best!
That is a point to think over for the rest of your life. – Because essentially what it means is this, God can create a better heaven, he could create a better earth, he could make a better version of you and me, but He could not make a better version of the blessed Virgin Mary! He made her the best of the best!
St. Bonaventure, “God could make a grander world, a greater heaven, but a greater mother than the Mother of God, He could not” - In speculo B. Virginis, cap. 8.
Something to think about for all of your life long!
In putting it in poetic form Bp. Fulton Sheen put it like this.
The Woman Whom even God dreamed of before the world was made;
The Woman of Whom I was born, at the cost of pain and labour, at a Cross;
The Woman Whom, though no priest, - Could yet on Calvary’s Hill breathe
“This is my Body; This is my Blood” For none save her gave Him human life.”
Bp. Fulton Sheen explains for us how Mary is God’s first love outside the Trinity and how He carried her in His heart from the beginning:
“Every person carries within his heart a blueprint of the one he loves. What seems to be “love at first sight” is actually the fulfilment of desire, the realisation of a dream. When we hear music for the first time, we either like or dislike it. We judge it by the music we have already heard in our own hearts. So it is with love. A tiny architect works inside the human heart drawing sketches of the ideal love from the people it sees, from the books it reads, from its hopes and daydreams, in the fond hope that the eye may one day see the ideal and the hand touch it Life becomes satisfying the moment the dream is seen walking, and the person appears as the incarnation of all that one loved. The liking is instantaneous because it was actually there waiting a long time. Some go through life without ever meeting what they call their ideal. This could be very disappointing if the ideal never really existed. But the absolute ideal of every heart does exist, and it is God. All human love is an initiation into the Eternal. Some find the Ideal in substance without passing through the shadow.
God, too, has within Himself blueprints of everything in the universe. As the architect has in his mind a plan of the house before the house is built, so God has in His Mind an archetypal
idea of every flower, bird, tree, springtime, and melody. There never was a brush touched to canvas nor a chisel to marble without some great pre-existing idea.
So, too, every atom and every rose is a realisation and concretion of an idea existing in the Mind of God from all eternity. All creatures below man correspond to the pattern God has in His Mind. A tree is truly a tree because it corresponds to God’s idea of a tree. A rose is a rose, because it is God’s idea of a rose wrapped up in chemicals and tints and life. But it is not so with persons. God has to have two pictures of us: one is what we are, and the other is what we ought to be. He has the model, and He has the reality: the blueprint and the edifice, the score of the music and the way we play it. God
has to have these two pictures because in each and every one of us, there is some disproportion and want of conformity between the original plan and the way we have worked it out.
The image is blurred; the print is faded. For one thing, ourpersonality is not complete in time; we need a renewed body.
Then, too, our sins diminish our personality; our evil acts blur the canvas the Master Hand designed. Like unhatched eggs, some of us refuse to be warmed by the Divine Love, which is so necessary for incubation to a higher level. We are in constant need of repairs; our free acts do not coincide with the law of our being; we fall short of all God wants us to
be. St. Paul tells us that we were predestined, before the foundations of the world were laid, to become the sons of God. But some of us will not fulfil that hope.
There is, actually, only one person in all humanity of whom God has one picture, and in whom there is a perfect conformity between what He wanted her to be and what she is, and that is His Own Mother. Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfil the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign. The Ideal that God had of her, that she is, and in the flesh. The model and the copy are perfect; she is all that was foreseen, planned, and dreamed. The melody of her life is played, just as it was written. Mary was conceived, planned, and thought of as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realisation.
That is why, through the centuries, Christian liturgy has applied to her the words of the Book of Proverbs to Mary :
“The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” – Prov 8.
Because she is what God wanted us all to be, she speaks of herself as the Eternal blueprint in the Mind of God, the one whom God loved before she was a creature.
She is even pictured with Him, not only at creation but also before creation. She existedin the Divine Mind as an Eternal Thought before there were any mothers. She is the Mother of mothers.
God not only thought of her in eternity, but He also had her in mind at the beginning of time. In the beginning of history, when the human race fell through the solicitationof a woman, God spoke to the Devil and said: “I will establish a feud between thee and the woman, between thy offspring and hers; she is to crush thy head, while thou dost lie in wait at
her heels/’ (Gen. 3:15.) God was saying that, if it was by a woman that man fell, it would be through a woman that God would be revenged. Whoever His Mother would be, shewould certainly be blessed among women, and because God Himself chose her, He would see to it that all generations would call her blessed.
When God willed to become Man, He had to decide on the time of His coming, the country in which He would be born, the city in which He would be raised, the people, the race, the political and economic systems which would surround Him, the language He would speak, and the psychological attitudes with which He would come in contact as the Lord of History and the Saviour of the World.
All these details would depend entirely on one factor: the woman who would be His Mother. To choose a mother is to choose a social position, a language, a city, an environment,a crisis, and a destiny. His Mother was not like ours, whom we accepted as somethinghistorically fixed and unchangeable; He was born of a Mother whom He chose before He was born. It is the only instance in history where both the Son willed the
Mother, and the Mother willed the Son. And this is what the Creed means when it says, “born of the Virgin Mary/’ She was called by God as Aaron was, and Our Lord was born notjust of her flesh, but by her consent.
Before taking unto Himself a human nature, He consulted with the Woman to ask her if she would give Him a man. The Manhood of Jesus was not stolen from humanity; it was given as a gift.
The first man, Adam, was made from the slime of the earth. The first woman was made from a man in ecstasy. The new Adam, Christ, comes from the new Eve, Mary, in an
ecstasy of prayer and love of God and the fullness of freedom.
” – (The world’s first love, pg. 3, etc.).
This summary outlines the biblical presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary as detailed in the provided text, spanning from Old Testament prophecies and figures to her role in the Gospels and the early Church.
“God says one author, adopted her as His queenly Daughter beloved by Him, says St. Ephrem, more than all His creatures. He made her to be the first in the order of nature, the greatest and best beloved, after the Sacred Humanity of Jesus.
“I came out of the mouth of the Most High, the firstborn before all creatures” Ecclus. xxiv. 5.
“ From the beginning and before the world was I created,” etc. xxiv. 14.
These words, spoken of the Incarnate Wisdom of God, are applied by the Church to our Lady, the Divine decree selecting her as the privileged Mother of the Word made flesh, being eternal as was the decree of the Incarnation.” – Mary, on the praise of Every tongue, by Fr. P. J. CHANDLERY, S.J., pg. 1
Yes. Pope Pope Pius IX, in the Bull of definition of the Immaculate Conception, states this more clearly for us saying: “ God chose and prepared from the beginning and before time for His only Son, a Mother of whom He would be born in the happy fullness of time, and He loved
her above all creatures; so that, by an extraordinary predilection, He placed in her alone the utmost plenitude of His complacency. Therefore, far above all angelical spirits and all Saints, He filled her so admirably with the abundance of all celestial gifts, taken from the treasure of His divinity, that, always exempted from all stain of sin, all fair and all perfect, she received such fulness of sanctity
and innocence that, under God, no greater sanctity can be imagined, nor anyone except God understand the perfection thereof” - Brev. Rom. d. 9 Dec. lect 4, 5.
First Reality – First Type or image of Mary is Eve.
The New Eve and Old Testament Prophecies
The text establishes Mary as the “New Eve,” the woman promised at the dawn of creation to be at enmity with the serpent.
• Genesis 3:15 (The Proto-Evangelium): Identified as the first mention of Mary, predicting a “woman” whose seed (Christ) would crush the head of Satan.
This Marian understanding of Genesis 3:15 was the common understanding of Christians as early as the second century. They quite naturally placed this Marian understanding of Genesis 3 in correspondence with St. Paul’s description of Christ as the New Adam, just as I have done.[1]I will just mention three things in passing:
1. Given that Mary is the “woman” of Gen. 3:15, then the same enmity exists between Our Lord and the serpent as between Our Lady and the serpent. Of course, this is a complete enmity because the enmity between Jesus Christ and the serpent is complete.
2. This verse (and the reality of Mary as the New Eve) already tells us that, in some sense, the Redemption is going to be a joint work of a man and a woman just as the fall was.
3. Although Genesis 3:15 is usually considered the first Marian verse, I like to think that we could also consider this one as “first”:
Gen 2:18: “And the Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like unto himself.”
Image of a Woman who would unto what Eve had done !
. The Basic Biblical Parallel
The Fathers noticed several parallels:
• Isaias 7:14: A direct prophecy of a virgin conceiving a son named “Emmanuel” (”God with us”). – As time gets closer, God begins to tell people about the arrival of this woman! She would be a virgin who would bring forth a son!
Mary is the Burning Bush that is not extinguished.
1. The burning bush – a figure of her virginity and purity.
· She brings forth Our Lord, and yet her virginity was not destroyed .
2. The Ark of the Covenant. – The Spirit of God dwelt over the Ark.
Key Scriptural and Theological Parallels:
• The Overshadowing: In Luke 1:35, the angel says the Holy Spirit will “overshadow” Mary, using the same Greek term (episkiazo) that describes the glory cloud of God covering the Ark in Exodus 40:34.
• The Ark brought blessings to the
Mary, the Ark as Revealed in Mary’s Visit to Elizabeth
Mary as the Ark Revealed by Items inside the Ark
Early Church Recognition:
• St. Gregory the Wonderworker (213–270 AD): Stated the Holy Virgin is “in truth an ark, wrought with gold both within and without”.
• St. Athanasius (296–373 AD): Referred to her as the “dwelling place of God the Word,” containing the true manna.
• St. Ambrose (340–397 AD): Explicitly stated that the Ark bore the tables of the Testament, but Mary bore the “Heir of the same Testament itself”.
3. Wisdom in the sapiential books is often applied to both Our Lord and Mary.
Pope Pius IX: “The same words in which the Holy Scriptures describe the Divine Wisdom and His eternal origins have been traditionally applied by the Church in her divine office and sacred liturgy to the beginnings of the Blessed Virgin who was predestined, along with the Divine Word, in the one and same decree of God.[2]”
She is also considered prefigured in the valiant women of the Old Testament (Deborah, Judges 4, Judith, and Esther in their own books) and by Sara, as much as she conceived miraculously.
Debbora, Judith, and Esther all saved their people in their own ways.
• Judith was noted for her purity and cut off the heads of the enemies of God. In fact, whenever a woman in the Old Testament kills the enemy of the people of God, she always does it by a blow to the head[3] – a curious parallel with Genesis 3:15.
After she had accomplished this act, we read, “And Joachim the high priest came from Jerusalem to Bethulia with all his ancients to see Judith. And when she came out to him, they all blessed her with one voice, saying: Thou art the glory of Jerusalem, thou art the joy of Israel, thou art the honour of our people.” - Judith 15:10
• Esther is a figure of Mary in her role as Mediatrix. In fact, the very words of the king in sparing her might be interpreted as prefiguring Mary’s immunity from original sin. “Thou shalt not die: for this law is not made for thee, but for all others.” Esther 15:13
Esther intercedes for the people and wins a victory for them.
Queen Esther prefigures the Blessed Virgin Mary as a powerful intercessor and queen who saves her people from death. Just as Esther was raised from obscurity to become queen and risked her life to plead for the Jewish people before King Ahasuerus, Mary was chosen to be the Mother of God and intercedes before her Son for humanity.
Mary does this for us! – We see this in Scripture when Christ works his first miracle on her account at the wedding of Cana.
We see that she is made the mother of all the faithful, to intercede for them when Christ commends His mother to St. John on the cross.
Mary as the Daughter of the Father –
“Give praise, O daughter of Sion: shout, O Israel: be glad, and rejoice with all thy heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord hath taken away thy judgment, he hath turned away thy enemies: the king of Israel the Lord is in the midst of thee, thou shalt fear evil no more.” - Prophecy of Sophonias (Zephaniah) 3:14 –
The same is repeated in the Prophecy of Zacharias 2:8
“Sing praise, and rejoice, O daughter of Sion: for behold I come, and I will dwell in the midst of thee: saith the Lord.”
To what shall I compare thee? or to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? to what shall I equal thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgindaughter of Sion? for great as the sea is thy destruction: who shall heal thee? - Lamentations 2:13
Mary is personified as the Church. Whatever can be said of the Church can be said of Mary. God literally came and dwelt in the midst of her. – She was a virgin and the daughter of the line of Juda of the house of David.
Virgin and Daughter! - She is the true daughter of the heavenly Father!
What is said of Israel applies all the more to Our Lady. She was literally a virgin and where God dwelt completely.
Queen and Mother –
The Queen in the Old Testament was not the wife of the King in the Jewish world. It was the Mother of the King. Not their wives!
The mother of the David Kings, where the Queen Mother’s! – 2 Kings 10:13
In 3 Kings 2:19, we read:
And Adonias, the son of Haggith, came to Bethsabee, the mother of Solomon. And she said to him: Is thy coming peaceable? he answered: Peaceable. And he added: I have a word to speak with thee. She said to him: Speak. And he said: You know that the kingdom was mine, and all Israel had preferred me to be their king: but the kingdom is transferred, and is become my brother’s, for it was appointed him by the Lord.
Now therefore I ask one petition of thee: turn not away my face. And she said to him: Say on. And he said: I pray thee speak to King Solomon (for he cannot deny you anything) to give me Abisag the Sunamitess to wife. And Bethsabee said: Well, I will speak for thee to the king. Then Bethsabee came to king Solomon, to speak to him for Adonias: and the king arose to meet her, and bowed to her, and sat down upon his throne: and a throne was set for the king’s mother, and she sat on his right hand. And she said to him: I desire one small petition of thee, do not put me to confusion. And the king said to her: My mother, ask: for I must not turn away thy face.
If Solomon, a sinner, would honour his Queen mother, who herself was a sinner, who is not good enough to touch Mary’s sandals . How much more would the perfect Son of David, the Almighty Son of God, honour His perfect mother, from whom He took his flesh and blood!
Now if Bethsabee, the wife of David, who was a wicked woman, who co-operated in the killing of her Husband, was given such a privilege and honour as the Queen mother, whom the King, her Son, could not refuse. How much more is that true of Mary!
Christ refused nothing she asked of him – We see this at the Wedding of Cana! Do what He tells you! - (John 2:5)
[1] The Mother of the Saviour and Our Interior Life, Garrigou-LaGrange, p.160
[2][2]Ineffabilis Deus.
[3]Not only Judith but also Jahel killed Sisara in Judges 4:21ff, and an anonymous woman killed Abimelech in Judges 9:50 ff.