The Gun (and the Pomegranates) Must Go Off: Literary Unity Part 2

Have you met, in your reading of the Bible, Jachin and Boaz and their many pomegranates? Or as most do, have you passed by with blinders on, unaware they even exist? What do these two pillars of Israel (do you remember them yet?) have to teach us about God and our good world?

As I mentioned in part 1 of this two-part series, “Chekhov’s gun” refers to a dramatic standard that requires every element of a play to necessarily contribute to the plot. The concept stands on the shoulders of Aristotle’s principle of unified action found in Poetics. But this criteria for good storytelling arose well before Aristotle named it or Chekhov fired his gun; the Bible uses this principle within each narrative unit, throughout each book (whether epistle, collection of poetry or wisdom, history, or compiled prophecy), and across all sixty-six books as a unified literary work

Frequently, however, we fail to expect all the details of Scripture to hang together, juicy with meaning. Instead, whether due to cultural gaps across time and geography, poor Bible study education, or a combination of both, readers disassemble these literary units and reduce Scripture to a litany of proof texts or a compendium of favorite characters. We impatiently skip over or daydream our way through repetitive details, odd descriptions, and tedious lists.

Are the details in Scripture primed to bloom upon inspection and bear the fruit of a unified literary argument? Or do they, ignoring Chekhov’s admonition, lie on the page as cold and impotent as an unused pistol decorating a set?

Jachin and Boaz
Let’s go back to those two marvels I mentioned earlier, Jachin and Boaz. Solomon gave them their names when he was building the temple in Jerusalem. They stood quite tall and stately—bronzed, in fact, and thirty-four feet high. Giants? No. They weren’t people but bronze pillars placed in front of the temple and capped with latticework and lilies and hundreds of wrought pomegranates. The pillar to the right (facing out from the holy entrance) he named “Jachin,” and the pillar to the left, he named “Boaz.”

Why name pillars, and why these names? “Jachin” [יָכִין; a short form of the verb ḵwn] most likely means “He establishes” and “Boaz” [בֹּֽעַז], vocalized in the Septuagint as be’oz, means “in strength.” Some consider the names inscriptions on the columns, which read from right to left, “He establishes it in strength.”[1] Others propose the words reflect God’s promises to David, that “the throne of David shall be established [form of ḵwn] before the LORD forever” (1 Kgs 2:45) and “O LORD, in your strength [בְּעָזְּ; be’oz] the king rejoices” (Ps 21:1).[2] Either way, the structures represent God’s establishment of his kingdom dwelling place through the Davidic king, a major literary arc that starts in the garden of Eden, climaxes with the resurrection of the Davidic king Jesus, and lands in the new Jerusalem of Revelation 21 and 22.

The Dish on the Fruit
Okay, so the column names have significance, but the pomegranates themselves are merely decorative, right? Surely, since many ancient Near Eastern nations used the pomegranate as a sculptural ornament,[3] we can conclude that this detail just expressed a fad, like gothic spires of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, split-level houses of the 1950s to1970s, or tin roofs and mixed-media siding of this century’s contemporary structures?

Of course not. The Bible’s tight writing has little room for describing fads; indeed, the human authors wrote for the people of their time and place, who already understood their own culture and customs. No need to explain those. Would you stop the action in your contemporary novel to explain why people had mobile phones? Probably not. (But you would need to give an explanation if your novel’s characters, living in the developed world of this decade, had no access or knowledge of these pocket-sized wonders.)

The biblical writers give a large amount of space to the pomegranate’s juicy details:

Likewise he made pomegranates in two rows around the one latticework to cover the capital that was on the top of the pillar, and he did the same with the other capital. Now the capitals that were on the tops of the pillars in the vestibule were of lily-work, four cubits. The capitals were on the two pillars and also above the rounded projection which was beside the latticework. There were two hundred pomegranates in two rows all around, and so with the other capital. He set up the pillars at the vestibule of the temple. He set up the pillar on the south and called its name Jachin, and he set up the pillar on the north and called its name Boaz. And on the tops of the pillars was lily-work. Thus the work of the pillars was finished. (1 Kgs 7:18–22)

And lest you think, Well, here the author merely details each element of the temple to establish the background setting, note that on summarizing the entire building process, the author again makes sure the reader/listener repeatedly notices the pomegranates:

So Hiram finished all the work that he did for King Solomon on the house of the LORD: the two pillars, the two bowls of the capitals that were on the tops of the pillars, and the two latticeworks to cover the two bowls of the capitals that were on the tops of the pillars; and the four hundred pomegranates for the two latticeworks, two rows of pomegranates for each latticework, to cover the two bowls of the capitals that were on the pillars; the ten stands, and the ten basins on the stands; and the one sea, and the twelve oxen underneath the sea. (1 Kgs 7:40–44)

If this reminder were not enough, the author(s) of Kings mentions the pomegranates again when Nebuchadnezzar’s Chaldean army conquers Jerusalem, destroys the temple, and takes the people of Judah into exile (notice he doesn’t list the items of the more precious metals):

What was of gold the captain of the guard took away as gold, and what was of silver, as silver. As for the two pillars, the one sea, and the stands that Solomon had made for the house of the LORD, the bronze of all these vessels was beyond weight. The height of the one pillar was eighteen cubits, and on it was a capital of bronze. The height of the capital was three cubits. A latticework and pomegranates, all of bronze, were all around the capital. And the second pillar had the same, with the latticework. (2 Kgs 25:15–17)

Chronicles and Jeremiah also significantly detail and repeat the pomegranate element of the pillars (2 Chr 3:16; Jer 52:22–23).

What significance, then, should we infer from this bounty of fruit? Literary and cultural contexts should give us plenty of ammunition to hit the target. Pomegranate trees dotted fertile landscapes in the region and thus became representative of the good life:

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. (Deut 8:7–10; cf. Joel 1:12 and Hag 2:18–19)

They also symbolized beauty:

Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil. (Song 4:3)

And the pillars that the pomegranates hung from also held additional cultural meaning:

The symbolic value of the pillars is contained in their position as gateposts. Archaeologically retrieved parallels and representations of entry pillars in ancient artistic sources indicate that the doorposts or gateposts of a temple convey to the viewer the notion of passage: that the god meant to inhabit the earthly dwelling (the temple) has indeed traversed the threshold of the building, entered the sanctuary built for the deity, is accessible to the human community, and legitimizes the political unit that has constructed the temple.[4]

So, put together, the copious fruit—two layers of hundreds—and the gateposts of God’s inhabited home point to the garden of Eden, God’s original dwelling place with humanity (see Gen 2:8–15). There, God commanded humankind to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion” (Gen 1:28). And while we often construe those words subdue (rāḏâ) and dominion (kāḇaš) here, to have the regular meaning they take after sin enters our word—ruling with a domineering, even violating oppressiveness—in this case, before humankind falls into sin, those words perhaps have a different connotation, a sense of taming wild chaos into an ordered and beautiful garden.

Even in English, we might speak of an unruly garden that must conquer or tame. We don’t mean to take a whip to the plants or exact punitive taxes; we mean “to bring order and harmony.”[5] Thus, being fruitful and multiplying so that we fill and subdue the entire earth means to expand God’s ordered garden, his dwelling place, into every corner of chaos on the globe.[6]

The End of the Story
So when we inspect the pomegranates for meaning, what do they add to God’s story? They are reminders that God has not forgotten us but is in the process of restoring us to paradise lost, starting first with worship at the center of a holy community. They declare that God’s presence brings abundance and the good life, and that with the building of his temple, God is once again working to fill the entire known earth with his cultivated garden (see this garden recreated as sanctuary city in Rev 21–22).

If we ignore the pomegranates—and the other many significantly placed details of Scripture, we will miss the rich bounty God has given us in the Word through his epic story of our world. Even worse, we may misconceive its meaning and bear rotten fruit as a result. So read carefully. And write carefully. Make sure your loaded guns go off[7] and the heroes get to eat the fruit.

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[1] W. Hall Harris, ed., The NET Bible Notes, 1st, Accordance electronic ed. (Richardson: Biblical Studies Press, 2005), paragraph 22489.

[2] Donald J. Wiseman, 1 and 2 Kings: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC 9; IVP/Accordance electronic ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 123.

[3] “Complex floral capitals . . . were characteristic of monumental architecture in the ANE. Egyptian architecture in particular is notable for its use of plant forms in structural elements, and the Phoenician workmanship responsible for the Jerusalem temple no doubt meant the use of many of the Egyptianizing forms that characterized Phoenician and W Syrian art.”
Carol Meyers, “JACHIN AND BOAZ,” Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, 3:597.

[4] Carol Meyers, “JACHIN AND BOAZ,” Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, 3:598.

[5] Concerning the importance of order in Genesis, I am indebted to Dr. John Walton for his fine research on ancient Near Eastern background in John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2009) and The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015).

[6] Even the temple interior, God’s house, was intricately carved with garden images (1 Kgs 6:18, 29, 32–35).

[7] Please know I am merely referencing Chekhov’s principle from part 1 of this series and am not endorsing gun violence of any kind nor supporting gun ownership without restriction or oversight.