Ps. 45.13 (the queen: interior and exterior)

“A princess / is all honor / within; - her garment / is made / from finely worked gold.” From the ‘favor of the nations’ we move into a description of the princess herself. It is, importantly, the first description of the princess as she is ‘in herself’ and not as she is perceived by others. In vs. 9 she was described as she appeared to the king; vs. 10 as she stood between ‘her father’s house’ and the king; vs. 11 as the king longed for her beauty; vs. 12 as the nations approached. Here, the eyes (the ‘containment of the queen’) is left behind briefly as she stands out in her own person. Interestingly, the verse moves in an all encompassing way—the queen’s beauty is entirely interior and exterior. Interior: “a princess is all honor within.” As the king issues grace through his ‘lips’, so too does the queen represent a pure vessel within herself. She is, without remainder, an emblem of the pure political reality of ‘honor’ (that virtue that is most appropriate to those in authority). She is “full of grace”. Exterior: as the description of the king came to a close and his wedding garments were described, the verse moved, very intentionally, to the exterior, physical description of the king. Here, the same goes for the queen. Her exterior appearance, through her clothing, is to be a mirror to her interior “all honor within”. Just as her interior is a ‘perfect space’, so too does her exterior represent her beauty. The fact that her clothes are described as “finely worked gold” is to be a type of exterior parallel to “all honor within”. Her clothing, therefore, far from being a type of veiling, is a revealing. It ex-presses her interior honor and nobility in much the same way that the kings clothing ex-pressed his regal authority. Finely, it needs to be noted that these are not merely ‘garments’ but wedding clothes—they are the garments she wears so as to fully ex-pressed and presented to the king in order to be united to him. One cannot help, therefore, calling to mind all of the images of the “bride of Christ” being ‘presented to him’ ‘without spot or wrinkle’ and how she would ‘descend from heaven’ adorned in the garments of ‘the sun’. The image is of the garments made for union; the covenantal garments of marriage. Here, the king is ‘receiving his worthy partner’ much as Adam received Eve—and, from that covenant, she became the ‘mother of all the living’.