Ps. 45.15 (entering the king's palace)

“In embroidered clothes / she is brought / to the king – the maidens, / her companions, - are behind her – being brought / to her. – They are conducted / with joy and gladness; - they enter / the king’s palace.” In a sense the psalm has been tending toward this moment: the presentation of the princess to her king. All of the descriptions of martial valor, beauty and interior honor have been but preliminaries to the actual meeting of these two almost luminous people. This verse represents the processional—when the queen is ‘introduced’ to the king. And, as we have seen throughout, the queen is now passive. She is “brought to the king”; even her companions (maids of honor) are “brought to her.” They are entering “the king’s palace.” The king is the magnetic center. He is the supremely active force; everything else is, primarily, passive to him. This is the movement of the queen from one ‘containment’ (of her father and people) to another (the king). This wedding represents the transfer and this presentation is the beginning of that movement. Notice how the psalmist emphasizes she is entering “the king’s palace”. Just as her original appearance was through the eyes of the king, so too now is her ‘transfer’ to be, geographically, made “in the king’s palace.” However, whereas before, when the transfer was first described, the queen had to be ushered through that hiatus (the transfer) by way of hope and of a turning, in forgetfulness, from her father and her people. Here, that hesitation is gone. Now that she is in the presence of the king the transfer is one purely of “joy and gladness”. What was ‘hoped for’ is now present. One can feel this assurance and change in tone in the lines themselves—the “joy and gladness” is immediately followed by “they enter the king’s palace”. Also of importance is that the ‘joy and gladness’ is not merely that of the king and queen but of those participating within the ceremony. Here we touch upon a profound point: through the king the covenantal forever-blessing of God is mediated to the world; however, it can only be done through this marriage (the king must be ‘fruitful’). If the king, therefore, comes to represent Israel, in his person, his marriage to the queen, in a very real way, is their marriage too as the perpetuation of the covenantal reality is bound up, irrevocably, within her. As much as the queen mother tends to be in the background in many of the histories it is here where we are afforded a glimpse of her primal necessity is perpetuating the covenantal blessing of Israel. In other words, is it is here where the ‘image of man’ (as man and woman; Gen. 2) is fully displayed. Might it be that that the queen’s reality was never given prominence because her office as ‘patron’ (vs. 12) could not be established until there was peace following the king’s pacification of the realm/world? And, that it is only following his victory that her place could be meditated upon as the ‘mother of all the living’, and the one through whom the actual covenant (literally) passed (the king does not give birth)?