Anointees

As subjects (sort of) of His Majesty, Joan and I made a point of watching all the best parts of the coronation on youtube and, of course, on the official coronation website, www.coronation.gov.uk. Whether we are technically his subjects, I’m not sure. But we both have Canadian passports and Charles III is indeed King of Canada, its Sovereign and its Head of State. The monarchy isn’t particularly popular in Canada these days, however, so who knows how long it will be before Canada follows Barbados and cuts its ties to the House of Windsor completely? And whither Canada goeth in this regard, thither soon enough shall surely followeth Australia and New Zealand, plus a host of other nations eager to assert their autonomy from their erstwhile occupiers. What can you do? Time marches on!

But the coronation itself was remarkable: a strange blend of magic and majesty, of pomp and tradition seasoned with an overt, sometimes slightly ham-fisted effort to make inclusive a ceremony that by its very nature could not conceivably be any less so. I watched, I do have to admit, with rapt attention. And there were some advantages to watching it hours after it happened because of Shabbat: as opposed to everybody present, we had the relaxing experience of watching the coronation unfold while already knowing that the whole thing was going to be pulled off almost without a hitch and that no one was going to try to make an anti-monarchic point by blowing up Westminster Abbey during the ceremony. So that was our stress-reducing reward for watching it not live, but fully after-the-fact.

The Jewish angle that has been discussed every which way in blogosphere has to do with the Chief Rabbi’s presence in Westminster Abbey, formally and in every conceivable other way a church, on Shabbat morning. (Depending on whom you read, the fact that the Chief Rabbi was put up over Shabbat by the future king at Clarence House, a nearby royal residence, either softens the blow or adds fuel to the fire.) Whatever! The part of the ceremony that caught my own attention, however, had nothing to do with the Chief Rabbi—who, at any rate, is at the helm solely of the Orthodox rabbinate in England—and had to do rather with the unexpected—unexpected by myself, at any rate—feature of Charles being formally anointed with oil prepared in Jerusalem in a ceremony so private and so secretive that screens were brought out to shield him from the prying eyes of those in attendance. Coronation literally denotes the act of investing someone with kingship by setting a crown on his or her head. (The word “corona” is Latin for “crown.”) And that act, where the giant crown is set on the king’s head formally to invest him with kingship, took place fully publicly in front of the two thousand attendees and the twenty-seven million people watching on television in the U.K. and across the globe. So that’s what I expected to happen. But what was the deal with the anointment oil?

It was a little bit to be expected, I suppose. The House of Windsor has this odd sort of conception of itself as related in some magical way to the House of David. (Yes, that House of David, the one in the Bible.) It all has something to do with a crackpot theory that achieved immense popularity in the nineteenth century called British Israelism according to which the people of Great Britain are actually descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. This theory, which is wholly bogus, was popular for a long time in England. Books like Colonel Garnier’s Israel in Britain, John Wilson’s Our Israelitish Origin, and John Pym Yeatman’s The Shemetic Origin of the Nations of Western Europe were bestsellers for decades; the 1906 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia gave the figure of 2,000,000 adherents in the U.K. and here in our country. Archeologists convinced that they were descended from the biblical Israelites began to excavate various places in the British Isles looking for ancient and/or sacred artifacts; the excavations at the Hill of Tara in Ireland in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant are especially noteworthy in that regard. But there were others too!

And then we get to the part about the royal family. According to this part of the theory, King Zedekiah, the last king of the House of David to rule over Judah before the Babylonian Exile in the 6^th century BCE, had a daughter who escaped along with the prophet Jeremiah and his amanuensis Baruch ben Neriah to Egypt. That seems unlikely but could, at least possibly, have happened. But then we move into true craziness. From Egypt, they theory posits, they managed to travel to Ireland where Zedekiah’s daughter had the good fortune to marry a local High King of Ireland. And it was from that union that the royal houses of Britain descended. And that is why the Stone of Scone played such a big role in the coronation ceremony: nowadays it is the stone installed beneath the Coronation Chair on which the king sits when being coronated, but originally, long before the Stone of Scone had that name, it was the stone upon which Jacob set his weary head down to sleep when he saw the ladder reaching up to heaven at Beth-El. And, yes, there’s a whole made-up story to explain how that gigantic rock made its way from Israel to Egypt and then through Europe all the way to Scotland.

I suppose this is all tied up somehow with the endlessly fascinating question of why the boys of the House of Windsor since the time of George I have apparently all been circumcised. That too is a vestigial feature of British Israelism, the theory that the royal houses of Great Britain are all somehow descended from King David. Talk about putting the brit back into Britain!

And then we get to the question of the anointing oil.

Made from olives taken from trees on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the hand-pressed oil is then mixed with oils taken from orange flowers, roses, jasmine, benzoin, cinnamon, neroli (whatever that is), and amber. First, the oil is poured into a special anointing spoon encrusted with pearls. And then, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the official anointer, dips his fingers into the oil and smears it on the king’s hands, breast, and head. How he gets his hand into the outfit to reach the king’s chest I couldn’t find out. Maybe he just wipes his finger on the outer garment. And that’s the ceremony. Does it remind you of anything?

How about this:

And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, “The Lord has not chosen these.” Then Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, David, but behold, he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and get him, for we will not sit down till he comes here.” And he sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. And the Lord said, “Arise, anoint him, for this is he.” Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward. And Samuel rose up and went to Ramah.

Later on, the kingship is passed to Solomon in roughly the same way:

So Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet … had Solomon ride on King David’s mule, and brought him to Gihon. And Zadok the priest then took the horn of oil from the tent and anointed Solomon. Then they blew the trumpet, and all the people said, “Long live King Solomon!” And all the people went up after him, and the people were playing on flutes and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth shook at their noise.

So you see where this is all coming from. Even the recipe has biblical roots in a passage that has been translated a thousand different ways, including by myself:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Take the following fine spices: 500 shekels of liquid myrrh, half as much (that is, 250 shekels) of fragrant cinnamon, 250 shekels of fragrant calamus, 500 shekels of cassia—all according to the sanctuary shekel—and a hin of olive oil. Make these into a sacred anointing oil, a fragrant blend, the work of a perfumer. It will be the sacred anointing oil … Anoint Aaron and his sons and consecrate them so they may serve me as priests. Say to the Israelites, ‘This is to be my sacred anointing oil for the generations to come. ³² Do not pour it on anyone else’s body and do not make any other oil using the same formula. It is sacred, and you are to consider it sacred.

And that’s where the recipe comes from—although in the Torah the oil is used to anoint the priests of Israel, not the king—and that’s from whence also derives the concept of investing a king with the kingship not by crowning him but with anointing oil.

The British Israel theory has been abandoned for more than a century by more or less all. Even King Charles would not claim descent from the House of David. (Or at least I hope he wouldn’t.) No one thinks the ten lost tribes of Israel somehow turned into the Celts and the Saxons and the Angles and the Picts of old Britain. And yet there was just enough in the coronation ceremony to constitute a whiff of the old sentiment, the discredited but ancient theory, the magical connection of the House of Windsor with the line of kingship chosen by God in Heaven to rule over Israel.

Should we be pleased or horrified by all this? I suppose the answer would have to be: a little bit of both. It neither pleases nor displeases me to know the king is circumcised. The Archbishop can shmear as much olive oil as he wishes on the new king, but that does not mean he gets to transcend the House of Windsor and claim some sort of attenuated but real descent from the House of David. The whole thing is, to say the least, bizarre. On the other hand, that specific aspect of King Charles’s coronation ceremony points to the ultimate legitimacy of the notion that an anointed king from the House of David will yet rule over Israel. Did I mention that mashiach is the Hebrew word for “anointed one”?