The Old Testament Figures and the Tree

The Church reads the Old Testament as a book about Christ, and the Cross is the point at which that reading is most concentrated. This file sets out the principal figures — the two trees of Paradise, the wood of the ark, the binding of Isaac, the Passover lamb, the rod and the outstretched hands of Moses, the wood that sweetened Marah, the bronze serpent, the curse of Deuteronomy 21:23, and the Servant of Isaiah 53 — and pins two celebrated cases to their attestation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

How the Church Reads

Typology is not decoration added to the Old Testament by later Christian ingenuity; it is the reading the New Testament itself performs and hands on. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). “These things happened to them as a type (τυπικῶς), and were written down for our instruction” (1 Corinthians 10:11). The Lord himself sets the rule on the Emmaus road: “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

The Church’s hymnography is saturated with this reading. The canons of Great Week and of the feast of the Exaltation move continuously between the wood of the Cross and the wood of the figures, and the octoechos assumes a congregation that can hear the allusions. The general principles are set out in the companion collection (see Typology, the Exodus, and Pascha; Christ the Key to the Scriptures). What follows is the specific dossier for the Cross.

The Two Trees

The governing figure is the pairing of trees. A tree in Paradise was the occasion of death; a tree on Golgotha is the instrument of life. St. Irenaeus states the pattern that will organize all later reflection:

“He has therefore, in his work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam… And therefore in the last times the Lord has restored us into friendship through his incarnation, having become the Mediator between God and men… And the sin which was committed by means of the tree was undone by the obedience of the tree.”
(Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.16.3–17.4, paraphrasing the argument; trans. ANF I; see Recapitulation)

The Church’s hymns make it a formal antithesis. The exapostilarion of the Exaltation and the stichera of the feast repeatedly set “the tree of disobedience” against “the tree of the Cross,” and the paschal canon sings that “by a tree came death, and by a tree came life.” The same logic drives the parallel figures: virgin against virgin (Eve and the Theotokos), garden against garden (Eden and Gethsemane, and the garden of the tomb), the sleep of Adam from whose side Eve is taken against the sleep of death of the Second Adam from whose pierced side blood and water flow (John 19:34).

The Cross is also identified with the tree of life of Genesis 2:9, from which the exiled Adam was barred by the cherubim and the flaming sword (Genesis 3:24) and to which access is restored in the Apocalypse: “To him who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7; cf. 22:2, 14). The connection is made liturgically rather than argumentatively: the Cross is called “the tree of life” in the propers of 14 September and of the Third Sunday of Great Lent (see The Exaltation and the Veneration of the Cross).

Wood, Water, and Deliverance

A cluster of figures turns on wood in relation to water and to salvation from death.

The ark. Noah’s ark, built of wood, carries the remnant through the flood — read as a figure of the Cross and of the Church by the early tradition and by 1 Peter 3:20–21, which makes the flood itself a figure of baptism (see The Theology of Baptism).

The rod of Moses. The staff that divides the Red Sea (Exodus 14:16) is read as a figure of the Cross, and the crossing itself as the paschal passage from death to life. The first ode of every canon in the Byzantine rite is built on Exodus 15 for this reason.

The wood at Marah. “The Lord showed him a tree, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet” (Exodus 15:25). The bitter waters made sweet by wood is a standing figure of the transformation of the world’s bitterness by the Cross.

Elisha and the axe-head. “He cut off a stick and threw it in there and made the iron float” (2 Kings/4 Kingdoms 6:6) — wood raising what had sunk.

The hands of Moses. “Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed” (Exodus 17:11), with Aaron and Hur supporting his arms until sundown. The reading of the outstretched arms as the figure of the Cross is very early: the Epistle of Barnabas 12 makes it explicitly, as does St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 90–91, and it recurs throughout the Fathers.

The Binding of Isaac

Genesis 22 is the densest of the figures and the one to which St. Gregory the Theologian appeals when he refuses to say the Father demanded his Son’s blood (see To Whom Was the Ransom Paid?).

The elements read typologically are the beloved and only-begotten son (Genesis 22:2); the three days’ journey; the wood of the burnt-offering laid on Isaac’s own shoulders (22:6); Isaac’s question and Abraham’s answer, “God will provide himself the lamb” (22:8); the place, identified in 2 Chronicles 3:1 with Mount Moriah where the Temple was built; and the ram caught in a thicket, offered in Isaac’s place (22:13).

The typology is worked in two directions at once, and both are needed. Isaac carrying the wood is Christ carrying the Cross; the ram substituted is Christ the sacrifice. The tradition does not resolve the doubling, because the figure is richer than any single correspondence.

The Fathers also mark the disanalogy, and Gregory’s use of the passage depends on it: the sacrifice of Isaac did not happen. The God of Genesis 22 stops the knife. Whatever the Cross is, it is not the completion of a demand that Genesis 22 shows God declining to make.

The Passover Lamb

Exodus 12 supplies the paschal frame of the whole Christian year. The lamb without blemish, a male of the first year (12:5); killed at evening by the whole assembly (12:6); its blood on the doorposts and lintel so that the destroyer passes over (12:7, 13); its flesh eaten roasted with unleavened bread and bitter herbs (12:8); and the prescription “you shall not break a bone of it” (12:46; Numbers 9:12), which St. John cites as fulfilled when the soldiers do not break Christ’s legs (John 19:36).

The identification is apostolic — “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed; let us therefore keep the feast” (1 Corinthians 5:7) — and it is the oldest Christian paschal preaching. St. Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha (c. 160–180), the earliest surviving paschal homily, is a sustained exposition of Exodus 12 as figure and Christ as fulfilment: “the mystery of the Pascha… is new and old, eternal and temporary, corruptible and incorruptible, mortal and immortal” (Melito, On Pascha 2; trans. Stewart-Sykes, PPS 20). The Church’s own name for the feast is the Hebrew word.

The Eucharistic connection is not an inference but a rubric: the bread prepared at the prothesis is called the Lamb, and the priest says over it, “Sacrificed is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (see The Symbolism of the Prothesis).

The Bronze Serpent — and a Patristic Disagreement

Numbers 21:4–9: the people are bitten by fiery serpents, Moses makes a serpent of bronze and sets it on a pole, and whoever looks at it lives. John 3:14–15 makes it a type of the crucifixion in the plainest terms: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

It is worth recording, rather than smoothing over, that St. Gregory the Theologian reads the same passage in the opposite direction in the very oration this collection relies on elsewhere. The bronze serpent, he says, “was hung up as a remedy for the biting serpents, not as a type of Him that suffered for us, but as a contrast; and it saved those that looked upon it, not because they believed it to live, but because it was killed, and killed with it the powers that were subject to it” (Oration 45.22; trans. NPNF II/7).

Gregory’s point is not that John is wrong but that the correspondence must be handled carefully: the serpent is the image of what is destroyed on the Cross, not of the one who hangs there. Later hymnography preserves both readings without embarrassment. The disagreement is a useful reminder that patristic typology is an art of judgment and not a mechanical key.

The Curse, and the Servant

Two texts supply the New Testament’s most difficult language about the Cross.

Deuteronomy 21:22–23. “A hanged man is accursed by God” — the prescription that a body hanged on a tree must not remain overnight, “for you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God.” St. Paul takes it up: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13). This is the pivot text of the later Western doctrine of curse-bearing (see The Reformers and Penal Substitution), and it is also the text that requires an Orthodox account to say what it means, rather than to avoid it. Paul’s own logic is that the curse falls on one who does not bear it justly, and is thereby exhausted; the Fathers develop this as the destruction of the curse by its own operation on one whom it cannot rightly hold, which is the same logic Section 03 traces for death itself.

Isaiah 52:13–53:12. The Servant “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities,” on whom “the Lord has laid the iniquity of us all,” who “makes his soul an offering for sin” and “bore the sin of many.” Acts 8:32–35 makes the identification apostolic. The passage is read at the Royal Hours of Great Friday. Nothing in the Orthodox tradition softens it; the argument of this collection is about the frame in which it is set, not about whether it belongs to the Cross.

Alongside these: Psalm 21/22 LXX, quoted from the Cross (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, verse 2) and containing the pierced hands and feet and the divided garments (verses 17–19), read entire at the Royal Hours; Psalm 68/69 LXX with the gall and vinegar (verse 22); and Zechariah 12:10, “they shall look on him whom they have pierced,” cited at John 19:37.

Two Attestation Notes

The Church’s typological reading is ancient and secure. Two specific items commonly cited in this connection are not, and the repository’s practice is to pin them rather than repeat them.

“The Lord reigned from the tree” (Psalm 95:10 LXX / 96:10). The phrase ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου, “from the tree,” is quoted by St. Justin Martyr as part of the psalm text, and Justin accuses Jewish teachers of having excised it (Dialogue with Trypho 73); it recurs in Tertullian (Adversus Marcionem III.19; Adversus Judaeos 10) and in the Old Latin psalter, and it survives in some Latin liturgical use — notably in the hymn Vexilla regis prodeunt. It is absent from the Hebrew Masoretic text and from the great Greek uncials, and the scholarly consensus is that it is a Christian expansion of the second century rather than an original reading that was suppressed. The Church’s typology of the Cross does not depend on it, and this collection does not cite it as Scripture.

Wisdom 14:7, “Blessed is the wood through which righteousness comes.” This verse is genuine and stands in the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the anagignoskomena received in the wider Orthodox Old Testament (see The Wider Old Testament and the Anagignoskomena). Its context is the wood of Noah’s ark and a polemic against idols carved from wood; the messianic-cross reading is patristic application, not the plain sense, and it should be cited as such.

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies V.16–21. Translated in ANF I.
Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho 73, 90–91. Translated in ANF I.
Epistle of Barnabas 12. Translated in ANF I.
Tertullian. Adversus Marcionem III.19; Adversus Judaeos 10. Translated in ANF III.
Melito of Sardis. On Pascha. Translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes, Popular Patristics Series 20. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 45.22. Translated in NPNF II/7.
The Festal Menaion. Translated by Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The propers of the Exaltation, 14 September.)
The Lenten Triodion. Translated by Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. (The Third Sunday of Great Lent and Great Week.)