Typology, the Exodus, and Pascha

Typology proper — the reading by which Old Testament persons, events, and institutions (the typoi) prefigure their fulfillment in Christ. Its supreme instance is the Passover and Exodus fulfilled in Christ’s Pascha: the Passover lamb in the Lamb of God, the Red Sea in baptism, the manna in the Eucharist. This file treats typology as the Church’s own reading, grounded in Scripture and enacted in her worship.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Typology Is

Typology is the most characteristically patristic and Orthodox mode of reading Scripture. A type (Greek typos, “figure, pattern, imprint”) is a real Old Testament person, event, or institution that, by God’s providence, prefigures a corresponding New Testament reality, its antitype (antitypon) or fulfillment. Unlike free allegory, which can attach a symbolic meaning to any detail regardless of history, typology depends on the historical reality of the type: the correspondence runs between two real moments in the one economy of salvation, the earlier foreshadowing the later (Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, Newman Press, 1960; Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, Cambridge, 1997). The vocabulary is the New Testament’s own: Adam is “a type (typos) of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:14); the events of the Exodus “happened to them as types (typikōs), and they were written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:11); baptism is the “antitype” (antitypon) prefigured by the flood and Noah’s ark (1 Peter 3:21). Typology is thus not a technique the Church invented but a reading the apostles practiced and handed on.

Christ Our Pascha

The master-type of the whole Old Testament is the Passover and Exodus, and its fulfillment is the Pascha of Christ — His death and resurrection. The very word the Orthodox Church uses for Easter, Pascha, is the Passover; the fulfillment carries the name of the type. St. Paul states the identification directly: “For indeed Christ, our Passover (to pascha hēmōn), was sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). John’s Gospel presents Christ crucified as the true Passover lamb: “not one of His bones shall be broken” (John 19:36, citing the Passover-lamb rule of Exodus 12:46), and John the Baptist hails Him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The blood of the lamb that marked the doorposts and delivered Israel from the destroyer (Exodus 12:7, 13) prefigures the blood of Christ that delivers from sin and death. The Exodus from Egypt — the passage from slavery through death to freedom and the promised land — is the type of the greater Exodus Christ accomplishes: the passage of the whole human race from the slavery of sin and death, through His own death, into the freedom of the Kingdom (Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 1960, on the Exodus as the fundamental Christian typology; see The Twelve Great Feasts, on Pascha as the “Feast of Feasts”).

Melito of Sardis and the Language of Type and Truth

The earliest and most powerful witness to Paschal typology is St. Melito of Sardis, whose homily On Pascha (Peri Pascha, later 2nd century) is a sustained meditation on the Passover fulfilled in Christ. Melito articulates the very grammar of typology: the type is a preliminary sketch, real but provisional, that is fulfilled and then, in a sense, superseded by the reality (alētheia, the “truth”) it foreshadowed. “The people [Israel] was a type by way of preliminary sketch, and the law was the writing of a parable… but the Gospel became the explanation of the law and its fulfilment” (Melito, On Pascha 40–43, trans. Stewart-Sykes, SVS Press, 2001). The type is valuable precisely as pointing beyond itself: “the type was precious before the reality, and the parable was wonderful before the interpretation” (ibid. 42–43). Melito’s homily, chanted in the paschal context, already binds typological interpretation to the Church’s paschal worship — the reading is enacted in the feast (Alistair Stewart-Sykes, intro. to Melito of Sardis: On Pascha, SVS Press, 2001; Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 1960). [Corrected: *On Pascha* was long transmitted anonymously or under other names; its identification as the work of Melito of Sardis rests on papyrus discoveries published in the twentieth century (the Bodmer and Chester Beatty papyri) and is now the scholarly consensus (Stewart-Sykes, *On Pascha*, 2001). Earlier references sometimes assigned the homily differently.]

The Red Sea and Baptism

Within the Exodus typology, particular events prefigure particular mysteries of the Church. The crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14) is the type of baptism. St. Paul: “our fathers were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:1–2). As Israel passed through the waters from slavery to freedom, and the pursuing Egyptians were drowned, so the Christian passes through the baptismal waters from the slavery of sin to new life, and the power of sin and the devil is drowned. This typology is woven into the Orthodox baptismal service and into the paschal hymnody, and it is the reason the Church anciently baptized at Pascha (Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, University of Notre Dame Press, 1956, chs. on the Red Sea and baptismal typology; see The Bible as the Liturgical Book). The first ode of every Orthodox canon at Matins takes its theme from the Song of Moses at the Red Sea (Exodus 15), so that the Church sings the type at the head of her daily hymnography.

The Manna and the Eucharist

The manna in the wilderness — the bread from heaven that fed Israel (Exodus 16) — is the type of the Eucharist, the true bread from heaven. Christ Himself draws the typology in the great discourse of John 6: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die… I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:49–51). The manna sustained bodily life for a time; the Eucharist gives the life that death cannot end. Related types cluster here: the water from the rock (Exodus 17; Numbers 20), which Paul reads christologically — “that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4) — and Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine (Genesis 14:18; Hebrews 7). Together these form the typological background of the Church’s understanding of the mysteries: the Old Testament feeding and deliverance were shadows of the true food and true deliverance given in Christ (Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, 1956; see Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology).

Other Great Types

The tradition reads many further types, most of them attested already in the New Testament: the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), the beloved son bound by his father and carrying the wood, as a type of the Father’s offering of the Son and of Christ bearing the cross; the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses (Numbers 21:9), which Christ applies to His own being lifted up on the cross (John 3:14); Jonah three days in the belly of the great fish as the type of the three days in the tomb and the Resurrection (Matthew 12:40); Adam as the type of Christ, the “last Adam” who undoes the first (Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45); and, in the Church’s hymnody, Eve and the Theotokos, the tree of Eden and the tree of the cross. The Orthodox liturgical texts are saturated with these correspondences, especially in the hymns of the great feasts and of Holy Week (Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, 1960; see The Twelve Great Feasts).

Typology Enacted in Worship

The decisive Orthodox point is that typology is not merely an exegetical theory but a lived and enacted reading, carried above all in worship. The Old Testament readings (paremias) at the Vespers of the great feasts are chosen precisely for their typological bearing: at the Vesperal services of Holy Saturday, fifteen Old Testament readings recount the whole economy of salvation — creation, the Passover, the Red Sea, Jonah, the three youths in the furnace — as the types now fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Christ (see The Lectionary and the Cycles). The Church does not first prove the typology and then celebrate; she celebrates the fulfillment and, in the celebrating, reads the types. This is the practical form of the principle that Scripture is the Church’s book, read within her worship: the meaning of the Exodus is disclosed when the Church, at Pascha, sings Christ risen as the true Passover (Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, 1956; Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001; see The Bible as the Liturgical Book). Type and truth meet in the feast.

See Also

References

  • Daniélou, Jean. From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers. Trans. Wulstan Hibberd. Newman Press, 1960; and The Bible and the Liturgy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956. (The Exodus, Red Sea/baptism, manna/Eucharist typologies and their liturgical enactment.)
  • Melito of Sardis. On Pascha (Peri Pascha), esp. 40–43. Trans. Alistair Stewart-Sykes, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Type and truth; the Passover fulfilled in Christ.)
  • Young, Frances M. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (Typology distinguished from allegory.)
  • Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Typology within the Orthodox reading of Scripture.)
  • Scripture: 1 Corinthians 5:7; 10:1–4, 11; John 1:29; 6:49–51; 19:36; Exodus 12–17; 1 Peter 3:21; Romans 5:14; Numbers 21:9 / John 3:14; Matthew 12:40; Genesis 22.