Isaiah's prophecy: "The weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice's den."
According to the mediæval explanation, Elisha, going up to Bethel, was a type of the pilgrimage of Christ on the Cross to the true House of God: and the bald head of the prophet typified the Saviour's Crown of Thorns. The mocking children represented the taunting Jews; and as there came two she-bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of the former, so, after forty-two years, the two savage conquerors, Vespasian and Titus, destroyed Jerusalem.
David's assumed madness in the court of Achish is here regarded as a symbol of the madness imputed by the Jews to our Lord. "Many of them said: He hath a devil and is mad; why hear ye Him?" S. Augustine, on Psalm xxxiv., dwells at great length on this type.
A reference to the mediæval belief that the whelps of the lion are born dead, and continue so for three days, when their father arouses them by roaring: as we saw in the hymn of S. Fulbert of Chartres.
Canticles i. 14. "My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyard of Engedi;" or, as the Vulgate reads, "a cluster of Cyprus." In the preceding verse the Church says, "A bundle of myrrh is my Wellbeloved unto me." The myrrh is interpreted of our Lord's death: the wine of His Resurrection. Thus Marbodus, of Rennes, in his metrical explanation of the Song of Solomon;
Who, dying, caused my heart one hour of deepest gloom,
Is wine of royal cheer, arisen from the tomb.
