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King Alfred and the restoration of Sion
Psalm 87; Nehemiah 8: 1-4a and 5-6; 1 Peter 2: 4-10

+ ‘The Lord loveth the gates of Sion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.’[1]

The cult of the ninth-century West Saxon king, Alfred, developed considerably in the lifetime of Dr Perse, in whose honour this sermon is delivered. It was in the sixteenth century that the epithet ‘the Great’ by which Alfred is still known first became popular. During the reign of Elizabeth, antiquaries and historians turned increasingly to Alfred as a key figure in the framing of an English past to serve the needs of the new political (and religious) order. Some of the growing interest in Alfred in this period arose from the creation of new editions of key primary sources from Alfred’s reign, notably Lambarde’s edition of the king’s law code, which argued for the king’s pre-eminence in the history of English law making. Matthew Parker, master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge and later Archbishop of Canterbury, collected an impressive library of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, many including texts closely associated with Alfred, for the express purpose of preserving ‘the antient Monuments of the learned men of our Nation’.[2]

Dr Perse is likely to have known something about Alfred, of his victories against the Danes (the vikings), perhaps of his military reforms, and even of his interest in education and the promotion of the English language, shown by the king’s sponsorship of a programme of translation from Latin into the vernacular. Whether Perse was inspired by Alfred’s plan to set to learning ‘all the free-born young men now in England’, when he bequeathed the money to found a free grammar school for boys in Cambridge, one can only speculate.

It seems less plausible, given his primary interest in medicine, that Dr Perse would have been so well-informed about events of the ninth century that he would have known that Alfred’s contemporaries drew direct comparison between the ills that befell their country at the hands of the pagan Danes and the fate of Jerusalem and its Temple at the hands of the Babylonians (Chaldeans or Assyrians) under Nebuchadnezzar. But that is the theme that I want to explore this evening, which explains my title and the relevance of the verse from tonight’s psalm that I took as my opening text.

From the first dateable viking raid on England – the attack on Lindisfarne in 793 – English and continental ecclesiastics had equated the pagan Danes with the evil that the prophet Jeremiah had warned would come ‘from the north’ to attack Jerusalem. Writing immediately after that first raid, the English scholar at Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin, reminded the Northumbrian king that ‘nothing defends a country better than the equity and godliness of princes and the intercessions of the people of God.’ ‘Remember’, he went on, ‘that Hezekiah, that just and pious king, procured from God by a single prayer that 185,000 of the enemy should be destroyed by an angel in one night’.[3] Yet, at the same time, Alcuin cautioned the bishop of Lindisfarne, reminding him that God had previously chastised his people whom he loved, giving as an example ‘Jerusalem, the city loved by God, which perished with the temple of God in the flames of the Chaldeans’.[4]

King Alfred and the scholars whom he gathered at his court firmly subscribed to this interpretation of the meaning, and thus the divine purpose, of viking raiding. Alfred wrote to all his bishops in a prefatory letter to his translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care urging them to take a lead in his educational programme of reform. He asked them to ‘Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.’ The king recollected ‘how – before everything was ransacked and burned – the churches throughout England had stood filled with treasures and books’; he lamented that none of his people had sufficient Latin understanding to read the wisdom that those books contained.

Alfred turned to the biblical past to find solace and inspiration in his own tribulations. He found common ground with Hezekiah, king in Judah between 729 and 687 BC, he whom Alcuin had held up as a role model. When Wessex, the only remaining kingdom free from Danish control, experienced such intense military pressure that Alfred was forced repeatedly to pay tribute to the Danes, he compared Hezekiah’s fate when his cities were besieged, and he had to pay tribute to the Assyrians. In more than half of the prose prefaces that Alfred appended to the vernacular translation of the first fifty psalms that he (or he with other scholars in his circle) created, he referred to Hezekiah’s example.[5]

Alfred was deeply familiar with the psalter, which lay at the heart of the Church’s liturgy. He had recited the psalms that lamented the fall of Jerusalem after Hezekiah’s time, and he also knew psalms like this evening’s, which celebrated Jerusalem (Sion) as a sacred place, the city of God. ‘The Lord loveth the gates of Sion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.’ This psalm celebrates Sion’s divine origins and the presence of God within the city established on God’s holy mountain. 

The psalmist continues by associating all the nations – even those of Babylon and the Philistines, traditional enemies of Sion – with this life-giving city of God. It offers a universal promise of the making of a human community in which all nations (all of whom were created, born, on this holy hill) would come together to worship the one God. Alfred would have read this through a Christian lens, taking it to point towards the New Testament and Paul’s mission to the gentiles, or the image of the new Jerusalem in the book of Revelation which includes all peoples.[6] He might also have seen it finding fulfilment for his own people in the words of the first epistle of Peter – ‘you are a chosen race, a royal people, a holy nation, God’s own people, …. called out of darkness into his marvellous light.’[7]

Yet the history of Jerusalem of which the psalmist wrote was not one of unalloyed divine favour, nor of the ceaseless music of singers and trumpeters.[8] Jerusalem did fall to King Nebuchadnezzar. Judah’s king, Zedekiah, and many of his people were taken into exile; the Temple was destroyed, its gold and silver vessels taken to the Babylonian court, and the books of the law and prophets burnt and destroyed. When Alfred lamented all that was ransacked and burnt in his land, he could make a direct correlation between events in Wessex and the fate of the city of Sion.

Thus, when Alfred had established peace, by defeating the Danish king Guthrum at the battle of Edington and insisting on his baptism as a Christian, he looked to the restoration of Sion after the return of the exiles from the Babylonian captivity for inspiration for the restoration and rebuilding of his own kingdom. That realm now included the Christian inhabitants of the midland kingdom of Mercia, brought for the first time under West Saxon rule, but it excluded all those who lived in eastern and northern England, subject to Guthrum and to other, pagan, Danish kings. Alfred believed that it was his and his people’s sin that had brought the viking wars upon them and had led to the fall of all the other early English kingdoms apart from his own. To create an enduring peace, he sought to lead his people in repenting of their past failings and to remedy their lack of faith which resulted from their loss of the books in which God’s law was expounded.

The historical books of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible describe the building of the second Temple in Jerusalem and the restoration of cult and community on the return of the exiled Jews to Jerusalem. That restoration falls into three discrete phases. Cyrus the Great authorised the first return of Jewish exiles to Judah in 538 BC; they started to rebuild the Temple, laying its foundations, but failed to complete the work (Ezra 1-6). Fifty-eight years later, Ezra, a priest and scribe of God’s law, led a second group of exiles back to Judah (Ezra 7-10). 

Ezra sought to rebuild the Jewish community in accordance with the teaching of the Torah; he brought back the sacred vessels and money to restore Temple worship once the building was complete, and he rewrote the books of the law which had all been burnt. Thirteen years later, when much of Jerusalem lay still in ruins, Nehemiah, a cupbearer at the Persian court, obtained permission to return to the city to organise the reconstruction of its damaged walls. Gathering the people at the water gate, on the eastern side of the temple compound, he instructed Ezra, as we heard in our first reading, to stand on a raised platform and read out the book of the law of Moses which God had given to Israel. (Nehemiah 8: 1-4) That experience of hearing God’s word inspired all the people to bow their heads and worship the Lord, the God of Israel. 

Through Ezra and Nehemiah’s co-ordinated efforts, Sion was rebuilt and defended. Nehemiah devised an ingenious system to defend the walls while they were under construction. He allocated defined portions of the perimeter to individual warriors, each supported by his family, so that they could simultaneously work on rebuilding and repel potential attackers. The recitation of the law cemented this reunited people’s sense of their own identity, the long history of their shared past (from exile in Egypt, through the wilderness and into the Promised Land, and latterly their regaining of that homeland on their return from exile) and the promises that God offered them, if they would follow and obey his commandments. It refashioned them as a holy nation, God’s own people.

For Alfred, king of a newly-united realm of West Saxons and Mercians, the narrative of Ezra and Nehemiah provided him with a template for his own plans for rebuilding and reform. Just as Jerusalem’s fabric needed to be reconstructed in tandem with the refashioning of the people under God’s law, so Alfred’s programme has long been recognised as fusing defensive and military rebuilding with spiritual renewal. It also involved the self-conscious creation of a newly-imagined political community to whom the king gave a new name, the Anglecynn (‘the English’; a direct translation of Bede’s gens Anglorum). Alfred’s conception of Englishness depended particularly on his people’s shared Christian faith, thereby differentiating them from the pagan Danes in the north and east.

The system that Alfred devised for defending the network of fortified towns across southern England, dividing his army into three groups that worked in rotation, and allocating to measured portions of wall men from a defined pieces of land neatly parallels Nehemiah’s scheme for the defence of Sion’s walls. Further, Ezra’s example as a scribe of the law finds reflection in the educational reform that the king announced in the preface to the Pastoral Care from which I have already quoted. There Alfred set out his intention to translate from Latin (which no one could read) into the language that all could understand (namely Old English) ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know.’ He justified that decision by reference to the history of the Law, originally composed in Hebrew but translated by the Greeks into their language, and then by the Romans into Latin.

What were ‘those books most necessary for all men to know’? Traditionally, scholars have assumed that Alfred meant the collection of patristic and early medieval Latin texts including Gregory’s Pastoral Care that were translated into Old English in the latter years of the ninth century, if not by Alfred himself then certainly with his encouragement and probably at his court. But recently it has been argued that Alfred meant scripture, the books of the law.[9] If he did, then Ezra’s example will obviously have resonated with him.

I have already mentioned that Alfred translated the first fifty psalms of the Psalter. More relevant here is Alfred’s own law code, whose prologue begins (in Old English): ‘The words that the Lord spoke to Moses and commanded him to speak’.[10] Alfred then translated into English extensive extracts from Exodus chapters 20-23, the law that Moses received on Mount Sinai, starting with the Ten Commandments. Those translated verses end (interestingly in the context of warfare with pagan peoples in Alfred’s time) with Exodus 23: 13: ‘Do not swear by heathen gods, nor cry ye unto them for any cause’ and then a summary statement: ‘These are the laws that Almighty God himself spoke to Moses and commanded him to keep.’[11] In this way, Alfred justified putting these laws before the people. Unlike all other laws, these injunctions were given by God himself. 

Alfred went on to set his own law making (in his own tongue) in historical context, giving an account of the recopying and rewriting of the law for each new generation (in terms reminiscent of the preface to the Pastoral Care). He cited the Christian precedents of the letter sent to Gentile peoples after the Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15, and the development of lawmaking among the gentiles, once many nations had received the faith of Christ and promulgated edicts through synods. Alfred thus set his own lawmaking within the divine plan for humanity, equating English conciliar decisions and synodal decrees with similar ecclesiastical legislation in other Christian countries, yet reiterating how its foundations rested on the law of Moses. 

Just as Ezra recopied the burnt books of the law for newly-restored Sion, so the law that the English had lost was now ready to be reaffirmed as the basis for collective Christian life under Alfred’s rule. This was a major step towards his goal of returning his people to worship and proper Christian devotion. Alfred’s people, united by their shared language, their common past, and their adoption of a single, biblically-based code of legal practice might now see themselves as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation; in their restored state they were ready to be ‘called out of darkness into God’s marvellous light’.[12]

How might these two stories resonate either in Dr Perse’s time, or in our own age? We could reflect on the role that biblical translation has played in the creation of nations not just in medieval but in modern times. St Augustine made specific reference in his On Christian Teaching to the fact that although divine scripture ‘started in a single language, in which it could have conveniently been spread throughout the world, [it] was circulated far and wide in the various languages of translators and became known in this way to the Gentiles for their salvation.’[13] While there are some medieval translations of portions of the Bible (including Alfred’s own contributions) it was only with the Protestant Reformation that all English believers could read the whole of Scripture in their own tongue. Stephen Perse lived long enough to see the King James Bible published in 1611. Whatever his own theological position (which remains contested), he would have seen the educative value of vernacular scripture and the contribution that it could make to public theology. The importance of scripture to the articulation of public theology, the value of reinterpreting God’s word afresh for each new generation, is no less relevant today.

Dr Perse and King Alfred shared a commitment to education and a willingness to invest resources in its promotion. Each lived in an era in which the past was reconfigured and retold in ways that helped to explain present realities and looked forward to as yet unseen futures. For Alfred, that future would lie in the success of his own dynasty in building on his achievements, conquering the areas occupied by the Danes, and ultimately uniting all the English people into a single realm. For Protestants of Perse’s generation, it lay in the endurance of the Elizabethan settlement, the unification of the thrones of England and Scotland under a Protestant king, and the success of the King James Bible. Both could claim to belong to a chosen race, a holy nation, to be God’s own people. Each could say with conviction of their contemporaries:

Once you were not a people,
   but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
   but now you have received mercy.[14]

May we, who like them have received God’s mercy, follow their example of looking to the future with hope.