"Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming"--Part I

 

This Advent season I’m doing a series about one of my favorite traditional Christmas carols, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” The fifteenth century German carol tells the Christmas story in an unusual way by comparing Jesus to a rose.¹

The origin of the rose comparison is Biblically unclear. The carol seems to be combining Isaiah 11:1 and Isaiah 35:1.

Isaiah 11:1 clearly refers to the Messiah, who was to come from Jesse’s lineage. Here it is from the King James Version:

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

The verses that lead up to Isaiah 35, on the other hand, seem to indicate that Isaiah 35:1 refers to God’s kingdom rather than to the Messiah. Isaiah’s original audience may have assumed they would return from exile to rebuild the worldly Jerusalem. For most Christians today, however, the reference is to the heavenly Jerusalem. With that background to build on, here is Isaiah 35:1 from the King James Version:

"The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." 

To further complicate matters, the translations can’t even agree on the flower that the passage refers to. The NIV and the ESV translates it as crocus rather than rose, and Martin Luther’s German translation uses lily. According to my internet research, what we usually think of as a crocus comes from the iris family, not the rose family, although there is apparently a shrub called a crocus rose.

The carol was written before the King James Version of the Bible came out, so it didn’t get the rose reference from there. Still, the actual flower is not the point of these passages so, for purposes of these blog posts, I’ll accept the comparison.

The first stanza of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” was translated from the original German into English by Theodore Baker in 1894. Here are the words:

Lo, how a rose e’er blooming

From tender stem hath sprung!

Of Jesse’s lineage coming,

As men of old have sung.

It came a floweret bright,

Amid the cold of winter,

When half spent was the night.

 

Jesus probably wasn’t born in the winter, since the shepherds were unlikely to be watching their flocks in the fields at that time of year, but Christmas was firmly established in December by the time this carol was written. And even if the carol got the season wrong, the reference to the Messiah is clear, at least to me.

There are some people who believe the rose originally referred to Mary rather than to Jesus. Next week’s post on the second stanza will discuss what it means today.

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¹Although the carol is generally acknowledged to be from the 15^th century, the first printed text appeared in 1599. See https://hymnstudiesblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/22/lo-how-a-rose-eer-blooming/.