Ancient Stories: King Thrushbeard

In the final episode of our Ancient Stories series on the Navigating An Ancient Faith podcast 🎙️, we explore the timeless story of King Thrushbeard. 📖 We follow the proud princess through her fall from status, her humbling trials, and the surprising reveal of the king's true identity.  🏰 Along the way, we uncover powerful themes of pride, transformation, and redemptive love—echoing biblical stories like Hosea and the gospel itself. ✞ Join us as we wrap up this series with reflections on how these old tales still speak into the spiritual journey today. ✨

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Read 📖 the article, The Wisdom of Ancient Stories

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Concept of Bargaining with Spirits
• 7:35 Introduction to King Thrushbeard
• 11:55 The Story of King Thrushbeard
• 22:08 Analyzing the Themes of King Thrushbeard
• 37:50 The Princess's Pride and the Cosmic Courtroom
• 56:29 The Princess's Struggle with Menial Tasks
• 1:07:39 Analyzing the Story's Deeper Implications
• 1:20:57 The Big Reveal
• 1:23:47 Connecting the Story to the Gospel

Transcript

King Thrushbeard

[00:00:00]

JR: Wait a second. Wait a second. That whole wedding is hers. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: Wait a second. The what? What do you, you're saying, how did I miss this? Wait a second. We may cut this out. You're saying that the entire wedding that was No, it says For the other king comforted. For the king's son. 

David: Yeah. He is the king's son. King Thrushbeard is the king's son.

JR: Wow. I don't even know what to say right here. It says, how could I be so dense? 

Anyway, yeah. Let's, I got on, we're, we're recording anyway. But no, this idea that, there's a spirit behind something. That's why I think the connection back to the water is what powered the mill. He was already engaged in a bargain with the water. 

So that makes perfect sense that there's a physical spirit in the story, but that it represents our bargaining with spirits that we do all the time. We just don't notice it. 

David: Yeah, you could have left that conversation with the idea in the back of your mind that, well, it's a good thing that there are no water nixies, right? <Yeah.> And the more I thought about it and the more we [00:01:00] were talking afterwards, it struck me that that's not the right way to look at this, because there may not be some physical manifestation of a spirit.

Right? And I don't know, whatever you wanna call it, but there are spirits of things and depending on, you know, what view point you're coming from. And I guess ever since that episode, I've even been paying more attention to that. I've even, I found myself saying, am I making a bargain with a spirit right now?

Yeah. You know, and it actually frames whatever's sitting in front of you at that moment. It actually frames it a little different. And so one of the examples we said, you know, is social media or your phone, if you don't think there's a spirit of your phone, <holy cow.> that is always bargaining with you to scroll more.

What do the kids call it? Doom scrolling. Is that doom scrolling? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, just sit there and doom scroll. Like if you don't think you're bargaining with a spirit, and again, you don't have to get spooky or whatever, but you know, if you don't see that, then you're just gonna go, oh, I was just wasting time.

Part of the points of these fairytales is to say, no, you're bargaining with the spirit, whether [00:02:00]you realize it or not. You know, it may not be this water nix that manifests itself rises out of the water. I've never seen a spirit rise outta my phone, but it's there and we bargain with them all the time.

I just thought it was interesting, and maybe it was the last thing that went unsaid from that episode that we kind of felt like needed to be said. 

JR: Yeah, and just recognize that it's helpful to view it that way. It's like you said, you don't have to be spooky , or weird about it, but it's much more helpful to recognize that there are spirits behind things that are constantly calling for your attention.

And to your point about the whole doom scrolling and I've sat there for 30 minutes before. and And I'll finally stop and I'm like, What have you been doing for the past 30 minutes? What a waste of time, you know? <Right.> And I'm watching dumb videos and just running down all these rabbit trails.

But it's actually helpful to recognize that and to see that as the spirit of something calling for your attention. And sometimes you win the battle and sometimes you lose. Sometimes you just fall straight. You fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. Right?

But yeah, recognize the [00:03:00] spirit and it's helpful to see things that way. 'Cause then you start to notice 'em all over the place and you start to see that pull of the spirits, I don't know. It's kind of like the ancient people, how we sort of say, well, they were, unsophisticated people.

They believed that there was a god up there in the sun and they believe that there was a God in that tree and there's a God of the ocean. And I don't think they looked at it the literal way we look at it, through this material, a scientific lens of an actual being in the ocean.

But what they did recognize that things had spirits and called to you. Things, had spirits and could capture you. <Right.> And we ought to be more aware of that really. And we're not because we have this silly notion that the ancients well, they attributed gods to everything and there's a lightning bolt and there's a God getting mad and <Yeah.> You know? <Yeah.> And it's just, yeah. It's not a helpful way to see it. You're more susceptible than you realize to it. 

David: Yeah. That's a good way to actually frame it is you can define almost the spirit of something, is that which is calling you to pay attention to [00:04:00] it and what it's promising you, if you will pay attention to it.

And we say all this to say, look, there's nothing wrong with looking at your iPhone. Throw in your directions to where you're going and your iPhone's great, right? <Sure.> If I wanna check the baseball score, I pull up my iPhone. It's right there. So, that's not what we're talking about.

But it's these things that promise, Hey, if you pay more attention to me, this will be the payoff. And of course there's not a payoff. Right? <Right.> Social media, if you wanna measure how many friends and how popular you are, you know, yeah. You should spend more time on, on this platform. Yeah.

Play the game a little bit and play the game. Yeah. And, get the likes, and get the friend requests and all that. But you have to step back and really say, is this a silly bargain? You know, we talked about Jephthah in that last episode. Am I making a dumb bargain? <Right.> And I don't know, it actually has helped me, like I said a couple of times, to actually, to give it a body. And again, not in a spooky way, but to say what is calling to me right now that makes me want to just sit here and doom scroll or, you know, look at my podcast [00:05:00] downloads and measure my self worth on that, right? Or something like that. <Yeah.> Like what is calling to me.

And it's actually just helped me to say, I can see a nix there and I don't wanna deal with it right now, you know? 

JR: Right, right. No, it's more helpful to view it as a being because in a lot of ways it is. Since we don't see it that way, it's merely a phone, it's merely Google and who can, <Right.> Who can get by without directions from Google Maps, right? We wanna put this binary thing of it's either good or bad. And it's not that, it's, I guess a more modern, contemporary term would be balance. Have the right balance, put it in its place. You know, it's fine to obviously use your phone. It's all kinds of advantages of utilizing it. <Yeah.> But understand that there's, there's a bargain that's to be made and it's constantly calling you out to live a life of imbalance.

And that's the price you pay. 

David: And we can't, we shouldn't go too far down this rabbit hole 'cause we got another, we've got enough talk about today. But gosh, if you don't understand that there are algorithms behind these [00:06:00] things <Mm-hmm.> that are specifically trying to keep your attention.

And if you don't see that algorithm as in some way, a spirit, you know, with all the caveats, that's what Yep. But, look, that's what they're designed to do. They're designed to hold your attention and they're making a bargain. And I don't know, I just, it jumped out at me kind of after that episode that I need to pay attention.

More attention to this and maybe the ancient, maybe they're not as, you know, naive and gullible as we think they are. Of course, we've said that through this whole series. That's part of the point of this series. But. 

JR: No, the more we do this, the more I realize, no, they had it figured out. We're the ones that have leaned too far in one direction and we're completely blind to the spirits that we come in contact with every day.

The point about the algorithm and AI's only gonna make that worse. <Oh yeah.> Only, only gonna make that more effective, and when people worry about AI, it's not the whole Terminator Skynet coming online and building robots. I don't think people are talking about that.

But I do think I think that wise people are [00:07:00] looking at the algorithm saying, if a simple algorithm is gripping people like it's doing in TikTok and some of the social media, what is AI gonna do with this? You know, what's gonna happen when we inject the steroids into this thing?

And that's right. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, and it's something that's worth being at least concerned and aware about. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, anyway, that was just one of the ending conversations that we had of last episode after we hit stop, and so we thought, well, let's revisit this a little bit because it's worth revisiting and just putting out there and paying attention to Yeah, I guess.

JR: Yeah. okay. So today King Thrushbeard. You ready for this one? This is one that you told me about and it's like, dude, you gotta read this. This is great. And I read it and I was like, yeah, this is, this is good.

But it seems a little simple maybe. And the more we talked about it, it's deceptively simple. How about that? On the surface, it's kinda like the Red Riding hood that if you only look at it as, oh, this is about staying on the path and obeying [00:08:00] mom and dad, then you're gonna miss all the imagery and details behind it.

And this is one of those stories. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this one today. 

David: Yeah. And this is our last one too, so, yeah. Yeah. It's been, it's been a fun journey, but yeah, in some ways it's like, oh, we're done. I could just be a bummer doing these. But yes, this is one where the surface reading of it is very simple.

And even from some of the things that you and I have seen online, it's actually one that's misunderstood because when you Oh yeah. Again, when you see the pattern of what's happening and what it's actually trying to tell you, I don't know. Things just burst off the page to me. <Right.> And I thought, oh wow, there is so much here to unpack, But I think as you listen to this, you'll hear it for the first time, I think we told people like, go read this first. I think this is one you've gotta read two or three times before it starts to click in you. Because you do tend to get hung up on, well, this obvious what this is trying to say.

<Right.> But it's not that obvious, right? So. 

JR: Yeah, don't get suckered into the obvious [00:09:00] shallow end reading of this story. It's, very deep and there's a lot of things going on, and it's easy to get caught up. Like you said, I think people misunderstand it, but I also think the people that misunderstand it are taking such a simplistic reading of it.

Don't you think? I mean, there's so much there. And if you just. I don't know. I don't know how much I wanna talk about it before we read it here. Yeah, yeah. You know, you know what I mean? It's like, maybe we should have this conversation on the other side. And maybe this is where we'll start of what are the problems with the simple reading of a simple understanding of it.

David: Well, you know, so you run into the same issues with Bible stories sometimes. And look, I've been doing some study and I was doing some writing yesterday, and there's this one particular story that I revisited and all of a sudden everything just jumped off the page of me, right? <Oh, wow.> And because I was immersing myself in it. And, and so I think this is one of those where you have to almost misunderstand it before you can understand it. I don't know. Does that make sense? 

JR: No. Yeah, it does. It's, yes. It's almost better just to get lulled into the story, and it's kind of one of those things [00:10:00] where at the end of it, you're like, man, is it about this?

Surely it's not about this. I guess it kind of triggers something in your brain to dig a little bit deeper. It's a little bit different phenomenon than some of the previous stories where this really bizarre element of the story pops out. And you're like, where did that come from?

You know? Where does being turned into a tiger come from? Or where does the talking goat come from? And so it almost shocks you to look deeper. This is a little bit different in that it almost lulls you into a simple story. As far as I know, let me think about this.

Yeah, there's no, you know, there's no talking animals. I mean, all this could literally happen. There's none of this crazy imagery that is impossible. This is more like a parable.

It's not this crazy fairytale land that we're in. This is all could happen, I suppose, you know? And so it just lulls you into the story and then you kind of, deconstructed on the other end. So, yeah, this has that effect on me. 

David: One other thing I'll say, and then we'll jump in and let the listeners listen to it, but this is also one where I think [00:11:00] because it's just kind of a plain surface level story, you are kind of lulled into misunderstanding it.

But when I started making the links to certain patterns and symbols that we've also seen in other fairytales, that's where I started to say, okay, if it meant that in this fairytale over here, then it probably means the same thing here. And so once you start pulling on those threads, I think that's for me, when this started to make sense.

So it's kind of allowing other fairytales to interpret this in a way as well. Right? <Yeah.> But we'll unpack this on the other side. 

JR: I think there's an advantage of this being our last one of this series here, because if we had started with this, I feel like we would've been trying to explain it. And this happens in other fairy tales, things like that.

But it's, I think you're right. I think it's better that we're doing this last because it has kind of a simple surface yeah, let's just listen to it and pick this conversation up on the other side. 

David: Yeah. Okay. So here's King Thrushbeard. 

Narrator: A king had a daughter who was beautiful beyond all measure, [00:12:00] but so proud and haughty with all that. No suitor was good enough for her. She sent away one after the other and ridiculed them as well. Once the king made a great feast and invited thereto from far and near all the young men likely to marry.

They were all marshaled in a row according to their rank, and standing. First came the Kings, then the Grand Dukes, then the princes, then the Earls, the Barons, and the gentry. Then the king's daughter was led through the ranks, but to everyone, she had some objection to make. One was too fat. The wine cask, she said another was too tall, long and thin has little in.

Some objection to make. The third was too short. Short and thick is never quick. The fourth was too pale, as pale as dead. The fifth [00:13:00] too red, a fighting cock. The sixth was not straight enough. A green log dried behind the stove. So she had something to say against everyone, but she made herself, especially merry, over a good king who stood quite high up in the row and whose chin had grown a little crooked.

Well, she cried and laughed. He has a chin like a thrushes beak, and from that time he got the name of King Thrushbeard. The old king when he saw that his daughter did nothing but mock the people and despised all the suitors who were gathered there was very angry and swore that she should have for her husband, the very first beggar that came to his doors.

A few days afterwards, a fiddler came and sang beneath the windows trying to earn a small alms. When the king heard him, he said, let him up. So [00:14:00] the fiddler came in in his dirty ragged clothes and sang before the king and his daughter. And when he had ended, he asked for a trifling gift. The king said, your song has pleased me so well that I will give you my daughter there to wife.

The king's daughter shuttered. But the king said, I have taken an oath to give you to the very first beggar man, and I will keep it. All she could say was in vain. The priest was brought and she had to let herself be wedded to the fiddler on the spot. When that was done, the king said, now it is not proper for you, a beggar woman to stay any longer in my palace. You must go away with your husband.

The beggar man led her out by the hand, and she was obliged to walk away on foot with him. When they came to a large forest, she asked to whom does this beautiful forest belong? Well, it belongs to King [00:15:00] Thrushbeard. If you had married him, it would've been yours. Ah, unhappy girl that I am if I had, but taken King Thrushbeard.

Afterwards, they came to a meadow and she asked again, to whom does this beautiful Green Meadow belong? It belongs to King Thrushbeard. If you had taken him, it would have been yours. Ah, unhappy girl that I am if I had, but taken King Thrushbeard. Then they came to a large town and she asked again, to whom does this fine large town belong?

It belongs to King Thrushbeard. If you had taken him, it would've been yours. Ah, unhappy girl that I am if I had but taken King Thrushbeard. It does not please me, said the fiddler to hear you always wishing for another husband. Am I not good enough for [00:16:00] you? 

At last, They came to a very little hut and she said, oh goodness, what a small house. To whom does this miserable mean hovel belong? The Fiddler answered, That is my house and yours, where we shall live together. She had to stoop in order to go in at the low door. Where are the servants? Said the king's daughter. What servants answered the beggar Man, you must yourself do what you wish to have done.

Just make a fire at once and set on water to cook my supper. I'm quite tired. But the king's daughter knew nothing about lighting fires or cooking. When the beggar man had to lend a hand himself to get anything done fairly, he did. When they had finished their scanty meal, they went to bed , but he forced her to get up quite early in the morning in order to look after the house.

For a few days, they lived in this way as well as might be, and came to the end of all their provisions. [00:17:00] Then the man said, wife, we cannot go on any longer eating and drinking here and earning nothing. You weave baskets. He went out, cut some willows and brought them to the home. Then she began to weave, but the tough willows wounded her delicate hands.

I see that this will not do. Said the man, you had better spin. Perhaps you can do that better. She sat down and tried to spin, but the hard thread soon cut her soft fingers so that the blood ran down. See, said the man you are fit for no sort of work. I have made a bad bargain with you. Now I will try to make a business with pots and earthenware. You must sit in the marketplace and sell the wear. Alas, thought she, if any of the people from my father's kingdom come to the market and see me sitting there selling how they will mock me. But it was of no use. She had to yield unless she chose to die of hunger.[00:18:00]

For the first time she succeeded well, for the people we're glad to buy the woman's wares because she was good looking and they paid her what she asked. Many even gave her money and left the pots with her as well. So they lived on what she had earned as long as it lasted. Then the husband bought a lot of new crockery with this. She sat down at the corner of the marketplace and set it out round about her ready for sale.

 But suddenly there came a drunken hussar galloping along, and he rode right amongst the pot so that they were all broken into a thousand bits. She began to weep and did not know what to do for fear. Alas, what will happen to me, cried she, what will my husband say to this? She ran home and told him of the misfortune. Who would seat herself at the corner of the marketplace with crockery, said the man.

Leave off crying. I see very well that you cannot do any ordinary work. So I have [00:19:00] been to our King's Palace and have asked whether they cannot find a place for a kitchen maid, and they have promised me to take you. In that way, you will get your food for nothing. King's daughter was now a kitchen and had to be at the Cook's beck and call and do the dirtiest work.

Both her pockets, she fastened a little jar in which she took home her share of the leavings. And upon this they lived. It happened that the wedding of the king's eldest son was to be celebrated. So the poor woman went up and placed herself by the door of the hall to look on when all the candles were lit and people each more beautiful than the other entered.

All was full of pomp and splendor. She thought of her lot with a sad heart and cursed the pride and haughtiness, which had humbled her and brought her to so great poverty . The smell of the delicious dishes, which were being [00:20:00] taken in and out, reached her and now, and then the servants threw her a few morsels of them.

These, she put in her jars to take home. All at once, the king's son entered clothed in velvet and silk with gold chains about his neck, and when he saw the beautiful woman standing by the door, he seized her by the hand and would've danced with her. But she refused and shrank with fear for she saw that it was King Thrushbeard, her suitor whom she had driven away with scorn.

Her struggles were of no avail. He drew her into the hall, but the string by which her pockets were hung broke. The pots fell down, the soup ran out, and the scraps were scattered all about. And when the people saw it, there arose, general laughter and derision, and she was so ashamed that she would rather have been a thousand fathoms below the ground. She sprang to the door and would've run away. [00:21:00] But on the stairs, a man caught her and brought her back, and when she looked at him, it was King Thrushbeard again. He said to her kindly, do not be afraid. I and the fiddler who has been living with you in that wretched hovel are one. For love of you, I disguised myself so.

I also was the hussar who rode through your crockery. This was all done to humble your proud spirit and to punish you for insolence with which you mocked me. Then she wept bitterly and said, I have done great wrong, and I'm not worthy to be your wife. But he said, be comforted. The evil days are passed. Now, we will celebrate at our wedding. Then the maids and waiting came and put on her the most splendid clothing, and her father and his whole court came and wished her happiness in her marriage with King [00:22:00] Thrushbeard, and the joy now began in earnest. I wish you and I had been there too.

JR: Okay. There you go. So, like we said, this story is deceptively simple on the surface. But it's really dense with themes about pride, transformation, and you might say like kind of the painful but redemptive journey toward maturity, right? This episode's gonna be a fun ride because again, it's so easy to kind of get pulled into this, well, that was unfair. Like, he just tricked her the whole time. You know what I mean? Like,

Yeah. Yeah. 

What's the deal with destroying her pots? Like she was getting somewhere with that. We're gonna get into all that stuff. But maybe the place to start is at first, this can sound like a simple story of a mean girl who gets what she deserves, right? And <Right. Yeah.> when you look online, you were saying that you look on the story, you see a lot of criticism of this fairytale for being sexist. For being misogynistic. And while I can see where it could be seen that way, I think it's an oversimplified and shallow reading of the story.

So maybe the [00:23:00] first question for you is, how do you respond to the critics that sort of say, this is just a misogynistic narrative of a man putting a woman in her place? 

David: Yeah. And I even saw someone online basically say, maybe this is one of these fairytales that we should just drop. Right, right.

We should just kind of put it to walk away, put it over there in the corner. Just forget about this one. 'cause it just really doesn't play well anymore.

Doesn't age well. Yeah.

Yeah. it's one of those things where we've said before. If something doesn't make sense, you need to dig deeper.

And to me, I think a lot of the surface level criticism of, well, this just seems so misogynistic. Well, why did this story last for hundreds and hundreds of years? Why has it been passed down to us? Right? There has to be something deeper in there and so that's where you gotta do the work and start digging.

Like all fairytales, if you only see this surface story, and maybe that's because you know, there are no talking flounders in here, or there aren't any big bad wolves, right? Yeah. That we tend to take this whole thing too, literally [00:24:00] because value, if there were, yeah, maybe if there were, you know, talking flounders and golden apple trees and things like that, maybe it would allow you to say, okay, let's move past this kind of surface level understanding and really try and understand, but this one doesn't offer that to you. Which I think's, why it's misunderstood. Right?

But you still have to approach it the same way. You still have to go beyond this very simple story, you know, this bratty princess and this guy who kind of puts her in her place and say, what's the deeper thing this is trying to tell me? And yeah, so I, I think the easiest way is just to start walking through it, because once you start identifying what these different elements mean, then to me it's almost like the domino's fall. Like it all starts falling into place, right? And by the end of it, you go, okay, this is not about just a guy who's a jerk who's putting some bratty princess in her place. 

JR: Right? And

David: It's not about that at all.

JR: Yeah, once you understand it, the roles can be reversed and it still have the same impact that it has. You know, this could be a story about a bratty [00:25:00] prince and gets tricked by a peasant girl. Right? And it still has the same impact that it has, Okay. So let's just start with breaking it down and let's start off with, do you wanna start with characters? Do you wanna start with act one? 'cause again, this is one of those stories that kind of comes in three acts.

So where do you wanna start with this one? 

David: Yeah, so let's just start at the beginning, you know, act one. And the very first line said a king had a daughter who was beautiful beyond measure, but so proud and haughty that no suitor was good enough for her. So that kind of sets the whole stage of what's gonna happen? Yeah. so you have the familiar characters in a fairytale, right? You have a king. <Mm-hmm.> Who we've said before, he represents the way things are. So this is interesting to me, one of my notes, and I'll get your take, is, you know, it said he had a daughter who was beautiful beyond measure.

Now, we've talked in other fairytales that beauty actually is a reflection of inner beauty. Because not every princess is the most beautiful woman in the world, right? Not every prince is the most handsome prince in the world. But this [00:26:00] one actually goes out of its way to say she was very beautiful, but right, but so proud.

So it's almost telling you upfront, it's like, don't confuse her beauty for her character. Right? Which is what you would expect to see in a lot of fairytales. 

JR: Yeah. Beauty is a stand in for the ideal person. And this is clearly, you're right, right at the beginning, it's talking about this imbalance, that she seems intelligent. She's even witty with some of the jabs that she comes up with about the guys, right? Yeah. But it's clear that she's emotionally unbalanced, and the other thing is like her ridicule of the suitors. It isn't just snobbery, it isn't just that, oh, we got a little rich girl that thinks she's better than everybody else.

It's a refusal to connect. It's mockery, right? She mocks everyone. And even the ones who appear to be a worthy match. So at the beginning it's clearly painting a picture of somebody who's emotionally unbalanced, but she does have this beauty going for her.

And like it says beyond all measure. But again, it's not the [00:27:00] ideal inside type of beauty. It's this imbalanced, she's beautiful on the outside, but on the inside she's a bit of a snob and haughty and you know, everything that goes along with it.

David: Yeah. Yeah. So we kind of gotta unpack this first part and I think that's where things will start to make sense because again, there's the surface level reading. You go, okay, I get the picture. What's going on here? So one suitor after another was sent away by her, like you said, she makes fun of them.

And then once the king made a great feast and invites from far and near all the young men likely to marry. Now this is interesting because it says he arranged them according to their rank and standing right? <Yeah.> And first came the Kings and Grand Dukes. And then what you had mentioned is that she goes down this line and she basically not just rejects them, but she mocks them, right? She makes fun of them. And some of 'em are pretty funny. One was too fat. Yeah. And she says the wine cask, right. The wine. She names them the wine cask. Right? 

JR: Right, okay, [00:28:00] so she has her beauty and she has her status because she's obviously a princess, but she lacks humility.

So on the surface, she's emotionally immature. And I think the point is, is that she's incapable of love. She's not ready for love because love is a mutual acceptance of each other. And all that goes along with it. So I think this first section of her mocking everybody.

Okay. So I think she's kind of a mirror of modern people who have these impossibly high standards. But it's really kind of just a smoke screen to avoid real connections with other people. You know what I'm talking about? She's like the Jerry Seinfeld of, <Yeah.> of the fairytale world. These crazy high standards.

When really at behind it, you really see it's just kind of a screen to, I don't want to connect with people, and so it pushes people away. That's the vibe I get from this. 

David: Yeah, that's true. That's funny 'cause it occurred to me too, at one point, reading through this, that it is almost like the Jerry Seinfeld, because, you know, every episode Jerry was dating a different woman, and that became the whole gag.

Right. Okay, [00:29:00] what's this woman gonna do that's going to be the one little thing that picks at him and you know, then he just dumps her and can't do it anymore, right?

She has man hands. Yeah.

Yes. There's always something. And she, same thing like, Jerry Seinfeld kinda labeled everything, you know, the low talker, the

Whatever, the close talker, right? Yeah.

The close talker. Yeah. There was always a reason to reject someone. And you kind of get that same idea here. And the last guy she rejects, it says, this is important 'cause we're introduced to King Thrushbeard. She said, "whose chin had grown a little crooked."

Well, she cried and laughed. "He has a chin, like a thrushes beak." Right? And from that time on, he got the name of King Thrushbeard. So she kind of mocks this one guy and the name sticks. Right? So now, now he's known as King Thrushbeard. 'cause that's, 

JR: Yeah. Like all his buddies are calling him this. It's not that she's just taken a shot at him. She's humiliating him in a way that actually sticks with him. It carries out to the rest of his life. It's not just the interaction of them. And he [00:30:00] leaves and it's like, well, that didn't go well and so let's not tell anybody about this, right? It sticks with him and there's something to that. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. it almost comes to define him. He becomes known as King Thrushbeard from here on out, right? <Yeah.> So there's one thing that I wanna point out before we move on, because, you know, there's a couple paragraphs of how mocking she is, things like that.

But there's one thing I wanna point out, and it's this idea that says the king ordered them all, and you almost get, it says it actually, they stood in a row according to their rank. Right. And it goes down the, you know, Kings and Grand Dukes and princesses and Earls and Barons and the gentry. I'm not even sure what the Gentry is, but you know, Kings all the way down.

So there's a couple things that I wanna point out here. We've seen this before. I think it was the fisherman and his wife and I didn't make the connection at the time, right? But one of the things the wife does is she orders all the people in her kingdom from the tallest to the shortest, right? She does the same thing. She orders everyone according to their rank, [00:31:00] and they kind of, you get this picture of they're standing next to her throne, right?

Almost forming this big walkway. And it occurred to me that I, think, and I, I'll also say I'm fairly certain though, that when a fairytale is talking about this, it's talking about the hierarchy or the way things are ordered in that society. Right? So it's not just that he lined them up, right? It's not just that the Fisherman's wife said, I want all the tall guys up here and the short guys down there.

What that is actually doing is it, it's telling you that they are somehow ordering the hierarchy. Right? <Right.> They're saying this is the way things are. And that's important in this fairytale because, this is kind of the first time we're gonna go a little deeper here, is you can't see this as her just rejecting a bunch of guys.

She's actually rejecting the order of things in her culture that she lives in. <Right.> She's rejecting the way things are. Right? 

JR: Yeah. It, took a couple readings for that to sink in, but [00:32:00] you're exactly right on that because not just this fairytale, but other fairytales, it's in Proverbs, it's in the Divine Comedy.

What you see is that order matters. <Yes.> And when the king lines up the suitors from greatest to the least, he's invoking a kind of moral or vocational hierarchy. And, and this is not saying that these people are unequal in value, right? But in the past, social function and the responsibilities that came with it carried a moral weight.

That's why in the fairytales, the king is the embodiment of moral decision making. Of moral, I don't wanna say value because I don't wanna say that the king is more important than other people, but it carries a moral weight. And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to equivalate the height that on the surface you're like, yeah, okay, the tall guys in the middle and the short guys, were gonna taper down from that, right?

Yeah. What they're trying to do is attach a moral weight to everybody. The king's basically laying out a worldview in front of his [00:33:00] daughter, right? An ordered presentation of potential unions that reflect how society holds together. And her mocking reaction is essentially her rejecting the created order.

That's how this should be seen. 

David: Yes. Yeah. And look, it's easy to see this in today's world. 'cause you're not talking about just someone who says, oh, I don't want to get married. You're talking about someone who's rejecting and mocking the very institution of marriage.

Yes. Right. That's how you have to see this, what's going on. <Right.> And I, I think you're exactly right. Like the king is ordering things. He's laying out, this is how things are in our society. Right? Mm-hmm. And she's mocking it. She's like, I don't want to even participate in it. 

JR: You're right, it's deeper than just merely saying, dad, I don't wanna get married right now.

I'm not ready. Right. I'm having a good time with my friends. I wanna go to college first, you know, it's, that's not what's going on. It's such a clear presentation of she's rejecting the created order of things. CS Lewis talks about this in The Great [00:34:00] Divorce, and he says that people create a disconnect between themselves and the world. And that's the great divorce. That's where the title comes from. And what she's doing is she's placed herself above the very structure of reality. And obviously the result of this is that she ends up alone.

But The Great Divorce is so fantastic. It really does capture this idea of the person who rejects the order of things and says, I don't wanna be a part of any of it. And it also has, I don't know if if you picked up on this to go back to One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes, it pulls me back to the cynic, the, you know, the three eyes who just rejects everything.

<Yeah.> Who thinks that they see everything, the motives behind everything. And so they're cynical and they reject everything. And they end up just being a critic of everything. Well, this is exactly what she's doing. But you have to understand that what deeper, what she's doing is she's being critical of the culture. She's being critical of the created order. 

David: Yeah, that's right. And there's no indication too that anything is wrong in the kingdom. So when you see that [00:35:00] there's a king and he has a kingdom, there's nothing that says, he's a tyrant and this was an unjust place, right? So you have to kind of pull that into that as well to see what you were saying is she's rejecting the way things are in a kingdom that's actually functioning.

We don't have any reason to believe it's functioning, bad at all, right? <Mm-hmm.> He seems to be a just king. He's trying to marry his daughter off. And the other thing I would say is I think sometimes we, it's another reason why we misunderstand this, because you know, there's a modern trope that we project back into medieval Europe, maybe, which is this idea that well, she wants to marry for love, right? Her dad's trying to arrange a marriage and she wants to marry for love. Right?

My wife and I just finished watching, I think it's called The Empress. It was actually pretty interesting. It's a kind of a true story as far as I can tell of man, I'm gonna forget his name. His name was, I can't remember. Here, let me google this so I get it right. Okay. Yeah. So The Empress, it has to do with the Austrian Empire and [00:36:00] the Emperor Franz, right? It's the Emperor Franz and the Empress Elizabeth. Okay. So the story is about how they come together and how they actually rule the Austrian empire, I think in the 1800s.

But it's interesting because the story started out in very much what I just said, which is that he was actually pledged to be married. His mother arranged this marriage to this, aristocratic family. I think it's actually somehow their related, but the older sister, right? So when the family goes to meet the Emperor, Franz and the queen mother, that he actually falls in love with the younger sister. So it makes for this awkward weekend, right?

Because at the end of the weekend he says, I've made a decision I'm going to marry. And everyone gets excited and then he says, I'm going to marry Elizabeth. And of course, the older sister's devastated. The mother is irate, but it's this whole, it's, the feel good story, right? Well, they married for love and the story, the show is very much about that, is I think in real life they very much, at least presented [00:37:00] themselves as being in love and devoted to each other. And this was not just another political marriage. Right? <Yeah.> So I say all that to say, the point is that we love stories like that, right? <Right.> But this is not one of those stories. This is not a romcom daughter, right? This is not a romcom where she's like, you know, I just, I wanna marry for love and you're forcing these guys on me.

Because the other thing you need to see is that when he puts every eligible bachelor in front of her, he's not saying, you have to marry this guy. He's actually saying, look around the entire kingdom. Just pick one. Right? <Yeah.> And it's this idea of participate in the society. <Yeah.> That's very much what this idea. And her response of mocking it is, you know, just like we've been saying, she's mocking the order of things in that society. And she's basically saying, no, I refuse to participate. Not in a romcom kind of way of a rebellious, you know, I see myself as better than all this. 

JR: Right, yeah. She sees herself as above it. The lineup of suitors [00:38:00] is more than just a wedding procession. It's some sort, it's like a cosmic courtroom, right? And the princess is being asked to enter into what the moral order of love, of vocation, of ultimately humility, responsibility, right? <Yeah.> And when she refuses to do that, that's when the story kind of shifts to this parable mode. And her pride has to be broken so she can see the value in what she once rejected.

That's the best framework to understand this story and it all starts with that lineup of the suitors from tallest <That's right.> to shortest. And so when you understand that, now you can kind of jump in the story and say, okay, now we're gonna see that the rest of the story is sort of how her pride is broken so she can rejoin proper society.

David: Yeah, that's right. It's simply a call to participate in life. Right, right. Life. Hey, hey, participate, go out there and participate. You know, you could say the same thing about the guy who's 30 years old and plays video games in his parents' basement. It's like, Hey, get out [00:39:00] there and participate in life.

Yeah, yeah. Go on a date, get a job. It's kind of that same idea. And if you miss that upfront, I guess, then that's what leads you to misunderstand the rest of this fairytale. 

JR: Right. I agree. And to go back to The Great Divorce, 'cause it, this is exactly what they're, he's talking about is we position ourselves above all of that. It's sort of to go back to the Jerry Seinfeld thing, we pick, you know, we're gonna pick out all these little silly things about somebody so that we don't have to make a commitment, right? And that's sort of a joke in a comedy show. But in The Great Divorce, he says, we do this in our own minds and we put ourselves above the ordered society and reject it, as a way of not having to take any type of responsibility.

Again, it's easy to look at it. It's like, well, maybe she, you know, wanted to fall in love. Maybe she wanted to do it a different way. This is about somebody who doesn't want to engage in the cosmic order that says, I'm better than that. And, all her [00:40:00] mockery clearly shows that. 

David: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Okay. So we've established now that this is a picture of her rejecting, basically participating in life in the kingdom. She just rejects it all. <Mm-hmm.>

So to move the story along, then it says, "But the old king, when he saw that his daughter did nothing but mock the people and despised all the suitors who were gathered together. He was very angry and swore that she should have for her husband, the very first beggar that came to his doors." It should tell you where this is all headed, right? <Right. Yeah.> So the king basically says, look, the next beggar that comes to my door, I'm marrying you off. You've rejected everything I put in front of you. This is how that's gonna go down. Right? 

JR: Okay. So yes. Do you think there's something significant to the beggar considering everything we just said? She's rejected the normal order of things. So why does her father, because I don't wanna overlook this, why do you think her father agrees to give her away to the first beggar and is there a significant to the fact that it's a beggar? 

David: I think what it is trying to convey is it's this idea [00:41:00] of the highest and the lowest. And we, again, this is another pattern we've seen, like, last week, the nix of the mill pond, right? The husband gets pulled down to the lowest, right?

And so what does the wife do? She has to ascend the mountain, so she has to reach for the highest, right? When things take a different turn, people tend to go in the opposite directions. And so there's this contrast between the highest and the lowest.

So what I think this is saying is, I've put all the highest in the land in front of you, and you've rejected it. Right? So he's not gonna play this game anymore, of, now here's the common folks, here's the cobblers. He's just going to almost banish her to the lowest, right? I think that's what it's trying to say.

JR: Yes. Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Because remember, that her father isn't just a dad, he's king, right? He represents the moral order of the kingdom. So it's important to see his pronouncement not just as like this cruel joke, but as, I guess like a descent into exile.

An intentional structured descent into exile, right into poverty, into this [00:42:00] wilderness where this is where the transformation is gonna begin. So her father, the king, again, it's not just the fact that she's his dad, it's the fact that he represents the moral order. So the moral order, if it's rejected, is going to put you into the wilderness.

And so that's exactly what happened. So that's what I think the significance of the beggar is. 'cause it does seem like he doesn't just simply say, well, the next guy who knocks on my gate, I'm gonna give her to him, but he specifically says the next beggar, it's like people are gonna come and go.

That guy doesn't count. I want the beggar, I want the guy who's completely outside of the structure of normal society. Somebody that represents exile, you know? And I think that's what the significance of the beggar. 

David: Yeah. And if you play that out even more so, she's rejected kind of normal society.

The other thing I'll point out real quick is it says he's the old king. So there is maybe a sense, and we don't have a sense that there's a queen, so there's almost a urgency in the kingdom is about to be handed over to her. <Yeah.> So that's, maybe a [00:43:00] backdrop too. So there is an urgency to this. And you know how concerning would it be as a parent to say, Hey, I built this successful business, I'm gonna hand it over to you. And the kid just makes fun of it all. <Yeah.> It's like, well, I'm about to lose everything if this kid doesn't straighten up. So I do think the beggar, it's the edge of society, right? So you've rejected society as a whole.

So I'm just gonna give you over to the edge of society. 

JR: Yeah. I think 

David: I'm gonna give you over to the lowest, right? 

JR: Yeah. I think that's what it is. I'm glad you said that about she was in line to be queen probably. 'cause I didn't really pick up on that or I didn't, think about that. So in, sort of the mythic terms, in the fairytale terms, this is a symbolic death. She loses her name, she loses her title, she loses her comforts, and she even loses like her basic needs. Right? And so, listen, this, the king giving her to a beggar is the God move in this story. Right? This is the pivot point.

And it's important that he's not just punishing her, for a little bit of a spoiler alert, he's not just punishing her, he's staging her [00:44:00] salvation. That's what he's preparing her for.

And so that, that's, 

David: Yeah, that's a great way to put that. Yeah. 

JR: Yeah. He's essentially saying that you mocked the man that you needed the most, and so you have to be given over to the least before you understand, before you can what, before you can rise again and come back into the order of things.

Right? So she gave up everything, but yeah, he's staging her salvation. That's the big move that's going on with the king. 

David: Yeah, that's a great way to put that because if you see the backdrop as this is an old king who the kingdom's gonna be handed over to his daughter and whoever she marries, and she's rejected every part of the society that the king has actually helped establish, then it's almost like a last ditch effort to say, then I'm gonna cast you out to the wilderness and hope that you see the light and hope that you return transformed.

<Yeah.> Because at this point, I don't know what else to do, right?

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that actually makes a lot of sense. I think that's right. 

JR: Yeah, and of course the beggar is not a beggar, it's [00:45:00] King Thrushbeard in disguise, right? And of course, that obviously plays out. 

David: Yeah. So it says a fiddler came, and that's the beggar and we've already heard the story, so we know that it's actually King Thrushbeard. But I was gonna ask you what do you think? Because I'm like, well, a fiddler, that's kind of mean, you know, like, what do you think of the Fiddler?

It's not just a beggar, it's a fiddler who comes and he's like playing a tune. He's obviously looking for a handout. And the king goes, that's the guy right there. There's your husband. You know, the fiddler. I don't know. Did you think anything significant about him being a fiddler? 

JR: I didn't, but since you're putting me on the spot, what I'm thinking of is that whole, yeah, you know, we talked about this in fairytales. A song isn't just a song. It's capturing the rhythm of life. It's capturing the rhythm of reality or something. Yeah. So maybe the fiddler is sort of like a wink at this isn't just a mere beggar. This is somebody who actually understands the rhythm of reality in the fact that he plays a fiddle. Is there something to that you think? 

David: Oh, yeah, [00:46:00] yeah. I think you're onto something because you're right, music and song in fairytales usually represents actually almost a higher level of knowledge, right? Yes. And so I do think there's something to this idea that he's a fiddler.

The king even says, your song has pleased me. So it almost, I like the way you said it. It almost is kind of a wink to the idea of there's more to this guy than you realize. He looks like a beggar. You know, he wants a handout. He's in dirty clothes. But this fact that he is able to play some kind of music that pleases the king, shows that he actually understands the way the world operates, maybe at a higher level here. 

JR: Yeah. Aligns with the rhythms of the kingdom. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he, knows the melody of the existing system and that's why it pleases the king. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of unclear whether the king was in on it or whether he just kind of got this sense of, Hey, this is a guy that there's more than meets the eye, right? I said I was gonna give her a way to a beggar, but. 

JR: Yeah, I never thought about that. I, do you think the king's in on it? I really never even [00:47:00]thought that. I mean, I just let the story take me where it goes, but I didn't think about the king being in on it. 

David: I have to, I'd have to read it like for the eighth time, but I don't think the story, I think it maybe leaves that unanswered, you know? I think it's one of those things where it's like, huh, well maybe they had a deal behind the scenes, you know? 

JR: Well, you know, look, I don't think I'm giving anything away to say that we're getting into a biblical pattern or that's what we're implying here, and we'll flesh this out more as we go on.

But if, we're seeing this as a biblical pattern, and we're seeing, let's just say the beggar in disguise and you realize that we're kind of taking this possible gospel angle to this story, then you can start to say, well, okay, the king would be in on it. The king is actually the one who sent the beggar perhaps. <Right.>

To give more away. <Yeah.> I'm trying not to just come out and say it, but it's like, well, let's hold off and, you know. 

David: Yeah. We'll unpack that. But yes, if you see the king as kind of basically the deity of this kingdom, then the king is probably aware that this fiddler is more [00:48:00] than meets the eye, and maybe it's all prearranged anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Alright.

But it doesn't explicitly say any of that. We will leave it at that, I guess.

Right. Okay.

Well, okay. So to finish what we call act one, it is funny 'cause they all fit neatly into three acts. The king marries her off and then says, "it's not proper for you, a beggar woman." Now it's interesting 'cause he now addresses his daughter who's still the princess.

<Yeah.> He addresses her now as a beggar woman and he says, "it's not proper for you any longer to stay in my palace. You may just go away with your husband." So that's the casting. I mean, that's harsh, right? That's brutal. 

JR: Yeah, sure. 

David: It's like you're no longer my daughter. You are a beggar woman and a beggar woman has no place in my palace.

So again, it's that almost intentional, if you reject the highest, I am going to just serve the lowest to you on a silver platter, and you're gonna have to embrace it. Right. 

JR: Yeah, best of luck with that. 

David: Welcome to the real world, right? 

JR: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I kinda see it that way. This is a little bit harsher than that. But yeah, sort of the, Hey man, if you can't [00:49:00] pay your rent, you know you're gonna have to get a second job. That's the real world son. 

David: Yeah. And you know, we can think of examples where, you have a trust fund kid who's not doing anything with their life and the parent finally says, look, I closed your bank account and I've cut off your credit card. And so good luck with that, you know? 

JR: Right, right. 

David: And the kid's like, well, where am I gonna sleep tonight? And the parents, I don't know, figure it out.

JR: That's a, yeah, that's a you problem. Sure.

David: Yeah, yeah, that's right. But you know, there's an attempt behind the storyline like that, you know, there's attempt to say, I've gotta do something to make this kid wake up to reality.

Right? <Yeah. Yeah.> And, and so I think you have to give the king the same benefit of the doubt here. 

JR: Yeah. And I think you said a few episodes ago, what is it? Look for the wilderness? You said something about when you read a fairytale, pay attention to mythic creatures you know, fantastic. 

Yeah. Where's the wilderness? 

David: Yeah. 

JR: Where's the wilderness? Yeah. You said a few episodes ago, where's the wilderness? Well, here's the wilderness right here. And so if you're looking for that pattern that we see in other fairytales, this is where the [00:50:00] wilderness clearly starts.

And you know, what you were saying is interesting that recognize that the king is instrumental in sending her out to the wilderness. And again, it sounds harsh, like golly, you know, I mean, just making her marry the beggar will turn her around, will wake her up to some degree. But it's like, no, she rejected the order of things and so therefore she can no longer be a part of the existing order.

So yeah, off to the wilderness she goes. And again, this is symbolic of something. And so, yeah. So yeah. So she gets out. Yeah, she gets sent out of the kingdom. And yeah. If you understand the symbolism of it, you realize she has to get sent outta the kingdom. 

David: Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.

Because the pattern is so clear in this one because it says, he let her by the hand out and they walked on foot. It said they then came to a large forest. Okay, so there's the wilderness, right? <Okay. Yeah.> And then afterwards they came to a meadow. Okay? So that's the transition between the wilderness and the next kingdom. And then it says they came to a large town.

So the pattern here is [00:51:00] very clear. It's like she has been cast out of her father's kingdom. She has to travel through the wilderness and then slowly enters into another kingdom, right? <Mm-hmm.> She goes to a large meadow. That's what, it's exactly what this is talking about.

And then it comes to another town. So she's in another kingdom now, right? <Yeah.> And that's what these transitions are meant to convey to you. And yeah, I think the reason the father sent her away is it's like, look, you've rejected everything in this kingdom. Try your luck in another kingdom.

Well, you've gotta traverse the wilderness. 

JR: Right. And kingdoms represent the traditional way of thinking. You know, we said this in several episodes, that the kingdom is the existing way of thinking. And if you're gonna reject that, well go find another kingdom. That's the only way it works.

And so, yeah. yeah, this is a clear transition. And the fact that she shows up at a large town is symbolic of her entering into a new way of thinking. 

David: And it should tell you that there is now another king in charge of this kingdom, right? <Yeah.> The large town is now she's in another [00:52:00] kingdom and there is another king in charge now.

<Right.> And so there's going to be a bit of a different reality than the way things were. Yeah. 

JR: Right. Well, it's also worth mentioning that as they go into the woods, she asks the question, "These are beautiful woods. Who owns this?" "Oh, King Thrushbeard." "This is a beautiful meadow that we're going in. You know who owns this?" "Oh, King Thrushbeard," right? <Yeah, yeah.> It's this repetition of, man, if I had only accepted King Thrushbeard, isn't he the one with the crooked nose? Isn't he the one with the beak? You know, like well, it's also funny that I didn't even think about this until right now, is that his response is King Thrushbeard, not his proper kingly name. 

David: Right? 

That's right. Which is more of this idea of, so she mocks this guy and gives him the name King Thrushbeard, and that's the identity that sticks with him now. Yeah, so act two is kind of going through the forest, the meadow, the large town, and everywhere they go she says, who does this belong to?

And he says, King Thrushbeard. It's almost, what's a good way to say? It's almost like you know. Yeah. That guy that [00:53:00] you mocked, right? This is all his. 

JR: Yeah. It's like, we're gonna make fun of Ugly Joe and then time after time, who owns this castle? Oh, Ugly Joe. Who owns this? The, all these cars. His 

David: Ferraris. 

Yeah. Who's Ferrari is that? Well, that's Ugly Joe's, you know? <Ugly Joe.> He wasn't good enough for you. 

JR: Yeah. And so at the end of this building, that's Ugly Joe. Yeah. Yeah. You have this light bulb moment where she's thinking, man, I wish I was with Ugly Joe. You know? And that's, I think that's the way you're supposed to see this. You're right. I never even put that together. That's great. 

David: But it also, in talking about it like we just did with, you know, Ugly Joe, it also almost shows the shallowness of her. <Yeah.> I made fun of this guy. You know, like to run with the example, we were kind of saying, whose Ferrari is this, you know? Well, it's Ugly Joe. Well maybe Joe's not so ugly anymore. Right? That's kind of a shallow way to view the world, right? 

Yeah. 

JR: So it's kind of an image that she is adjusting her way of thinking, but it's certainly not deep by any stretch. You know what I'm saying? She's still kind of shallow, but she is starting to turn around and probably regret, Golly. Well if [00:54:00] Thrushbeard owns all this stuff, I probably should have married Thrushbeard, right? So it indicates the turn, but we're certainly not there yet. 

David: Right, yeah. So then after the large town. You know, she's like, wow, who does this whole town belong to? Well, King Thrushbeard. And after Every one, he said, "if you had taken him, it would've been yours."

Unhappy girl that I am, if I had taken King Thrushbeard, which is funny. And then he finally says, "It does not please me to hear you always wishing for another husband. Am I not good enough for you?" So he's kind of playing the part, like he's starting to get irritated now. It's like, right, well look, you rejected him. All this would've been yours, but you're with me now.

So they come to a small house and her response is funny. She goes, "Oh goodness, what a small house. To whom does this miserable hovel belong to?" <Right.> the fishermen and his wife, right?

Yeah, that's right.

The stinking hovel. The stinking the visual answers.

We go, yeah, of course. It says, you know, that's my house. And he says, and yours, where we'll live together. 

JR: Yeah. Happily ever after. [00:55:00] Here we go. 

David: Who's stinking hovel is this? Yep. And he's like, it's all yours baby. 

JR: That's right. There's your room back there. You might as well unpack your things there. There you go.

David: Start living the dream.

JR: That's right. Oh, alright. So it is funny. Well, okay. So as we're talking about this, well there's no way around it. It's like I wanna talk about this story, every detail about how it applies to the end, you know, the big reveal at the end that this is all a gospel story.

That this is all a image of being reconciled to God through Jesus, those types of things. So I'm wanting to comment on all these things, because all this stuff has more meaning when you see it through that lens. I think, maybe it's just the type thing that where we encourage people to go back and read it through that lens and to see, well, if they pick up on the fact that. 

David: Yeah, yeah, that's true. But I think that's how we kind of end this is really tying the gospel. 

JR: Yeah. I mean, just the fact that we're chasing after. First, we think we're above the natural order of things that somehow we are the enlightened person that all that stuff is beneath us, right?

And so [00:56:00] we reject it and then you start to turn around, it's like, well, maybe I don't wanna reject it completely because I really like this land and I like this forest and I like this town and I like the Ferraris and I like, you know what I mean? And so we kind of engage in it. I don't know, there's just a lot of angles to this when you read it through the end.

But like I said, other than being a four hour podcast, we'll just have to wrap up with that. 

David: Should we move on to the house? 'cause he gives, this is interesting too 'cause he gives her three tasks where, you know, that's the three thing again, right? The pattern three. Yeah.

JR: That's good. 

David: Okay, so they go into the miserable, mean hovel, that's all hers now. <Yeah.> And it's funny 'cause her first response is, you know, where are the servants? What servants, of course, and then I love this "You yourself must do what you wish to have done."

Yeah. Hey Princess, there are no servants here. Right? If you want dinner, you've gotta make dinner, right? <Yeah.> So it starts this next pattern of them at the house together. And there's a pattern of three that plays out here that's very easy to, he gives her basically three tasks to do.

And again, [00:57:00] spoiler alert, she can't do any of them. She's basically, basically, 

JR: Well, lemme say, lemme say this real quick because this popped in my head when you said that, where are the servants? And he says, well, you have to do it. And this is another thing you can just gloss over and think, ha ha, this spoiled rich girl thought that there would be servants in this hut.

But again, to go back and say, if you reject the order of things. We think we're above these things and we think, oh, I'm not gonna fall prey to the whims of society, and I'm not gonna adjust myself the way society expects me to run. Well, that's fine, but just understand, you have to rebuild society.

You have to rebuild that order in your yourself. Does that make sense? So, I see this section where he, where she sort of naively says, wait, where are the servants in this tiny hut? Right? Which is absurd. And he says, no, you have to, if you want it, you have to build it.

Which is a way of saying, when you reject the order of things, don't think that you're just merely rejecting it and walking away and saying, no, I don't wanna be a part of that. You have to build something [00:58:00] yourself. You gotta start from scratch, and you have no idea how fundamental the things that you have to start building are when you reject the world the way it is.

David: Yeah, that's actually a good way to put this. It, she has to start over and anything she wants, she has to do herself. For some reason why you were talking, the image I had is the college kid know it all who's denouncing all the evils of capitalism while they're, have their venti Starbucks and their iPhone.

Right, right, right. And it's like, no, no, no, no. If we're gonna play this out, you might as well hand those over to me. <Yeah.> And yeah, gimme the keys to your Tesla also. Yeah. It's like, or or you're gonna have to, 

JR: Yeah. The idealistic person that says make love not war. You know, we shouldn't be in war and we're killing babies.

Why are we doing this? It's like, okay, I understand that. Let's start from the very beginning. How do you untangle the mess between Russia and Ukraine or Israel and Gaza, right? You tell me, O wise one, where do we start? <Yeah, that's right.> You know what I mean? And it's like you, yeah.

You can say these things in an idealistic [00:59:00] way without realizing that you're undoing everything and you have to start from the very foundation of something and rebuild it. And I think that's kind of what that line Yeah. That's less, at least what that line tells me, right? 

David: No, that's good. And it actually plays into, I think the tasks that he gives her.

Right, because <Yeah.> Right? 'Cause the first thing he does, like the next day is he went out and cut some willows and he brought them home. And then he says, you're gonna have to earn your keep around here. So here's some willows. I need you to weave baskets. Right? She begins to weave. But the tough willows wounded her delicate hands, right?

Now, it's funny because, he says, look, you can at least make baskets, right? And I think we kind of joke that sometimes in college, you know, what's the football player major in? And we say, well, basket weaving. I don't know. We used to say that. It's kind of a ways like what's the easiest major for the dumbest guy on the team to be able to pass.

And you know, it's basket weaving, right? Weaving right. This is the simplest of tasks. Right? 

JR: Right. No, that's great.

David: And it says the willows wounded [01:00:00] her delicate hands so she can't weave baskets. <Yeah.> And then it says he gives her thread. And then the same thing, the thread cut her soft fingers so that blood ran down.

<Mm-hmm.> So I wanna point out here that like this idea of, weaving and sewing, you tie this back to some of the other images that we've looked at in fairytales. It's much more than just a menial task. It's actually sowing is a way, I think we talked about this last episode. <Yeah.> That, so, yeah. With the spinning wheel, sowing is a way to say that she understands her proper role as a, what did we say?

As a defender of the household and a provider for the children. Right, right. Yeah. Because we referenced the idea of Penelope in the Odyssey weaving her tapestry. <Right.> So that imagery is attached to this. So he's not just giving her menial task, like in the story, that's what he's doing, but he's also basically saying, can you, at least at the most basic level function as a provider in this house, a [01:01:00] protector of future children.

And she can't do it, right? 

JR: Right. Yeah. She's completely unequipped for reality.

David: That's right. Yeah.

JR: Yeah, and to your point about the spinning, it's spinning is a way to view that is not just simply, well, that's a woman's job, so get in there and do it, right? What it is, is taking chaotic, disconnected fibers and weaving them into a useful thread that can weave and make something, right? And so again, it's going down to the foundation of something. If you're gonna reject the current order, well you've gotta go back down to the foundation. You better learn how to weave.

You better learn how to take these disperse fibers and make something functional out of them. Or else all you're doing is just naively rejecting something. If you can't start and build something new and explain how we're gonna start from the beginning, how we're gonna tear this down to the foundation and rebuild.

Well that's what the spinning represents, and it obviously on the surface level, again, her fragile hands, her delicate fingers are ill-equipped, which is again, another great image of somebody [01:02:00] who foolishly rejects the created order, not realizing that you're completely unequipped to rebuild from scratch.

David: Yeah, that's right.

JR: You're completely lost without the order. And so I like your idea about the college student sitting there with his vente macchiato. You know, you have no idea how unequipped you are to actually set order to things and how difficult it is. So you just sit back and mock the existing system.

David: Yeah, yeah, that's right. If you want your coffee tomorrow and you're gonna reject the whole order you know, here's a coffee plant. <Yeah.> How in the world do you make coffee out of this thing, out of the beans and the berries on there and all that? It's like, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Giving them all the raw material and say, well, here you go. Start rebuilding your perfect society then, right?

Have at it.

Build your utopia.

In four years. Yeah. 

JR: Yeah. Four years. Prove me wrong that you got some little drip coffee thing going, right? 

David: All right. So, she can't do the willows, she can't do the thread.

So he finally says, "Now I will try to make a business with pots and earthenware. You must sit in the market and sell [01:03:00] the wear." Now I think there's something interesting here too, because he specifically points out earthenware, which is like I mean, that's again, that's the lowest, right. Right. He's not saying make gold jewelry.

He's basically saying, look, you can't screw up dirt. Right. When you were a kid. Right. When you were a kid and went to summer camp, I mean, you plop a lump of clay in front of a kid and you make your dad an ashtray even though he doesn't smoke, right? But that's what you do because any kid can make that, right? Right.

Anybody, to me, that's what anybody can take mud and surely make a bowl. Right.

Yeah. That's right. So to me, this is what it's like, okay, you can't screw this up, right? Here's some earthenware. <Yeah.> Try not to mess this up. That it's, so to me it's another funny image. 

JR: Yeah. But the thing not to miss is that she didn't make it. It's somebody else's making this simple pot.

Oh, that's true. Yeah.

You know, and so it's important to realize she fails at making or creating anything, you know? Which is interesting because it implies that she doesn't really have any functional talents, right? She doesn't offer anyone, any value.

You know, give me something, something that you [01:04:00] can do, you know? And, we're saying this obviously in a cynical way. But we talked about this when we talked about fruits of the Spirit. I forget the episode, but it's several episodes back. And one thing I'd said that I mentioned is that what value is fruit to a tree? Like what value is a lemon to the lemon tree? And the answer to that is nothing. You can have a healthy fruit tree that doesn't bear any fruit. Like it can be biologically healthy, is what I mean. It's not functionally healthy. So in a biological way, yeah. Yes. A tree can be completely healthy but not bear any fruit or, give you sour fruit or inedible fruit.

It doesn't care, right? The tree doesn't care. The point of fruit in the Bible is that it's meant to communicate value to others, right? Value to the community, value to people around you, not necessarily to yourself, right? So I mean, this idea that she's unequipped for anything, she doesn't offer any one value, but the one thing she put value in was her status, her title, her good looks, right?

And she never thought to think, I mean, again, you're gonna be queen, right? You're gonna be [01:05:00] ruling over a nation and your decisions are gonna affect other people, but yet she had nothing to offer other people. And that's what I think it's trying to say with the fact that she couldn't spin, she couldn't weave baskets, and so she has to take other people's creations and go out and sell that, right? That's kind of where I see this. 

David: No, yeah. That's good. And again, it's just that picture of the three eyes, right? It's three eyes again, right? It's the person who sits on top of the world, criticizes everything going on in the world, and yet has nothing constructive to offer society.

Right, right. That's, yeah, that's the picture. <Yeah.> That's being painted here. <Yeah.> So, yeah. So it's important to see that. 'cause again, we can fall back into the like, man, this guy is just being mean to her. It's like, no, he's doing whatever it takes to pull anything of value out of this princess who, at least the potential lies there for her to be ruling the next kingdom now.

'cause she's in another kingdom, right? Yeah. Yeah. Pull anything of value out of her and, [01:06:00]and he she just can't do it. 

JR: Yeah. And he's setting up the scenario for her to see that she has nothing to offer. And that's another important, well it's just an important thing to note, when we get to the end and tie all this together.

<Yeah.> That, yeah. He's pointing out and giving her the opportunity to say, what do you have to offer me? What do you have to offer society? What do you have to offer the world? Yeah. And her answer is basically nothing. And so she has to go in and sell somebody else's pots, right?

Okay. So this is, this is an interesting section because this is where I kind of had a problem with it. Remember the surface reading? I'm thinking, okay, she goes out and she sells pots and she's actually, for the first time, she's kind of successful doing something, right? She's selling these pots, right? And then of course, a horseman who turns out to be Thrushbeard, goes barreling through and destroys all the pots.

And I remember that bothering me thinking, well, come on, man. She's actually being helpful. She's finally bringing in some money. Right? But then he destroys that. So, yeah. What's your deeper take of that? 

David: Yeah. Okay. So I read this [01:07:00] section a couple of times and I'm gonna offer a little bit of a spicy take. Okay? <Okay.> Because again, it bothered me the first time too. I'm like, well, she was finally succeeding and then he just, you know, destroys all the pots. It's like the cuts all malicious. 

JR: Yeah. Right? Yes, yes. 

David: Right. Okay. So I had this idea, I had this picture. And we'll keep this PG 13, but there's this idea of selling your wares in the marketplace that could be taken as, basically she has began selling herself, right?

<Yeah.> Now we have to unpack this, and I have to make the caveat that I'm not saying that's what she was doing in this story. What I'm saying is the way the story is written, I believe that that's what it might be alluding to. Well, yes. I don't know. Does that make sense?

It's like, on the surface, it's like, no, you're not supposed to see that she's prostituting herself. <Right.> But the deeper level is definitely, I think, insinuating that what, that imagery, that theme is what's behind [01:08:00] all this, right? 

JR: Well, it says in the story, it says, for the first time she succeeded well. For the people were glad to buy the woman's wares because she was good looking and they paid her what she asked. Many even gave her money and left the pots with her as well, right? <Yeah.> So it, it is kind of this, sort of implication that at the very least, she may not be literally prostituting herself as far as the story goes, but at the very least what she's doing is she's going back to her, what, she's going, she's still not offering anybody any value, except to look at her. Come take a look at me. Come talk. You know, you know what I'm saying? Right? 

So it is, I mean, 

David: yeah, no, exactly. So it starts out by saying that she was what did it say? She was one of the most beautiful, she was beautiful beyond measure, right? <Right.> But there's nothing of value within her.

So it is interesting that the first time she starts succeeding, it says, like, you just read, people were glad to buy the woman's wares because she was good looking. <Right.> And it's like, it's almost like there she's falling [01:09:00] back again on that very shallow level. It's, yep. Gosh. I mean, you know, it's like she started an OnlyFans account and go, Hey, I'm starting to make some money here.

And it's like, no, that's not what you offer the world, right? 

JR: Yes. That's brilliant. I love that. Yes, she's using, and so there's good looks once again, leveraging her good looks, leveraging the shallow end into the pool once again. Yeah. <Yeah.> That's exactly what she's doing.

David: Yeah, exactly. And then the next line that you just read, "Many even gave her money and left the pots with her." So it's like, gosh. I mean, once you see, to me, once I saw the allusion here, it's like I can't unsee it now, right? Right, right. It's like, so now people are paying her and they're not even taking pots.

Well, it's kind of like, well, what are they paying her for then? <Right. Yeah.> And again, you know, she's got a little OnlyFans of account behind the scenes here, and she's like, Hey, it's starting to work. I'm making some money. Yeah. And it's like, no, no, no. That's not what you offer society. 

Right. I'm not doing anything wrong. <back on the same thing.> 

JR: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely those implications. Again, I think [01:10:00] you're dead on with that. You're right. It may not be a literal, that's what she's doing. I think you're saying that it's not necessarily a euphemism that selling her pots is a euphemism for prostituting herself, but it's definitely pulling on that thread of saying, look, she's still not offering anybody anything.

All she's doing is setting there and being good looking and thinking, I can leverage this and look, I even have the pots left over. We can still sell the pots and I still have money, right? And it's just such a, I don't know, it's just such a kind of gross on both ends. The men that are coming to give her money just to look at her and not buy her pots.

Wow. And on her end too, the whole thing's gross. You're right.

David: Well, yeah, not to go down this road too much, but imagine this wife coming home and it's like, Hey, I made a hundred bucks today. You know? Oh, did you sell pots? No, they didn't even want pots. And you'd be like, wait a minute. What's going on in the marketplace? <Right.> I think I wanna accompany you tomorrow and see what's happening. 

JR: Yes. Yeah. Some of the men just rubbed my shoulders and left. And you're like, okay, I don't like this at all. This is [01:11:00] freaking creepy. 

David: Yeah. But that picture, that image, and OnlyFans, I actually think is a great picture of that. You know, it's like, oh yeah, well, I'm not doing anything wrong. So it actually explains then, why King Thrushbeard, why the rider comes through and destroys the pots. If you see this as an allusion to something a little more seedy, then <mm-hmm.> it actually explains why he does that. Otherwise, it's kind of a jerk move, right? Hey, my wife was just starting to be successful and I'm not done teaching her a lesson, so I'm gonna go destroy her work.

JR: Yeah. I'm gonna sabotage it. <Yeah.> But the better way to look at it is , no, she's not selling the pot, she's selling herself.

And that's not exactly, that's not acceptable. I mean, you're a wife, all that kind of thing. It's like, yeah, that's not the way to do this. And so he's basically undoing the nonsense that she thinks she's succeeding at.

David: Yeah, that's right. And another subtle clue, and I may be reading too much into this, but it says with this, she sat down at the corner of the marketplace. And then the husband actually gets [01:12:00]onto her saying, It's basically, what were you doing at the corner? <Yeah.> And I thought, well, that's weird. <Yeah.> But if you understand this idea of the center and the fringe again. <Yep.> Right? <Yep.> And you understand the allusion what's going on here.

The allusion is she's not at the center of the marketplace with all the other vendors. She's kind of off to the side. <Yep.> Like something, I think it's just another subtle allusion that something shady is going on here. 

JR: Well, all you have to do is say, standing on the street corner, well, what does that mean?

You know, everybody knows what that implies, right? And I just think it's interesting that this ancient story or this certainly old story kind of implies the same thing. Yeah. Again, it's one of those things, don't miss that detail. What were you doing on the corner?

It's like, well, where am I supposed to be? And again, if you look at it on the surface, you're like, well, I guess the corner is probably more dangerous 'cause traffic's coming through and you're more likely to break the pots. But no, it is a definite allusion to what are you standing on the street corner for?

You know, what do you think you're gonna achieve? Yeah. Why are you [01:13:00] selling yourself on the street corner? I mean, that's just a perfect, I don't know, that just fits in perfectly with that idea. 

David: Yeah, it actually does. That's a very good modern phrase that we would use. And everyone knows what you're talking about.

Hey I got you a booth in the center of the town square, and you told me that your display got messed up, on the street corner. It's like, what were you doing on the street corner? I had you booth in the middle of town, you know? 

JR: Right. Okay. yeah, I like that too. You're right. 

David: And so that helps make sense of all this. Now, the actions make sense. He's the one who rides through town and tramples the pots, right? Because he's like, this is not the path you need to be going down. 

JR: Right, yeah. And this is where we've made mention of this, but this is where I became pretty convinced that this is clearly meant to reflect some sort of gospel story, right?

Because again, to go back to the beginning, why would he wanna undo what little progress she's finally achieving? It's not because he wanted to take her down a notch. It's because she's still relying on something other than her character, right? In a way, she's trying to charm her way [01:14:00]toward virtue or something like that.

She's shortcutting Righteousness is what she's doing. And the moral here is that you can't bypass the wilderness. You can't shortcut righteousness. You can't shortcut the process of salvation or something like that, you know? Anyway, this is where I started to really say, okay, this doesn't make any sense unless you see this as a redemptive gospel type story.

David: Yeah. And we'll unpack this at the end, but yeah, since you brought it up, for it to be a story of really divine redemption, then you really do have to see the character as being in the lowest place. <Yes.> Right? <Right, right.> So it doesn't do any good to redeem her if she's really good at making baskets and now they've got a nice little living going on.

Like she literally has to be in the lowest spot if this is going to be what you know, the idyllic story of redemption. <Yeah.> She has to be pulled off the street corner. She has to be pulled out of the gutter. <Yeah.> That's the way to look at this. 

JR: Exactly. 

David: Okay. 

JR: I keep jumping ahead. It's killing me. 

David: I know. We'll get there. Well, let's [01:15:00] finish the story and then we can really unpack this.

Okay.

Because as a result of this disaster in the marketplace, he says, I finally found you a place in the King's Palace, okay, as a kitchen maid. <Yeah.> So basically, you're worthless to me here in this house. You might as well go work, again, it's the lowliest of lows, right? In fact, it says the king's daughter was now a kitchen maid and had to be at the Cook's beck and call and to do the dirtiest work. <Mm-hmm.> So there's this idea of the lowest again, right? 

JR: Yeah. But if you look at the scene, she's rejoined the order of things. She's in the palace. Granted, she's cleaning toilets and stuff like that. But I'm saying that it's an indication that the turn is continuing. At first she was just like, who owns all this wonderful stuff? Oh man, I really should have married Thrushbeard. Well, that's an indication of regret maybe, but the character hasn't changed.

And so now she goes through, do you have anything to offer to society? Do you have anything to offer the community? No. Well, [01:16:00] I can sell myself a little bit and we're gonna undo that. 'cause that's doesn't build character. Right. That's going the wrong direction. <Yeah.> And so now we're at least we're in the palace.

So it, should be a little bit of a message of, this is the, what the entry point back into society maybe, or back into the order of things. You're saying that 

David: Yeah. And I think that's why I was trying to think that's why I think she's, at least back in the King's palace. Now, it's a different kingdom. <Right.> But at least she's back participating even at the lowliest of jobs. <Right.> She's at least back participating in the order and structure of a society, even if she's starting at the lowest rung. Yeah. <Right.> That's the way to see this. Yes, that's right. 

JR: Okay. So she's sweeping, she's doing menial tasks at this new castle, this new palace. And then we have the banquet scene. Okay. So then what we find out is that there's been this big banquet and she is ordered to serve, be a servant to all the people that she rejected at the beginning of the story, right? 

David: That's right. It's a [01:17:00] circle back around to the original scene. 

JR: Yeah. so in a way, she's in her former life, but obviously not with her former title, right? So her identity's been stripped and now she's kind of this object of scorn because of this, banquet scene. 

David: Yeah. And it's actually a wedding of the King's eldest son. So it's almost like she now enters in to, play off what you just said, it's almost like she now enters into the very scene that we started with that could have been hers, right? <Yes.> Only now she's looking at it enviously, right?

JR: Yeah. From the outside.

David: Looking. Yeah. She's looking at the celebration, she's looking at the candles, the food, and it's like this all could have been her from the beginning, but she rejected it all. Right? <Right.> So then comes the next setup basically.

"So all at once, the king's son entered clothed in velvet and silk and gold chains around his neck. And when he saw the beautiful woman standing at the door, the servant, he seized her by the hand and would've danced with her, but she refused and shrank back with fear." So that's interesting because [01:18:00] she again, rejects the social order of things, but now it's out of a sense of humility. I didn't pick that up the first time, but when I just read that, 

JR: No, I didn't either. Yeah, it's almost like she was willing to sell her good looks to sell pots, but when that went south, maybe this is sort of an indication that, look, I'm just a chamber made, right? And here this, royalty, this royal person sees how beautiful I am and grabs my arm and says he wants to dance with me, but I'm not making that same mistake again.

It's an awareness move. Don't you think? I mean, I think this is sort of some kind of awareness. I'm not going to fall into this trap again where I rely on my good looks to provide something of little worth to people, right? 

David: Yeah. And maybe at this point she doesn't even see herself having any value, right? 

JR: Well, okay. That's another way to look at it. Yeah. Maybe that's a better way to look at it. She doesn't even recognize her own beauty anymore. 

David: Right. For the first time, it's like, no, this would be a social faux pa for you, the king's son, to dance with someone like me. I'm just a lowly kitchen maid.

It's like, for the [01:19:00] first time. Gosh. We'll have to wrap this up 'cause I keep wanting to caveat what you say. Like this is a gospel message, right. For the first time she actually is seeing herself through a bit of realism maybe. 

JR: Right, Yeah. She's seeing the real her maybe. And she's humbled by it, not humiliated. Well, she's about to be humiliated, but she's humbled by it. 

David: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. 

JR: Uh, right. Okay. 

David: So the struggle well, it says her struggles were of no avail. So it's like the struggle is he's pulling her onto the floor to dance and she's refusing to go.

<Right.> And, the story kind of talks about how she had some pots tied to her apron because she kind of what she scraped off the food and that's what she's going to eat later tonight. <Yeah. Right.> So in any case, in this kind of, he's pulling her on the dance floor, she didn't want to go. Her apron breaks and these pots break all over the place.

<Yeah.> Well now she's mortified because now she's the objects of scorn, right? <Right.> Everyone's laughing at her. 

JR: Yeah. That she was trying to steal food and [01:20:00] how pathetic that is, right? And I think right now , she kind of, I don't know, maybe the scales have fallen off her eyes at this point.

Because somebody could look at something like that and you could see yourself as a victim, right? You could be in that situation and be mortified, but you see yourself as a victim. And I don't think that's what's happening. I think she's seeing herself as someone who used to look down on other people like herself, except she knows I'm in that position now.

<Yeah.> So finally the table's been completely turned, and I think she's realizing it. And so she starts to weep, not just from shame, but from awakening, maybe, is kind of what I read into this part right here. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe for the first time a sober what perspective on <Yeah.> who I really am. <Right.> You know, get past the good looks. Yeah. I really don't have anything to offer. 

JR: Yeah. However you look at this, this is bottom right. Everybody has to find bottom. This is the, <Yeah.> prodigal son eating the pig food, in the pig trough and realizing, what am I doing, you know? <Exactly. Yeah.> yeah. She's going through that same thing, right? 

David: Alright, so then it's the big reveal. We can finish this story up, [01:21:00] then talk about it. The big reveal is she runs to the stairs. The man caught her and brought her back in, and then he reveals, do not be afraid. I, and the fiddler who have been living with you in that wretched hovel are one.

So he says, it's me, King Thrushbeard. And he goes through and says, for love, I disguised, I destroyed your pots, right? But he makes it clear that this was all done, well, it actually says, "This was all done to humble your proud spirit and to punish you for the insolence with which you mocked me." Now that kind of sounds a little harsh as well. <Uppity.>

But she says, "I've done a great wrong, I'm not worthy to be your wife." But he says, "Be comforted. The days of evil are past. We will now celebrate our wedding." <Right.> And so that's the big thing. The whole wedding is hers and she's going to marry King Thrushbeard.

JR: Wait a second. Wait a second. That whole wedding is hers?

David: Yeah.

JR: When you said that, I'm sitting there thinking, oh wow, wait a second. The whole wedding that was set up for- I knew it was set up for her, again, I don't wanna [01:22:00] say humiliation for her humbling, that's fine. But no, I just never clicked to me that the entire thing was set up for her wedding. <Yeah, yeah.> Right. Okay. 

 Anyway, I'm just gonna play dumb and keep moving. 

David: Okay. But it says, "Be comforted. The evil days are passed. Now we will celebrate our wedding." And then it said, "The maids in waiting came in and they put on splendid clothing and her father and his whole court."

So, I guess that's the answer. Her father and his whole court came. 

JR: Okay. Yeah. So that, and they, we'll send this back to the, did the king know about it? And so apparent whether he knew at the beginning, I don't know, but he certainly was let in on the whole deal. Right, okay. 

David: Yeah. But the wedding that she's at is her wedding.

JR: Yeah. Okay. Wow. How about that? Alright. Just for some reason in my own memory of the story, it was like they then got married, but I guess I just skipped the parts. I know. Well, that's how usually works. Yeah. Yeah. The happily ever after, right. 

David: Yeah. 

JR: But anyway. Okay.

David: Well, let me read the last line.

So the last line in fairytales are usually great. Right? A lot of times you go, yeah, that's a great way. So the last line is they got married, and the joy now began in [01:23:00] earnest. And the last line is, "I wish you and I had been there too."

Yeah. I, I just think it's a great line. 

JR: It's something, you know, if you said, how does a fairy tale end? Everybody says happily ever after. And then you read a bunch of fairy tales and I'm sure some of them end that way, but most of 'em don't end that way. And there's some kind of little twist on it.

But you're right, that's a great line. I wish you and I had been there too. 

David: Yeah. I think another one said, you need not ask if they were happy, or something like that. Or they're still fighting to this day, right? In the hovel. Right, right, right. There's some, yeah, there's still, there's always some great way to end each fairytale, but that's a great line to end this one.

JR: No, that's great. Well, did they change or did they not, and this is clearly one of those lines that sort of says, yes, there was a transformation. And that's where the happily ever after part comes from. The transformation is now made permanent. 

David: Yeah, that's right. Alright, so let's bring this full circle 'cause we can finally start talking about <Yeah.> that this is a story of the gospel. This is a story of God sending his son to redeem the world and save it. [01:24:00] <Right.> And I think it's so clear, I think it's so clear once you get that image in your head. So what are some of the things that jumped out at you that said, this is the right track here. This is the right way to read this. 

JR: Well, again, when he destroyed the pots, that was the first time I, I just, you know, I had to go back to that point thinking, what in the world, why would he undo all the, you know, she seemed like she was getting some traction in life, right? And he undoes it. But then when you see it through a gospel lens, and again, you see that she's relying on something of herself.

Not anything she can offer anybody, but something, you know, just like I said, her good looks. She's offering herself to other people for money, right? <Yeah.> Then you can really kind of say, okay, this is that idea that. I don't have anything to offer. The whole, I can't spin, I can't weave baskets. But every once in a while we have that idea that, well, I do have this going for me.

You know what I mean? And to tie it to the gospel message, it's that point in our lives where we sort of say, oh yeah, I'm a filthy beggar. I am a terrible person. You know, you [01:25:00] kind of belittle yourself, but then in the way you live, you sort of say, yeah, but I am a pretty good conversationalist.

I am pretty good looking or I really do make people feel good. You know what I mean? It's that whole idea of wanting to go back and say, I do bring something to the table. And what this story is telling you once you see it through the gospel lens, is no, there's nothing you're bringing to the table to God.

There's nothing that God says, man, what would I do without you there? Right. And that's just a clear image of that. So anyway, where he destroyed the pots is where it really kind of, I don't know, hit home for me that that's what this is about. 

David: Yeah. That's what did it for me too, is the marketplace. Because man, once you see that image, there's so many biblical parallels. You already brought up the idea of the prodigal son. Right? Here's, the kid eating the scraps that the pigs leave. Right? <Right.> And the father says, you're welcome in my house, right? Not only just to be a servant, but to come back and be my son, right? It's the story of redemption.

Man, all throughout the Old Testament, when Israel turns to other gods, how [01:26:00] do the prophets, or how does God refer to them? He refers to them as prostitutes, right? <Right.> Yeah. I mean, he says, you prostituted yourself to other gods. And yet then we see God going to great lengths to bring them back, right?

So <mm-hmm.> It, it's a theme all throughout scripture, right? <Right.> We are unfaithful to God and yet God will go to great lengths to bring us back into a right relationship with him. <Right.> One other thing I restore the relationship is Yeah. 'cause you said, you know, we have nothing to offer and there's true to that, and yet we still have the potential.

God sees in us the potential to become almost like God. God sees the potential. You know, we talked about this idea of theosis on some other episodes long time ago, but God at least sees the potential in us to, what? Be this son or this daughter that he loves. <Mm-hmm.> And he sees all potential in the world.

So I think that's important to point out too, and you see it in this story where it's like, she marries King [01:27:00] Thrushbeard and she didn't have anything to offer, but she always held out the potential of being the queen of her kingdom. And there's no reason to think that that didn't happen, right? <Yeah.> Only now she under it all properly handle it. Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yes. And so I think that's another important thing to point out, that it's not just that she was worthless and had nothing to offer. She always held this potential. <Yeah.> Of being a ruler of her kingdom, right? 

JR: Well, and that's our situation. In, one sense, the Bible describes us as filthy rags. And in another sense it describes us as sons and daughters of the most high God, right? And so it's this dichotomy that seems impossible. You're like, well, what? Look, which am I right?

But it's the tension between those two ideas, right? And in myself, I'm nothing. But when you add King Thrushbeard, right? Yeah. Now you rise. Right? When you add the redemption of Christ, now you rise to be the son and daughter of the most high. You know, that's how you achieve [01:28:00]that, not through your own difficult work or, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Right? And so, yeah, there's a lot more to it than that, but you're right, it's such a clear picture at that point.

And another story in the Bible that's so clearly parallels King Thrushbeard is the prophet Hosea, right? And he's told to, yeah, yeah. He's told to marry a prostitute and then, she leaves him and sleeps with other men and has kids with other men, and then he goes and redeems her, right?

I read Hosea this morning actually, and it's interesting. I didn't realize in the story of Hosea that he actually secretly bought her back. You know, the idea is that he married the prostitute, she left him, she goes back into prostitution. You know, there's implications of a lot of these things that she goes back into prostitution gets sold as a slave once again.

And that he bought her back. He redeemed her, but he did it in secret, which is interesting 'cause I was sitting there thinking the King Thrushbeard story, and I'm like, yeah, he did all that in secret, you know. 

David: He's in disguise. Yeah. 

JR: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, and so, yeah, so [01:29:00] there's a lot of parallels between Hosea and this story.

In fact, to the point that I don't think the writer of this story could have not been thinking about the book of Hosea, kind of trying to tell a similar story, you know? 

David: Yeah. And you could see from that perspective maybe it's like, how do I tell this story to kids. So instead of her being a prostitute, you know, she's selling earthenware at the corner of the marketplace and Yeah, I could see that.

Sure. I, I think you're right. I think the parallels are so clear, and of course, Hosea marrying the prostitute is a picture of God redeeming Israel. Right? Goes back to that thing about you prostituted yourself to other idols. And so what God is doing in that story is he's saying to Hosea, unfortunately, Hosea is the one who got tagged with this task, but you know, he's saying, in order to demonstrate this and bring Israel's sin before their eyes, I'm gonna have you do the shocking thing, right? 

JR: Right, right. Yeah. 

David: And so from that standpoint, you can see that, you know, the story of Hosea it's kind of this [01:30:00] small pattern of the larger pattern, right? <Right.> And the prodigal son is also a small pattern of the larger pattern. Right, right. And there's so many stories I think in the Bible that you could pick out of the small pattern that is emblematic of the larger pattern. And yeah, I think you're right. I can't read this story now and not see this as a small pattern of the larger pattern of redemption.

JR: Yeah. And the funny thing is that the book of Hosea is also kind of, if you read it on the surface, that's another kind of misogynistic, sexist, you can read the sexist overtones into that story, right? And to go back to the original critique of this is that, oh, it's outdated. This is clearly sexist or whatever.

But you know, if this story is misogynistic, then so is the gospel. Right? And that may sound provocative, but if you think about it, you know, the gospel is about a wayward bride. You know, that's the way it describes us, right? And that's humanity who has to be humbled to be saved in the groom Christ, allows her, allows us to fall in order to lift us up.

Right? And the love of the [01:31:00] bridegroom, looks like loss before this glorious wedding at the end, right? And so I guess I'm saying if King Thrushbeard is merely a cruel man, humiliating a woman, then Hosea is about what a controlling God forcing submission, right?

But if you read Hosea and the fairytale as stories of like, just insane mercy, then they're not about humiliation. They're about healing through humility, not humiliation, and there's a difference between those two. 

David: Yeah. And to kind of hammer that point home, why is this not misogynistic?

Well, it's because if you don't see yourself as the princess who mocks reality and rejects God, then you miss the whole point of the story, right? <Right.> So to bring it home then, if I don't see myself as that entitled spoiled Princess <Yes.> Then I miss the point of the story. 

JR: Again. You can flip the gender roles and it still works. <Yeah.> And that's, an indication that this isn't merely a sexist story. 

David: Right, exactly. Yeah. I was just gonna say any last thoughts. 

JR: Well, okay. What pops in my head is that fairytales at [01:32:00] their best and myths at their best and parables at their best. They don't just tell us how the world is, they show us how the soul works.

You know what I mean? And that's this story. It's far from being some kind of patriarchal lesson, right? It's about how we are all the proud princesses, you know, regardless of whether you're a guy or a girl, right? We're this haughty princess that thinks we have this title and thinks we're, you know, thinks we have something to offer.

And, we're cynical and we reject society and, the order of things because we think we can do it on our own only to find out that we're not equipped to engage in the world outside of, what, outside of the realistic reality structure that the Bible lays out, right?

And you can't get away from that. And if you try to get away from that, well, there you go. That's the wilderness. And then some people would say, that's hell. And so it's only through <Yeah.> loss. It's only through this descent. It's only through being taken down that you can become capable of. You know, you say that's the way you become capable of love, but certainly the [01:33:00] love of God, the love of Christ.

That's how that works. You have to be taken down. You have to have all that stripped away before we're capable of doing that. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And another parallel just occurred to me, and we talked about this several times now, is I think it's Colossians, where, who being in the very form of God, didn't think equality with God was something to be grasped. 

JR: Yeah. Yeah. Like he descends. I, that's funny. I had that written down. I had it's Philippians 2. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I had that. I knew I had a verse written down that I was trying to find it. Yeah, go ahead. 

David: Yeah. So he descends to become human and then he descends further to become a servant, right? Yeah. And so he does all this in order to lift mankind up, right? And redeem man. Well, you see the same pattern in Thrushbeard, right? Because Thrushbeard is actually the King's son, but Thrushbeard is willing to take on the form of a beggar, right, of a fiddler.

To live in a stinking hovel, which he probably had to tolerate. You know, I think there's even a point in the story where he is like, you know, we don't have to live in this stinking hovel anymore, right? <Right. Yeah.> We can go back to the palace. I [01:34:00] was just messing what you did. So it's the same picture though.

It's the king son, the son of God. Right. Descending to become the lowest in order to redeem this person. Right. Yeah. It's a beautiful picture descending to her world, and it's all there. 

JR: Yeah. It really is. Yeah. Yeah. It's so clear and you're right. So I would encourage the listener to go back and read it, when you have time and think about it through that lens, because there's so many times, well, that's why I kept bursting out.

Here's the gospel, here's the guy. Yeah. You know what I mean? I couldn't contain myself because it's so obvious once you see it through that lens, that a lot of the details take on a much deeper meaning. And you know, it's like the selling, being on the corner, it's like, well, what does that matter?

Man, now, you really have a deeper understanding of that aspect. You have a deeper understanding of why it was a fiddler and not just a mere beggar. It was like, you know, again, if this is Christ an image of Christ, it's not just a mere beggar. It's somebody who understands the rhythm and the reality of the world.

And, I don't know, it's just a perfect picture that you can see all these little details from, but you gotta go back and read it through that lens once [01:35:00] again. And like we said, we've read it, what, 5, 6, 7, 10 times? 

David: Yeah. Several times. And it's another one where every time I read it, something new jumped out at me.

But about the second time I read this and I got the connection to this is a story of God redeeming us. I was like, we've gotta do this one, we've gotta walk through this one. And Yep. Absolutely. Great fairy tale. 

JR: Well, it's a good ending one, because like you said, this is actually not a fairytale type of fairytale. It's more of a parable, but it's such a good one.

It really kind of requires the understanding of other fairytales to build on how to break this down, the symbolism and get something out of it. But yeah, I hate we're at the end of it, we're gonna have to do this series again in another season or something like that. This is too much fun for me.

David: Yeah, me too. We've talked about doing some different things. It might be something where we do Ancient Stories next season, but we maybe do a little bit different take maybe the parables of Jesus or maybe some of the Greek myths. But yeah, we'll figure out a way to keep working this in, because I could go through, there's 200 Grimm's fairytales.

I could go through [01:36:00] every one of them and have this conversation, but. 

JR: Oh yeah, no kidding. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard from someone who's listened to one of the previous episodes that if we've ended up having this conversation about, man, I can't help but read any story you know, read into it now.

I mean, it's just like you have a framework for understanding the deeper understanding, symbolism in all stories, whether it's the Bible, whether it's mythology, whether it's a Marvel movie, right? You can just see it. Once you kind of grasp it and you know it's there, then you can kind of grab it in all kinds of different stories.

So this whole series has been wonderfully helpful to me and it's really changed the way I read the Bible and understand story, in general. But, like I said, I hate that it's over, but I guess we gotta end at some point. That's right. We can't do this for 10 years. 

David: Well we could, we might be the only ones listening, but. 

JR: Yeah, exactly. 

David: All right, so this ends our Ancient Stories series for this season, at least. One programming note if you listen to us as we release these, and we release these [01:37:00] on the first and the 15th of each month. But if you're waiting with bated breath, waiting for the next release, right in July, we won't be doing any, give ourselves a break.

Got some vacations coming up. So we will pick back up sometime in August. We'll shoot for August 1st. And a little bit of teaser. We're going to look at the book of Ephesians, which should be fun because you and I have both been to Ephesus, and so we're gonna Yeah. Bring some of those insights to that conversation.

JR: Alright. You wrote a book on it, so read up. 

David: I wrote the book. There's, there's your homework. That's I, I'll say the book on it. I won't say the book you wrote Ephesians. How about that? I wrote a book, yeah, I'm sure I'll find ways to plug that book, but <surely>, right? But yeah, there you go. That's the plan. And, yeah, we'll see everyone in August.

JR: Yeah. And go to our Facebook, go to our webpage navigatinganancientfaith.com and we will see you after the break.