Christ is the “head of every man” (1 Cor 11:3). “He is the head of all rule and authority” (Col 2:10). He is the one whom God gave “as head over all things to the church” (Eph 1:22). As “head of the church” he is “Savior of the body” (Eph 5:23; Col 1:18), and as such he lays his life down for the church (Eph 5:25).

Following John Calvin’s exposition of the “three offices” of Christ (Institutes, II.15), it has become customary for many modern theologians to focus on Jesus’ fulfillment of the Old Testament offices of “Prophet, Priest, and King” (WCF 8.1), and these only. But what of the OT office of “the Head”? Is “headship” even to be understood as an OT office?

New Testament scholarship has tended to understand Paul’s use of the term “head” (kephale) primarily within the first-century cultural context in which Paul was writing, with special reference to Greco-Roman “household codes.” In this understanding, Paul takes up a Greco-Roman concept (the “head” of household, the patriarch, the paterfamilias) and Christianizes it for early Christians. He takes this culturally understood category and puts it in service of explaining the gospel of Christ: Jesus is the true exemplar of what a (Greco-Roman) ‘head of household’ ought to be, Paul is purportedly saying (e.g. Eph 5:22–33).

But is this what Paul is saying?

I contend that all of Paul’s thinking and writing is to be understood primarily within the context not of Greco-Roman culture generally, but of the thought-world provided by the Scriptures of Israel, as expressed within the liturgical life of first-century Judaism. Put bluntly, when Paul says that Jesus is the head of the church (Eph 5:23; Col 1:18), he is not speaking primarily with reference to Greco-Roman household codes but with reference to a Hebraic-Scriptural office. And, as I have argued in a previous article, within the Scriptures of Israel, the head is the representative member of the body, not the ruler over it.

In what follows, I will argue further that the OT “head” is an office that denotes “soteriological representation.” In other words, the head is the one in whom the salvation or damnation of the whole body is mediated. As such, Paul sees in the OT office of the “head” a figure of Christ.

Old Testament Heads

Throughout the OT, the “head” consistently functions as a figure for corporate blessing and cursing. When the head is blessed, the whole body is blessed; when the head is cursed, so is the whole body. This is literally true, and metaphorically true. When the (literal) head is cursed or blessed, the whole person is cursed or blessed. When the (metaphorical) head (of household) is cursed or blessed, so the whole body (i.e., all persons under his “headship”).

First, the literal. In the opening chapters of Genesis, God declares the defeat of the serpent’s “head” through the woman’s promised seed. “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (3:15). Here, the crushing of the head is the crushing of the whole person—in this case, the destruction of the entire demonic realm represented by and existing under Satan. In other words, the crushing of the serpent’s head signals not the demise of the serpent only, but of all who “belong” to this serpentine body (cf. John 8:44).

Various OT writers pick up on this promise, that God will destroy His enemies and save His people by the bruising (or “crushing”) of the enemy’s head. In the book of Judges, Israel triumphs over their enemy when “[Jael] drove the peg into [Sisera’s] temple . . . she crushed his head” (Jgs 4:21; 5:26). A later victory is won when “a certain woman threw an upper millstone on Abimelech’s head and crushed his skull” (Jgs 9:53; cf. 9:57). Salvation will later be brought to all of Israel when David strikes and cuts off Goliath’s head (1 Sam 15:45–51).

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