Oaths

“This is an assassin’s binding, a Moonshadow elf ritual. Before I met you, I swore an oath: I bound myself to end Prince Ezran’s life, and the binding will never come off while he’s alive. It will just get tighter and tighter until I lose my hand – but I’m ready to pay that price.”

The Dragon Prince S1 E6, ‘Through the Ice’ (2018)

Rayla from The Dragon Prince, according to the prodigious artistic skills of JessxJess at newgrounds.com.

I sort of hadn’t realised how big of a gap I had in my life for a good animated-fantasy-drama serial – like, wholesome, heroic animated-fantasy-drama with fun action, solid characterisation, and of course a good hefty dollop of comedy as an integral part of the proceedings, kind of thing – until Netflix’s original series The Dragon Prince came along and filled it.¹ I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was a kid, it seemed as if this sort of stuff was all over the place: semi-realistic animation with proper storylines that you could get properly invested in; funny cartoons, yes, but funny cartoons with a bit more about them than merely constant resort to the silliest brands of humour on the market. I used to watch The Mummy and Ultimate Book of Spells and Smurfs Adventures and Jackie Chan Adventures and The Batman and W.I.T.C.H., and it was brilliant, and I’m not really sure where that entire subgenre disappeared off to, but about when I hit my teens, disappear off it did, or seemed to, at least on the media platforms available to me at the time. And, as I say, I hadn’t really noticed how much I missed it until The Dragon Prince reminded me of how much I love that sort of thing.

The Dragon Prince is set in a world at war: in the east is Xadia, a land swimming in magic and populated by dragons and elves, while in the west are five rather more mundane human kingdoms. We join the story just after the Dragon King has been killed by humans in battle, and his only egg and the heir to Xadia’s throne, the titular Dragon Prince, has also been destroyed. Or at least – henceforth be spoilers; proceed at your own risk – that’s what everyone thinks has happened to the Dragon Prince. It’s based on this information that a group of Moonshadow elves, deadly assassins the lot of them, plots to avenge Xadia by breaking into the royal castle of Katolis, one of the human kingdoms, and killing King Harrow and his young son, Ezran. The king and his heir: a life for a life.

To prove their commitment to their goal – their acknowledgement of how serious and costly a thing this is – the Moonshadow elves swear a magical oath pledging to carry out the assassination. Indeed, they literally bind themselves: they wrap a cord around each arm and perform a spell that prevents that cord from ever being removed while their intended targets are still living. Unless King Harrow and Prince Ezran die, the cord will, as we learn later, only tighten and tighten until it eventually severs off the limb altogether. Yikes.

With that, the Moonshadow elves set off to do some assassinating, but in the process, one of their number, Rayla, stumbles across something that rips a bit of a hole in the plan. The egg of the Dragon Prince hasn’t been destroyed at all: it’s merely been stolen. Prince Ezran has found it sitting safe and intact in a secret room in the castle. This changes everything. If the egg can be safely returned to its mother, there might be a chance of brokering peace between Xadia and the humans. As far as a means of putting things right goes, that’s a vastly better solution than a simple exaction of tit-for-tat revenge. Rayla redefines her objective. She no longer has any reason to wish Prince Ezran dead. Her goal now is to work with him and his stepbrother Callum to take the Dragon Prince home.

But that doesn’t change the fact that she bound herself. Prince Ezran is her friend and ally now, but that doesn’t change the fact that she swore an oath to see him dead. And sure, at the time, she swore in sincerity, she meant what she said, but the trouble was, she didn’t have all the relevant information back then. If she had done, she would never have bound herself as she did in the first place. But once the oath is sworn, it’s too late. As things stand, it looks as if Rayla will pay the heavy price of a hand for her underinformed sincerity.

Oaths are absolute, and that makes them a dangerous game for finite, limited beings to play. We are changeable, but an oath is fixed; our knowledge of any given set of circumstances is only ever partial, but an oath has no room to accommodate new information. Rayla’s oath to kill Prince Ezran rather reminds me of Jephthah’s oath as recorded in Judges 11.² He vowed that if God enabled him to defeat the Ammonites, he would sacrifice whatever first came out to meet him when we went home from the battle as a burnt-offering. Presumably he was thinking some item of livestock or other was likely to wander up to meet him, but of course what actually happened was that his daughter, his only child, came out first to congratulate her father on his victory. (A variation on the trope appears in some versions of Beauty and the Beast, in case you were wondering where else this jazz seemed familiar from.³)

If Jephthah had known that that was what would happen, he obviously never would have sworn the oath in the first place, but once the oath is sworn, it’s too late. Numbers 30:2 reads as follows: A man, when he vows a vow, or swears an oath to bind a bond upon himself, shall not violate his word; according to everything that comes out of his mouth, he shall do.⁴ The rest of the chapter details the allowances made for women making vows, because in your ancient-Israelite societal setup, most women would have been subject to a male head-of-household (father or husband) who might feasibly have led his family in such a direction as to prevent the woman from fulfilling her word – in which case, God makes very clear, she is not bound to what she said. But the very laying out of this exception shows the weight of the thing; that the particulars of the condition have to be so carefully explained shows how important it was that the allowance be made where it was needed, and hence how big a deal it was to break a vow. Jephthah, of course, being a bloke, got no allowances, only the straightforward starkness of verse 2. He had to do as he had vowed, even though, given the new information on the table, that was clearly a horrible idea. He had to pay the heavy price for his underinformed sincerity – or rather, his daughter did. She for her part agreed to it, incidentally, although I’m not sure how much better that really makes it. Like most of Judges, this story is a pretty grim and hopeless one.

 

A properly beautiful sculpture of Jephthah and his daughter by Emil Wolff, in Erbach in Germany, photograph kindly uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Marion Halft under the usual conditions.

So it’s no wonder, really, that Jesus instructs us not to make vows at all. Again, he says in Matthew 5, you guys heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not swear falsely, but you shall fulfil your oaths to the Lord. But I say to you guys, don’t swear at all: neither by heaven, because it is God’s throne; nor by earth, because it is the footstool of his feet; nor by Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king; nor by your head shall you swear, because you can’t make one hair white or black. Let your word yes be yes; no, no. What goes beyond these things is from evil. James records the same teaching in the fifth chapter of his letter: Above all, my brothers, do not swear, neither (by) heaven nor (by) earth nor (by) some other oath; let your yes be yes, and no, no, so that you guys might not fall under judgement.⁵

On one level, I think there’s a point there that we should be conducting ourselves with such integrity that we just don’t need to swear oaths. Jesus’ big point in that chunk of Matthew 5 is, after all, to hold his followers accountable to a higher standard of behaviour than that revealed in ha-Torah; or rather, actually, to hold them accountable to a full, fundamental alignment with the heart of God, whose values are indicated by, but not fully contained in, his commandments. If people know and trust that when we say yes or no, we mean it, and they can rely on us to follow through on what we’ve promised, then it just isn’t ever necessary for us to add the extra clout of swearing an oath to the statement of our intentions. But on another level, there’s a very clear warning that to take an oath is to render oneself liable to judgement. It doesn’t matter what you swear by, because everything, at the end of the day, is God’s. Even your own body isn’t yours to swear by; if you can’t make one hair of your head white or black just by willing it, then why should you suppose that you have any right to proffer it as surety? To swear an oath is to bind your intentions to something else, something important; the idea is to establish it as so certain that you will fulfil your intentions that you’d be prepared to stake the continued soundness of the something else on your doing so. But the something else isn’t yours to put on the line. To lay claim to it in that way is an attempt to usurp God, to whom all things truly belong.

That said, the Bible does include some explicit commands that Israel ought to swear by the name of the LORD their God, rather than anything else – try Deuteronomy 6:13 and 10:20, for instance – and also mentions that, in the future, people in Israel will swear by God as opposed to by false gods. Isaiah 65:16 tells us that the one who swears in the land shall swear by the God of truth, because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they are hidden from my eyes.⁶ I think this verse refers to a future restored Israel from which Jesus will rule the world as king and high priest, and that the point is that, in those circumstances, the Law will be practised perfectly; the one who swears in the land will be able to swear by the God of truth because God will make it perfectly true and certain that he fulfil his oath properly. In a sense, then, nothing will be on the line; the former times when someone might swear an oath and not follow through on it will be forgotten. And swearing by the true God in that context glorifies him, because it upholds him as the ultimately true and certain thing by which an intention might be guaranteed. At least, I think that’s what’s going on with that. But at any rate, the teachings of Jesus as recorded by Matthew and James make it abundantly clear that, in our covenant, swearing an oath is simply not one of the options on the table. Because we, finite, limited, changeable beings that we are, simply can’t be relied upon to carry through our intentions – certainly not to the extent where the integrity of those intentions might be bound to the integrity of something else. Like Rayla, like Jephthah, we might bind ourselves with all the sincerity in the world, but all it takes is a single piece of new information and we’re left wishing we’d never bound ourselves in the first place. Fulfil the vow or break it, either will exact a heavy price – kill Prince Ezran or lose a hand; sacrifice an only daughter or be liable to God’s judgement – but one price or the other must be paid.

The one being who can’t be thrown off course by the introduction of new information is God, because he knows everything already anyway. Couple that with his immutability and it turns out that, unlike the rest of us, there’s no reason for God not to swear oaths. Indeed, he frequently does swear oaths in scripture. Sometimes he just swears by nothing in particular (Numbers 32:10; Isaiah 14:24; 54:9), but other times, he swears by himself (Genesis 22:16; Isaiah 45:23; Jeremiah 22:5; 49:13; 51:14; Amos 6:8); or he swears by his right hand (Isaiah 62:8); or he swears by his name (Jeremiah 44:26); or he swears by his holiness (Amos 4:2); or he swears by the pride of Jacob (Amos 8:7), which I think we can say is a roundabout way of referring to himself. This is pretty awesome, actually, because it means that the ‘something else’ to which he’s binding his intentions – the thing he’s putting on the line here – is the ultimately true and certain thing: himself and his unchangeable attributes. This point is made in Hebrews 6 with respect to God’s oath to Abraham in Genesis 22: For God, having promised to Abraham, since he had no-one greater by whom to swear, swore by himself, saying: Surely I will certainly bless you and I will certainly multiply you. And thus, having patiently waited, he obtained the promise. For human beings swear by (something) greater, and the conclusion for confirmation of every dispute for them is an oath; by which God, planning to prove more excessively to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable(ness) of his plan, guaranteed (it) with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which God is unable to lie, we who took refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us.⁷

God can’t lie anyway – his yes is yes and his no, no, every time – so it’s kind of superfluous for him to swear an oath, but just to drive home the absolute, unshakeable certainty of what he’s promising, he swears one anyway. What reason could we possibly have, then, to doubt the fulfilment of what he has said? We can seize the hope set before us with both hands; drop everything else, because everything else is changeable and subject to being thrown off course by new information, whereas God is ultimately true and certain and guarantees his promises twofold in binding them to himself.

So what was God’s doubly certain promise to Abraham back in Genesis 22? To bless him and multiply his offspring as stars and as sand; that his offpsring would possess the gate of his enemies, and bring blessing to all the nations of the earth. And all that because he obeyed God in not withholding his only son from him, which we all know is a top-notch bit of typology where Isaac represents Jesus as sacrifice (go and do the study for yourself; the parallels are amazing but we haven’t got time for the particulars right now).⁸ This brings me to the one last point I want to make today. Failing to fulfil an oath incurs a cost, as it did for Rayla when she failed to follow through on killing Prince Ezran and the cord began to tighten around her wrist. The cost in the real world is even higher, though, because binding your intentions to something that belongs to God – i.e. literally anything that exists – and then failing to follow through on them, incurs his righteous wrath against you. You have attempted to usurp him, and there’s a punishment to pay for that. As James wrote, one who swears an oath brings judgement upon himself.

But in our case, where does that punishment go? On Jesus. And this means that when God swears by himself, he really does put himself on the line. He swears by himself that he will achieve the blessing of all nations through the multiplication of Abraham’s descendants – which we know finds its fulfilment in Jesus, and his death and resurrection – and he is ready to pay the toll that that incurs. Rayla was willing to pay the price for her own oath that she failed to fulfil, but God chooses to pay the price for our broken promises. He binds his intentions to himself, knowing absolutely everything about what that will entail; knowing that fulfilling this oath and achieving his purpose for humanity will cost him the life of his beloved Son as a sacrifice. He is not caught out by new information, like Rayla or Jephthah; this was always his plan. He who can never break an oath, swears to bear the penalty incurred by every broken oath, and guarantees it by binding that promise to his own unchangeable nature. Whatever any of us may have sworn, and whatever we may have sworn it by, who we are in God’s eyes is guaranteed only by what he has sworn, by himself.

Footnotes

¹ I try not to recommend too may TV programmes to people, because let’s be real here, we’re probably all watching too much TV already, but here it is if you’d like to check it out: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80212353?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C648b8f11-ea43-4edb-9842-1d97f4e73a4f-301393619%2C%2C.

² Check out the story: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges+11&version=ESVUK.

³ I definitely had a fairytale book when I was a kid in which the beast demanded, upon letting Beauty’s father go, that he send back in his place the first thing that met him when he arrived home, but I’m not sure how frequently this detail is included in the story.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+30&version=ESVUK. I’ve given my own translation, as you’ll have gathered.

⁵ Here’s the Matthew: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+5&version=ESVUK; and the James: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james+5&version=ESVUK.

⁶ I’m literally just prooftexting with this one, rather than discussing it nicely in context: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+65&version=ESVUK.

⁷ You know the drill: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+6&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Go on, go type-hunting, you’ll love it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+22&version=ESVUK. That this is the first instance where Abraham’s offspring are referred to in terms of sand as well as in terms of stars is also super interesting, but again, no time for that today.