Hail, O Theotokos, Maiden of many names: Tabernacle, Vessel of Manna, Table, Lampstand that bears the Light, burning Bush, overshadowed Mountain of God! (from Orthros - Morning Prayer - of the Melkite (Byzantine) Liturgy in the first week of Lent.)
This is one of what I plan as an occasional series of posts in which I highlight types of the Virgin Theotokos from the Scriptures which appear in traditional sacred art.
In the icon below, Mary is shown in person and as the unhewn mountain, which refers to the biblical prophecy in Daniel: “You saw until a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands, and it smote the image upon its feet of iron and earthenware and utterly reduced them to powder.” (Daniel 2, 34) “Whereas you saw that a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands, and it beat to pieces the earthenware, the iron, the brass, the silver, the gold; the great God has made known to the king what must happen hereafter: and the dream is true, and the interpretation thereof sure” (Daniel 2, 45).
This image is interpreted as prefiguring Christ (the stone) being born of Mary (the mountain) without human intervention so that she remains a Virgin.
It is “overshadowed” because at the Annunciation, in Luke 1, 35, the angel Gabriel tells Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
This divine overshadowing enabled the virgin birth, or put another way, it enabled the stone to be removed although ‘unhewn’. The cave, therefore, also becomes the womb that is ‘more spacious than the heavens’, as it can contain God as another hymn to the Virgin Mary states, the Akathist.
The image below is my illumination of the Nativity. In this rendition, the mountain in this scene is overshadowed by the Glory of God, the light in the sky that guides the wise men.
