Even by the God of your father, who shall help you; and by the Almighty, who shall bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb:
All Commentaries on Genesis 49:25 Go To Genesis 49
Ambrose of Milan
AD 397
But as to what Jacob says, “the blessing of the womb, the blessing of your father and mother,” if we should choose to interpret it as the womb only of Mary, the reason why he coupled the two blessings will escape our notice, for he could have spoken of the womb only of the mother. But I think it more appropriate that we should take it, according to the spiritual mystery, as the two begettings of the Lord Jesus, that according to the divinity and that according to the flesh, because he was begotten from the Father before all ages. For this reason also the Father says, “My heart has uttered a good Word,” because the Son has proceeded from the most profound and incomprehensible substance of the Father and is always in him. For this reason also the Evangelist says, “No one has at any time seen God, except the onlybegotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him.” “The bosom of the Father,” then, is to be understood in a spiritual sense, as a kind of innermost dwelling of the Father’s love and of his nature, in which the Son always dwells. Even so, the Father’s womb is the spiritual womb of an inner sanctuary, from which the Son has proceeded just as from a generative womb. To be sure, we read in different versions, now that it was the Father’s womb, again that it was his heart, with which he uttered the Word, and again that it was his mouth from which justice proceeded and from which Wisdom came forth, as Wisdom herself says, “From the mouth of the Most High I came forth.” Thus, since the One is not limited and all things declare the One, the blessing refers rather to the spiritual mystery of generation from the Father than to some part of the body. But just as we interpret it to mean that generation from the Father, likewise let us interpret it to mean the generation from Mary unto the completion of faith, when the mother’s womb is blessed, that virginal womb of Mary which brought forth for us the Lord Jesus. The Father speaks of that womb through the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you came forth from your mother’s womb, I sanctified you.” Therefore the prophet showed that there was a twofold nature in Christ, the divine and the fleshly, the former from the Father, the latter from a virgin, but in such a way that Christ was not deprived of his divinity when he was born from a virgin and was in the body.
