A few months ago I finished a full draft of Fleshly Readings, but now it is time to check a few references. Not long before Hans Wildberger, a pious, sober and otherwise boring German scholar of the Hebrew Bible offers this gem on Isaiah 11:5. First the translation:

‘Righteousness shall be the girdle of his balls [bemotnayw]; and faithfulness the girdle of his nuts [halatsayw]’

or, as I prefer: ‘The loin-cloth of justice clings to his balls; the underwear of faithfulness to his nuts’.

For our faithful Wildberger this verse is nothing less than a signal of the messiah, indeed that this is the very loin-cloth of the messiah himself (p. 455).