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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from VerseNotes. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re looking at “We Three Kings”, a song that gets two-thirds of its own title wrong.
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.
Now, even though we’re looking at this song in the third week of Advent, it’s technically an Epiphany carol about the Magi visiting Jesus in Matthew 2, not way back with the shepherds in Luke 2.
Anyway, let’s look at that title: We Three Kings.
There’s nothing wrong with the word “we”, but “three” is incorrect. Matthew mentions three gifts, not three visitors.
And “kings” is also wrong. Matthew doesn’t say kings; he says “magi”.
And here’s a bonus error from the first line: the word “orient”. That word is doing a lot of work here, right?
Matthew says “from the east”, and that could mean a wide range of places, but it probably points to somewhere like Persia or Babylon. Today, though, we tend to think of “Orient” as more Far East Asia.
Anyway, the carol isn’t reporting facts. It’s doing something else. It’s taking a small biblical scene—you know, just a couple of verses—and turning it into this giant production.
We’ll see why later.
Before we dig into the lyrics, let’s first ask: who were these Magi anyway? We use that word as if people know what it means.
The Greek word is magoi, or something like that—a broad term for learned specialists.
These are the astrologers, the astronomers, the dream interpreters, the magicians, the alchemists—really the court scholars.
They’re the scientists of their day.
The point here is that Matthew is showing us something totally crazy that people will once again not understand for decades.
The point is that outsiders—Gentiles—are among the first people to recognize Israel’s Messiah.
Now let’s talk about those three gifts.
If Matthew gives us something to count, it’s not kings; it’s gifts. So this song turns those gifts into three soloists.
There’s the guy who brings gold, the guy who brings frankincense, and the guy who brings myrrh—kind of like an ancient sacred boy band.
So let’s look at each of those really narrowly for a minute.
The first one is the gold.
Born a king on Bethlehem’s plain,
Gold I bring to crown him again.
Let’s first clarify that Jesus is the king born on Bethlehem’s plain, not the king who’s currently singing.
And then look at “crown him again”. That’s kind of weird, right? Because Jesus has just showed up for the first time.
Now, “crowning” probably means “recognition” here, so it’s a poetic sense of the word. But it accidentally hints at this bigger truth: that Jesus is already a king long before people admit it.
And that crowning—especially that crowning again—will actually happen much, much later, at His second coming.
Second, let’s look at frankincense.
The verse goes:
Incense owns a Deity nigh.
I had never paid attention to this line, and I didn’t understand at all what it meant until I chased it down this week.
“Owns” is an older usage of the word, meaning “acknowledges” or “confesses”.
So the line really means that bringing incense confesses that God is near, because incense belongs to worship and temples.
So that’s what it means: I brought frankincense because God is here.
And finally,
Myrrh is mine, its a bitter perfume.
Myrrh is actually a resin from northeastern Africa and southern Arabia that’s used in perfumes and medicine—and especially embalming.
This carol drags Good Friday right into the nativity scene, which honestly is where it belongs.
The shadow is already there, even though He’s just been born.
Now, these solos are almost completely invented by the author of this hymn, but they’re not completely non-biblical either.
Isaiah 60 forms a kind of hidden scriptural backbone to this carol.
Isaiah pictures the nations streaming to God’s light and specifically mentions them bringing gold and frankincense, both of them being incredibly valuable.
Frankincense comes from the two words “frank” and “incense,” often meaning “pure” or “high quality”. It originally meant something like “true incense”—not that cheap imitation.
So Matthew isn’t just saying, you know, check the box, Isaiah 60, we got it. But the shape really matches, doesn’t it?
The Messiah draws the nations, and the nations bring their treasures—their wealth—with them.
And there’s also a little hint here of Psalm 72: kings bringing tribute.
You might have heard me just say “kings” instead of “wise men,” and that’s because Psalm 72 actually talks about kings.
So it’s not really that the later church tradition of kings at the manger instead of wise men is totally random. It’s just kind of smushing a couple of pieces of Scripture together and coming up with a nice story.
Now, I’ve mentioned the author of this hymn a couple of times.
His name is John Henry Hopkins Jr., and he wrote both the words and the tune of this song in 1857 for a Christmas pageant at General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he was the music director.
And this origin really explains why it’s built like a miniature drama.
There’s a chorus, and then there are three solo verses where each gift gets its own spotlight, and then there’s another chorus.
It’s literally written to be sung exactly like that in the pageant.
This song became super popular, so in 1863 he published it as a song, and it became one of the first American carols to go globally popular—which is really nice for a song about the nations showing up to worship this Bethlehem king.
So as we’ve seen, this is kind of a messy carol.
It’s a weird set of stories built on imagination and tradition made manifest. But whatever else is fuzzy, the message here, I think, is crystal clear:
Jesus is not a tribal secret.
He’s a king for all the nations.
And so that refrain—
Guide us to thy perfect light—
becomes a prayer.
Not just, look at that cool star, but God, lead us—all of us—to you.
So even if the song gets the headcount wrong and the job titles wrong, it does get the direction right.
Westward leading, still proceeding,
toward Jesus,
toward the manger,
toward Christmas.
That’s why we sing.
Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out VerseNotes Commons at: versenotes.org/commons.
We’ll be back tomorrow with another Carol of Christmas.
If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].
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