Wilderness Tabernacle and Eschatological Temple: A Study in Temple Symbolism in Hebrews in the Light of Attitudes to the Temple in the Literature of Middle Judaism

Abstract

The literature of middle Judaism, including the Epistle to the Hebrews, contains considerable temple symbolism. Through a careful examination of such symbolism, this study demonstrates that the wilderness tabernacle is not seen as an inferior copy of a heavenly sanctuary in Hebrews. Rather, it prefigures the eschatological dwelling of God with his people, which is pictured in Hebrews as a heavenly temple. This eschatological reality is inaugurated with the exaltation of Jesus to God’s right hand, and access to it is available proleptically to God’s people in the present.

The literature of middle Judaism is explored in terms of the attitudes to the temple disclosed in the various documents. Some texts portray a positive attitude to the temple, seeing it as the dwelling place of God, a microcosm of the universe and a link between heaven and earth. Other texts portray a sense of dissatisfaction with the temple that surfaces in a variety of ways, but is nearly always resolved with reference to a heavenly temple. Such texts often ignore the Second Temple altogether. The Qumran community’s dissatisfaction with the Jerusalem temple led to a withdrawal into the Judean desert. The community compensated for the lack of a physical temple by referring to either a heavenly or an eschatological temple. Some texts anticipate the eschatological temple that God was expected to construct in the last days, while in other texts the community viewed itself as a temple. In this connection, community members believed that they were participating in angelic worship and they also envisaged angels as present with them in the Judean desert. Apocalyptic literature reports heavenly journeys and a heavenly priesthood, marginalising the earthly temple and priesthood. Some texts that respond to the fall of the temple portray a positive attitude to the temple and other texts express a negative attitude. In both cases, however, there is the anticipation of an eschatological temple to be built by God. The evidence is mixed, but in texts anticipating an eschatological temple, it seems to be conceived as a physical building in Jerusalem, sometimes of gigantic proportions. Dissatisfaction with the Jerusalem temple also emerges in Hebrews, despite the lack of explicit reference to it. The writer claims that the wilderness tabernacle anticipates the heavenly, eschatological temple, of which Christ is a minister. The wilderness journeys of the people of God in the past are a paradigm for the pilgrimage of the people of God in the present. However, their destination is not the land of Canaan, but God’s rest in the heavenly temple in the world to come. Jerusalem and temple are negated in favour of the true tent “pitched” by the Lord with the exaltation of Christ to God’s right hand, the heavenly Jerusalem, the city to come, where Jesus is now enthroned.