Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 72:1 (NA 2021)
Article: ‘The True Tabernacle’ Of Hebrews 8:2 Future Dwelling With People Or Heavenly Dwelling Place?
Author: Nicholas J. Moore

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‘The True Tabernacle’ Of Hebrews 8:2
Future Dwelling With People Or Heavenly Dwelling Place?

Nicholas J. Moore

Academic Dean and Lecturer in New Testament
Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham University
[email protected]

Abstract

Many scholars hold that the Letter to the Hebrews portrays heaven as God’s true tabernacle, the original from which the Mosaic tabernacle was derived. Recently Philip Church, building on work by Lincoln Hurst, has argued that the heavenly tabernacle instead represents God’s eschatological dwelling with his people, and that the Mosaic tabernacle (and the temple that followed it) was a prior sketch and foreshadowing of this yet-future reality. They advance a number of important arguments which have not been systematically addressed by those who read the true tabernacle as primarily heavenly in a spatial and ‘vertical’ sense. This article examines and rebuts the arguments of Hurst and Church. First, the case for the ‘eschatological dwelling’ position is outlined; then I make two wider points regarding the cosmological presuppositions that underlie this view; next, the meaning of the key terminology in Hebrews 8–9, especially ὑπόδειγμα, is examined; finally, Hebrews’ perspective on the heavenly tabernacle is articulated with an eye to both cosmology and eschatology. Only by integrating spatial and temporal categories can a satisfactory account of God’s heavenly dwelling be offered.

1. Introduction1

Many Jewish apocalyptic texts associate heaven with a sanctuary, or envisage a celestial temple within heaven. An analogy between universe and temple is also drawn by some Graeco-Roman writers (e.g. Cicero, De Rep. 6.15; Plutarch, Tranq. An. 20), a notion that is developed in a distinctively Jewish direction by Philo of Alexandria (e.g. Spec. Laws 1.66–67). Within the New Testament, the book of

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Revelation and the Letter to the Hebrews offer the most extended presentations of this idea. However, beyond the clear association of heaven with sanctuary in both texts, a number of questions remain contested: is the heavenly sanctuary symbolic of something else (such as the new age, the people of God), or does it have a more actual, spatial referent? When does it come into existence, and when and how is it inaugurated? And (in the case of Revelation especially) does it persist into the age to come?

Philip Church has recently made an extensive and detailed case that temple imagery in Hebrews relates to the eschatological dw...