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The SkyePod - Temple Theology (Rerelease)
00:23:05
Carmen Imes joins to talk about the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant—and how much of it is redeemed Egyptian religious imagery. Why is the New Jerusalem in Revelation cubic shaped? Were Egyptian statues’ noses cut off on purpose? ...
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- [00:00]
Sky Jetani
Like, there's people who like, well, we're Christians, we're forgiven, we have it all. You know, God's on our side, therefore we get a pass on what we do. Or this, that it's like, no, no, you got it completely backwards. You have greater responsibility, not greater license. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Skypod. I'm Sky Jetani and this is brought to you by Holy Post Media. I am joined by a Holy Post pundit and Old Testament scholar, Carmen Imes. Carmen, welcome back.
- [00:39]
Carmen Imes
Great to be back.
- [00:40]
Sky Jetani
Okay, so let me give you a little bit of background on what we're going to be talking about for gosh, since 2014, I have been writing a daily devotional called With God Daily. We've done all kinds of different topics. And as I was thinking about Planning ahead for 2025, I decided I wanted to do a series. I don't know how long it's going to be, probably months, tracing the theme of the temple or temples or temple theology through the Bible. And I've got a stack of books I've been reading. I've been reading and researching what other scholars have done online. I'm beginning to outline that series and I thought I really want to talk to an Old Testament scholar friend and get some of their takes on this. And Carmen, I found out you just finished working on a book on exactly this topic, which I haven't seen yet. But tell us as we jump into this, what is the book and when can we expect it?
- [01:30]
Carmen Imes
Yeah. So viewers or listeners might be familiar with my previous books which we've talked about on this podcast. So Bearing God's Name and Being God's Image. This is the third installment. So we now have a trilogy and it's called Becoming God's why the Church Still Matters. I'm addressing the question of why bother going to church? Why bother being part of a community that's flawed, that has, you know, we all know the me too church too movement and kind of waves of deconstruction or disillusionment with organized Christianity. And what I thought would might be helpful is to look back at the Bible and say, what are the expectations for the community of faith gathered around the presence of God? And I think we've been trained sometimes in the west to read the Bible through individualistic eyes. It's all about me and my destiny and my self actualization or whatever. And I wanted to, to sort of recover the communal dimensions of our faith and why it matters for us to meet together and give shared attention to something, to wait for God together. And so I'm tracing in the book the theme of the gathered people of God and how God's presence comes among his people. And so that puts me in all the temple texts because that is kind of a focal point in Israel's history for gathering around God's presence.
- [02:56]
Sky Jetani
Okay, that brings up the first question I really wanted to begin with here. As Christians, we don't talk about temples. We don't tend to think about temple stuff. We certainly don't engage in temple theology. We assume that's all Old Testament stuff, and we don't have a temple anymore. And it's irrelevant to our understanding of our faith and our reading of the New Testament. Why is that assumption wrong? Why do we need to understand this idea of temples and temple theology as New Testament Christians?
- [03:26]
Carmen Imes
Well, the temple in the Old Testament is super important because it's the resolution to the problem that was introduced in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve are alienated from the presence of God, when. When God gives Moses the instructions to build the tabernacle on Mount Sinai. It's a way of saying, hey, I want to come back together and be in close proximity with you again. I want to dwell in your midst. And so here's a way to safely do that, to have the appropriate barriers in place so that your sinfulness or your ritual impurity doesn't cause any problems. Here's how I can be with you, and you can be with me. So this is a really good thing and is really important. In the Old Testament, we don't think about it because there's a big shift in the New Testament where Jesus identifies himself as the temple. And then Paul and other New Testament writers identify the church as the dwelling place of God. And so we are the body of Christ. So there's all kinds of metaphorical stuff going on, but. But Christ replaces the temple as the physical expression of the presence of God among us. And then when Christ ascends to heaven and sends the Spirit, the Spirit comes on people who are gathered to worship God, and we become that temple, that mediation of the presence of God on earth. And so we might not think of temple because we don't go to a building the way they did. We have maybe church buildings that we go to, but it's not the same thing as the temple in the Old Testament. It's not sacred space. There's nobody at the door making sure that everybody's in a state of ritual purity before they walk in the door. Can you just imagine when was the first day of your last menstrual cycle. They're asking you this as you walk into church to make sure that we're not polluting sacred space. No, that is not what we have in the New Testament. There's a. There's a democratization of God's presence. Everyone, you know, as a kingdom of priests is allowed to be in the presence of God. There's. There's not a concern anymore with ritual purity because we don't have sort of designated sacred space. Instead, we're kind of spreading sacred space throughout the earth.
- [05:46]
Sky Jetani
Yeah. What I. What I hear you saying, and maybe this connects with what some people without deep theological training may understand, is there's all this rhetoric in Christian communities about how our faith is about living in communion with God or living in relationship with God or living in God's presence. And that idea of God's people and God's presence sharing the same space is a theme that runs throughout the entire Bible, as you said, from the Garden of Eden all the way through to the New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation. Yeah, but the way and the framework with which we understand our relationship with God and our communion with him is kind of prefigured in the Old Covenant and through the physical structure of the tabernacle and the temple. So to understand how that all operated in the Old Testament gives us an understanding of how it operates in our current relationship with God in the New Testament. So it's all integrated. It's primarily about relationship and presence, not just rituals and things that don't matter anymore.
- [06:49]
Carmen Imes
Right.
- [06:50]
Sky Jetani
Okay, so let's back up even a step further from scripture and help us understand. How were temples, how did temples function? What did they do in the ancient near east generally? And how did God's people, the Israelites, share that perspective about temples? Or how did the. The way their temple functioned with the God of Israel differ from other ancient Near Eastern.
- [07:15]
Carmen Imes
Yeah, I love that. So a year ago, right now, I was in Egypt on a tour looking at so many temples, and it was fascinating to see over and over again examples of the way temples were constructed, the kind of art that decorated it, the kind of rituals that we could see evidence in, the art of, the kinds of rituals that they performed there. Learned so much about the context that the Israelites would have been coming out of as they left Egypt and then built their own tabernacle. So a couple of things stood out to me. One, all of the temples of Egypt have garden imagery in them. The pillars are not just stone pillars, but they're flowers that are open to the heavens. You know, either lotus flowers or papyrus stalks. The ceilings, where the ceilings are intact. In Egyptian temples, they're painted blue with yellow stars all over it, as if it's the night sky, which is essentially what you get in the Israelite Tabernacle because they make this purpley blue curtain that goes overhead and it's got gold threads in it which would reflect the light of the lampstand. So you'd get this, a similar effect in the Israelite Tabernacle. So there's a sense of. In which the temple is a microcosm of the universe or of the created world. And it's a place. In Egyptian thinking, the temple brings order to chaos. It's like carving out order from the sands of Egypt. And there are layers or levels of access to sacred presence. So there are priests who mediate this presence by. By bringing the sacrifices, bringing the offerings. Offerings would be a better way of putting it for an Egyptian context. They're bringing offerings to the deity. In their case, the deity is often a dead pharaoh who was thought to be the physical embodiment of. Of a deity. So when someone becomes pharaoh, they're called the son of Ra or son of Re, the sun God. And then after death, they become Osiris, who's the God of the underworld. And so there's this. This kind of, like, physical representation of the deity in the pharaoh. And so Pharaoh is pictured everywhere as worshiping the deity, but also being worshiped after death, as sometimes there's images that merge Pharaoh and the deity. It's like the deity with Pharaoh. Pharaoh's face on it, whatever. It's really, really interesting, which has all kinds of resonance for the topic we've talked about before, the image of God, because we talked about how when God creates humans as his image. The really radical thing about this is that in other ancient Near Eastern contexts, like. Like in Egypt, only the king is the image of God. By image, they're thinking of something very physical. You're. The. You're. You're the physical representative of the deity on Earth. And for Egyptians, that's Pharaoh. For the Israelites, it's. Every single person is a signal or a symbol of the presence of God and is pointing to that in some way. So I was struck, as I looked at all these temples, by how much of the imagery that I was seeing was then reused by the Israelite tabernacle. I assumed I'm writing a commentary on Exodus, and when I went to Egypt, I was just past the Red Sea. So I just assumed that I would be sort of done with Egypt. And it was a good time to go because I had finished the Egypt part of the book. And what really shocked me was how much I saw in these temples and tombs that related to the second half of the book of Exodus, the building of the tabernacle and the gathering around God's presence at Sinai. Things like the Israelite Tabernacle has the Ark of the Covenant, this fancy box with poles, carrying poles.
- [11:20]
Sky Jetani
It's the Indiana Jones thing. People know Indiana Jones.
- [11:23]
Carmen Imes
Right, right, right, right, yes. And it has winged guardian like cherubim on the lid of the box. Well, you walk into the museum in Cairo and if you look at the King Tut exhibit, right away you notice there's a fancy box with carrying poles and it's got a deity on top. It's got Anubis, the God of the underworld. And this is something that he felt he needed to have with him in the. And, and every temple has scenes carved into the stone walls where priests are carrying a fancy box on poles on their shoulders. And so it's like, oh, when, when God told them to do this, this was not like, let me make up something entirely new that you've never seen before. It was, let me take symbols that you associate with sacred space and with divine presence and I'm going to co opt those symbols, them, so that you can see that I am replacing what you came to understand as, as the deities of Egypt or those worthy of worship. No, you need to worship me instead.
- [12:39]
Sky Jetani
This is a huge topic. And I, and I know that when people first learn some of this stuff, it kind of freaks them out because we don't have at our fingertips the ancient Near Eastern cultures. And we don't, we aren't familiar with all this stuff.
- [12:54]
Caitlin
And so when we open up our.
- [12:55]
Sky Jetani
Bibles and we read whatever, whether it's the creation narrative or the, the tabernacle descriptions and the temple ceremonies and all these different things that you read about in the, in the Old Testament, we assume that this is all unique and completely original. It came directly from God to the Israelites.
- [13:13]
Carmen Imes
It's all brand new.
- [13:14]
Sky Jetani
It's all brand new. And, and yet what we know from archeology and all this study of the ancient near east is, most of it is not new. It's adapted from other pagan cultures. And the description of the tabernacle and the temple and the garden imagery and the holy space, as you mentioned, the blue cloth and the star, all that stuff is taken from pagan temples, even the Ark of the Covenant in some ways is taken. So it freaks people out. And yet it fits the pattern you see throughout the Scriptures. I mean, even the use of Hebrew or Greek in the New Testament to transmit the truths of God. Those are pre existing languages that God condescends to and uses to communicate divine truths. Why would he not use pre existing architecture symbols?
- [14:05]
Carmen Imes
God is a good communicator. He used languages and symbols that they already understand in order to make powerful points.
- [14:13]
Sky Jetani
Right. But the hard part becomes, sorry, but the hard part becomes where do those symbols get redefined or changed in a way that's different from Egypt or different from Mesopotamia or where the creation narrative in Genesis copies parts of these other flood narratives or creation errors? But how are they different? Because in those differences, God seems to be saying something important. Yes, so you already mentioned that the image of God idea that the, the Hebrews saw that as not belonging just to the king, but to all people creating God's image. What other differences existed in the Hebrew tabernacle or temple from Egyptian temples, for example, that grab your attention going, oh, this is where the God of Israel is declaring his uniqueness. Yes, from these pagan deities.
- [15:02]
Carmen Imes
This is the right question to ask. I mean, you're right that people kind of can be a little jarred by the similarities and think, oh, is there, is the Bible not unique? No, there's something really unique happening, but it's being communicated using conventional symbols. So I mentioned the Ark of the Covenant with the cherubim on top with their wings facing each other. Every temple you go to, every like, religious scene that you see on the walls of, of ancient monuments in Egypt has winged creatures that are like protective around the deity or the pharaoh in the center. And what's really interesting is that Israel's fancy box, the Ark of the Covenant, does not have a deity on top. It only has the winged protectors. And there's, there's emptiness in the center where you would expect to find Anubis or, or the cartouche of the king or something in, in the images, Yahweh has decided that he does not want to be represented by an image of stone or gold or metal. He says worship, worship means to use New Testament terms in spirit. And in truth, I, I can't be represented by wood or stone. In part, I think Tim Mackey gets this right in his Bible Project video on the image of God when he says God tells them not to make any idols because he's already made images and, and God, God is choosing animate humans to represent him rather than Something dead. And that has all kinds of significance because all around Egypt you have these statues of pharaoh, and they would have gone through a special ceremony to open the mouth of Pharaoh, to sort of breathe the breath of the gods into his nostrils. And this is probably why there's some debate about this, but this is probably why there are so many ancient statues missing their noses is not just because the nose is the part that breaks off if the statue falls over, because there are like sometimes like a false beard that sticks out even farther than the nose. And the beard isn't chopped off, but the nose is. In Egyptian thought, if you cut off the nose, it's preventing the soul from traveling in and out of this statue. So they would have gone through some kind of ceremony to animate the statue by breathing into its nose. And if you cut the nose off, then it can't have that life in it, and it's dead now.
- [17:35]
Sky Jetani
So either a rival cult or some other empire comes in and wants to destroy the existing gods. So they cut off the noses of those idols.
- [17:44]
Carmen Imes
Exactly.
- [17:44]
Sky Jetani
So they can no longer. Oh, that's fine.
- [17:47]
Carmen Imes
It's the decommissioning process for an idol is to cut off his nose. This is what some scholars think.
- [17:53]
Sky Jetani
Okay. So obviously there's a link there to what we read in Genesis of God forming the man from the dust of.
- [18:00]
Carmen Imes
The earth and breathing into his nostrils.
- [18:03]
Sky Jetani
And so God's image, his icon, his idol is a living, breathing, walking, thinking human person, not a piece of stone or gold. Let's go to the Genesis thing. You mentioned already how the Egyptian temples and the Israelite temple had a lot of garden imagery. And I always. I don't know if this is a good analogy or not, but I'm thinking back to elementary school when I had to do book reports and we'd make dioramas. Yeah, right. You use a shoebox and you create a little scene that depicts, you know, the story of the book. And in a way, these ancient Near Eastern temples were dioramas of the cosmos.
- [18:40]
Carmen Imes
I like that.
- [18:41]
Sky Jetani
Yeah, right. It's a depiction of what the earth is supposed to be in the heavens. And the. So how does temple imagery from the ancient world inform the way we read the creation account in Genesis? And are there. I know there's scholarly debate about some of this stuff. And how do you read that? And where do you think it's well applied and where do you think it may be over applied?
- [19:04]
Carmen Imes
Yeah. So this. So the. The basic debate, for those who haven't kind of heard it, is some Bible scholars say that Genesis 1 is a, is a cosmic temple text. That it's not just about a garden or God creating the world, but that God's setting up or bringing order to the world so that it can function the way that a temple does. And there are signals in this text in Genesis 1 that sound temple ish. One example is in verse 14, when God puts the lights in the sky to separate the day from the night. It says, let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years. So before we even have humans in chapter one, we have the establishment of rituals and festivals that relate to the human calendar. It's just kind of fascinating to have that echo there. We have the structure of Genesis 1 into seven days fits with, I mean, kind of throughout the ancient world, there's sevens related to temples. Seven, a seven day ordination ceremony or inauguration ceremony. In, in Exodus, when they're setting up the tabernacle, God speaks. Moses is in the presence of God for seven days. And on the seventh day, God starts speaking and he gives him seven speeches about what to build. And the seventh speech is about the Sabbath. And there's just all kinds of echoes. So, so the question, the debate is, is which direction do these references go? So when I was in seminary, I read Greg Beale's book, the Temple and the Church's Mission. Beale argues that that Eden was a temple and that God's intention was for the boundaries of that sacred space to keep expanding out until it enveloped the whole world. And that's why in Revelation 21 and 22, when the new Jerusalem is coming down out of heaven, it's a cubic shape. Shape, it's as high as and as wide as it is long because the only other cubic dimension we get in the Bible is the holy of holies. So the idea, it's like the, the most holy place of God's presence has now expanded to fill the entire cosmos. And there's a mention in Revelation 21 and 22 that there's no longer a temple because God's presence is everywhere. So there does seem to be kind of a direction of spreading throughout the Bible. So. So my doctoral mentor was Dan Block, and he contributed to a volume in honor of Greg Beal, the one who wrote the Temple of the Church's Mission. And scholars do funny things sometimes. Dan Block's way of honoring Greg Beale was to argue against him that his essay in this volume is on why Eden is not a temple.
- [22:12]
Sky Jetani
Oh, interesting.
- [22:13]
Caitlin
Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually, plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber. So head over to holypost.com skypod and sign up for just $5 a month. Not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never.
- [22:33]
Sky Jetani
Have to hear this dumb announcement again.
- [22:35]
Caitlin
But you'll also get access to everything else at Holy Post plus, including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin, Chess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe.