(3.) Outside the tent, but still within the consecrated precincts, was the court, fenced in by an enclosure, yet
TABERNACLE
HI
TABERNACLE
open to all the congregation as well as to the Levites, those only excepted who were ceremonially unclean. No Gentile might pass beyond the curtains of the en- trance, but every member of the priestly nation might thus far "draw near" to the presence of Jehovah. Here, therefore, stood tlie altar of biirnt-offerings, at which sacrifices in all their varieties were offered by penitent or thankful worshippers ( Exod. xxvii, 1-8; xxxviii, 1), the brazen laver at which those worship- pers purified themselves before they sacrificed, the priests before they entered into the sanctuary (xxx, 17-21). Here the graduated scale of holiness ended. Wliat Israel was to the world, fenced in and set apart, that the court of the tabernacle was to the surrounding- wilderness, just as the distinction between it and the sanctuary answered to that between the sons of Aaron and other Israelites; just as the idea of holiness culmi- nated personally in the high-priest, locally in the holy of holies.
V. Theories of Later Times. — 1. It is not probable that the elaborate symbolism of such a structure was under- stood by the rude and sensual multitude that came out of Egypt. In its fulness, perliaps, no mind but that of the lawgiver himself ever entered into it, and even for him, one half, and that the highest, of its meaning must have been altogetlier latent. Yet it was not the less, Avas perliaps the more fitted, on that account, to be an instrument for the education of the people. To the most ignorant and debased it was at least a witness of the nearness of the Divine King. It met the craving of the human heart, which prompts to worship, with an order that was neither idolatrous nor impure. It taught men that their fleshly nature was the hinderance to worship; that it rendered them unclean; that only by subduing it, killing it, as they killed the bullock and the goat, could they offer up an acceptable sacrifice ; that such a sacrifice was the condition of forgiveness, a higher sacrifice than any they could offer as the ground of that forgiveness. The sins of the past were consid- ered as belonging to the fleshly nature which was slain and offered, not to the true inner self of the worshipper. More thoughtful minds were led inevitably to higher truths. Tliey were not slow to see in the tabernacle the parable of God's presence manifested in creation. Darkness was as his pavilion (2 Sam. xxii, 12). He has made a tabernacle for the sun (Fsa. xix, 4), The heavens were spread out like its curtains. The beams of his chambers were in the mighty waters (civ, 2, 3: Isa. xl, 22; Lowth, De Sac. Poes. viii). The majesty of God seen in the storm and tempest was as of one who rides upon a cherub (2 Sam. xxi, 11). If the words " He that dwelleth between the cherubim" spoke on the one side of a special, localized manifestation of the Di- vine Presence, they spoke also on the other oi' that Presence as in the heaven of heavens, in the light of setting suns, in the blackness and the flashes of the thunder-clouds.
2. The thought thus uttered, essentiallj' poetical in its nature, had its fit place in the psalms and hymns of Israel. It lost its beauty, it led men on a false track, when it was formalized into a system. At a time wlien Judaism and Greek philosophy were alike effete, when a feeble physical science which could read nothing but its own thoughts in the symbols of an older and deeper system was after its own fashion rationalizing the my- thology of heathenism, there were found Jewish writers willing to apply the same principle of interpretation to the tabernacle and its order. In that way, it seemed to them, they would secure the respect even of the men of letters who could not bring themselves to be prose- lytes. The result appears in Josephus and in Philo, in part also in Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Thus interpreted, the entire significance of the two tables of the covenant and their place within the ark disap- peared, and the truths which the whole order repre- sented became cosmicul instead of ethical. If the spe- cial idiosyncracy of one writer (Philo, De Profttg.) led
him to see in the holy of holies and the sanctuary that which answered to the Platonic distinction between the visible (aia^ijTci) and the spiritual (j'ojyrrt), the coarser, less intelligent Josephus goes still more completely into the new system. The holy of holies is the visible fir- mament in which God dwells, the sanctuary is the earth and sea which men inhabit (•lM^ iii, C, 4, 7 ; 7, 7). The twelve loaves of the shew-bread represented the twelve months of the year, the twelve signs of the zodiac. The seven lamps were the seven planets. The four colors of the vail were the four elements {<jToi\t'i(i), air, fire, water, earth. Even the wings of the cherubim were, in the eyes of some, the two hemispheres of the universe, or the constellations of the greater and the lesser bears (Clem. Alex. *S7ro??i. v, 35). The table of shew-bread and the altar of incense stood on the north, because north winds were most fruitful ; the lamp on the south, because the motions of the planets were south- ward (ibiii. § 34, 35). We need not follow such a sys- tem of interpretation further. It was not unnatural that the authority with which it started should secure for it considerable respect. We find it reappearing in some Christian writers — Chrysostom (Horn, in Jounii. Bapt.) and Theodoret (Clucest. in Exod.'); in some Jew- ish— Ben-Uzziel, Kimchi, Abarbanel (Bithr, St/mbul. i, 103 sq.). It was well for Christian thought that the Church had in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse of St. John that which helped to save it i'rom the pedantic puerilities of this physico-theok>gy. It is curious to note how in Clement of Alexandria the two systems of interpretation cross each other, leading sometimes to extravagances like those in the text, sometimes to thoughts at once lofty and true. Some of these have already been noticed. Others, not to be passed over, are that the seven lamps set forth the va- ried degrees and forms (TroXjijitfpwc (cni TroXyrpoTTitit) of God's revelation, the form and the attitude of the cherubim, the union of active ministry and grateful, ceaseless contemplation (Strom, v, 36, 37).