midnattsfunderingar

The first important theme is that the Temple was a microcosm of the whole creation. We do not have many artefacts from the second-Temple period with which to form an impression of the visual symbolic world of the day, but we have enough descriptions of the Temple to know that it was quite deliberately constructed so as to reflect the whole creation, the stars in the heavens on the one hand and the multiplicity of beautiful vegetation on the other [...]. Gregory Beale, in a thorough and careful work, asks why the new heaven and new earth of Revelation 21 and 22 is described as though the whole thing is a temple. His answer, on the basis of a wide survey of Temple-discourse throughout ancient Jewish history, is that the Temple was always supposed to represent creation, and that at last, according to Revelation, the purpose is accomplished: that which was represented by the Temple, namely the presence of the creator in his world, is completely achieved. There is thus no Temple in the New Jerusalem, because the whole new creation is itself the ultimate (and originally intended) Temple [...].

John Walton [...] argued strongly [...] that the creation-account in Genesis 1 would have been understood in the world of its day as the construction not nust of a garden but specifically of a temple, a place for the creator to live in. 'God created the heavens and the earth', creating them as a home for himself.

[...] Even if particular interpretations were local, or pecular to this or that writer, the overall picture, of the Temple and its intimate details designed as a way of drawing together the whole creation, was widely known precisely in those circles (intelligent and learned Jews in the Diaspora as well as in Jerusalemn) where we know Saul of Tarsus to have been brought up [...].

Threats to the Temple were threats to the king, and vice versa [...]. The destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians goes hand in hand with the overthrow of the monarcy [...]." (Ibid, s. 100-103).

 

"The two themes so far noted – Temple and cosmos, Temple and king – are both implicated in the third theme, of special importance for the study of the whole second-Temple period and, not least, the rise and self-understanding of the early Christian movement. What happens to the worldview, focused as it was on the Temple, when the king was killed and the Temple destroyed? Answer: it threatens to fall apart. YHWH has abandoned the Temple to its fate, thereby removing his presence from Israel and leaving the king and nation to their fate. The worldview can be put back together again only with the help of prophecies about the coming new Templw – which means, of course, the work of the true king and the restoration of the true cosmos. New Temple, new king, new creation: that is the combined promise of the exilic prophets." (Ibid, s. 104).