Busy day=light post: Quotes, allusions, and echoes of the destruction of Jerusalem in Hebrews 2.
I found one possible "impact" item that is not a quote, allusion, or echo:
2:5 "the coming inhabited world of which we speak"
According to my thesis, part of the impact of the destruction of Jerusalem in Hebrews is a systematic reorientation of space heavenward. The coming inhabited world is the heavenly realm, the world of the heavenly Jerusalem and the city of the living God (12:22). Of course Paul in Galatians already shows signs of this reorientation of space. We can easily imagine, however, that the destruction of Jerusalem might lead to a radical reorientation of this sort, where the truly civilized world is in heaven rather than on earth.
It is possible that 2:13a alludes to the current state of Jerusalem. The quote, "I will have put my faith in him" comes in Isaiah 8:18 in the LXX right after "I will wait for God, who has turned away his face from the house of Jacob." The original context was the destruction of the northern kingdom by Assyria, and the hope of restoration. A few verses earlier in the LXX read, "the houses of Jacob are in a snare, and the dwellers of Jerusalem in a pit. Therefore many among them shall be weak and fall and be crushed."
In short, this verse would be particularly appropriate to the time just after Jerusalem's destruction. But of course we cannot know for sure if the author paid any attention to the immediate context at all.
The next quote in 2:13b comes from the next verse in Isaiah 8:19, "Behold I and the children God gave me." In Hebrews these are the brothers of Christ that he is leading to glory, for whom he partook of flesh and blood. They are presumably a sign of salvation in Isaiah in a time of distress.
If the context of Jerusalem's destruction applied, we would think of Christ leading these children from the earth to the coming world.
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3 comments:
Hmm....I haven't read your book yet, so I do not know your full argument, but I am troubled by something.
Second Temple Judaism was already oriented heavenward. Parts of 1 Enoch, the parts that indicate heavenly journeys (Book of Watchers and the Astrological Book) are probably third-century BCE. This is just one example. Aramaic Levi, some parts of Testament of Levi, etc. And the turn heavenward, that the true temple is in heaven, etc., is nothing new and is not even distinctly Jewish / early Christian, although it takes a distinctively Jewish / Christian stamp in Hebrews. It seems to participate in a much wider environment in the Hellenistic period. Another is the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice which were at latest probably 1st century BCE. This orientation is nothing new with the Romans and nothing new with the destruction of Jerusalem.
This is something I have thought about myself, since I am following a Priestly tradition that gets transposed to heaven (in terms of both space and time), but the texts that depict this occur on both sides of the Jewish War chronologically (assuming Hebrews is after).
Perhaps we could, at best, say that the destruction of Jerusalem nurtured an impulse that was already there to focus on the heavenly Jerusalem with its sanctuary (Heb. 10) and throne (Heb. 4). But, I don't know if we can go the other way and say that these things are definitive echoes or impacts of the destruction. It provides a very nice context, a suggestive, a tantalizing suggestive, context.
On the other hand, we also have 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra which also draw on these earlier traditions, and clearly are responding to the destruction of the temple. The tradition provided lots of fodder to look forward to a heavenly existence. Perhaps the destruction intensified this.
You're right that there are some prior assumptions at work here. The main one is a sense that the earliest Christians did not look forward so much to eternity in heaven as to a kingdom on earth with Christ as the messianic king, the full restoration of the kingdom of Israel, etc...
So by talking of shift I am talking within early Christian thinking.
Yes. I see that within Christian thinking. If only we had more information of pre-70 Christianity (other than Paul) instead of trying to tease it out of later gospel sources, which always seem like an exercise in self-reflection (everyone always seems to see what they like best as earliest).
Revelation sees a future earthly existence, with the city of God descending upon the earth, also probably in response to the destruction of the temple.
So, the argument would be that Christians, by and large, pre-70 looked forward to the "kingdom on earth" while after the destruction, they (or, Hebrews at the very least) drew upon other aspects of Jewish traditions of a heavenly temple that had been around for centuries, although some like John of Patmos stuck with the older model, yet with an added urgency.
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