Part 3: Echoes of Destruction

I've set this final part of my paper, "Heaven as the True House of God," to post at 10:30am, just as I'm supposed to get up to read it :-)

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Reconfiguration of the Tent

3. Echoes of Destruction
One of the arguments often made against a post-70 date for Hebrews is the idea that the author surely would have mentioned the destruction of the temple to reinforce his argument. Luke Timothy Johnson puts it this way: “one would think that some reference would naturally be made, not to a covenant growing obsolescent and a cult being ineffective, but rather to a cult proven to be broken and a cult demonstrated by God’s action as a thing of the past.” It would go well beyond the scope of this paper to mount a full argument for such a date. We will merely mention in response to Johnson that his comment assumes that the destruction of the temple would be an argument for some further point that the old covenant is no longer in force. We would argue the opposite, namely, that the author argues that the “old covenant” is no longer in force to help the audience cope with the more fundamental datum: God’s allowance of Jerusalem and its temple to be destroyed. Mention of the temple’s destruction would not be an argument the author fails to mention but the fundamental exigence of the sermon, known to all.

It is possible, however, that the author does allude to the destruction of Jerusalem. The most obvious possibility is Hebrews 13:14: “We do not have a city that remains here but we are seeking the one that is about [to come].” Given that the author has just used the metaphor of Jesus suffering outside the gate (13:11) and of believers going outside the camp (13:13), the most likely city in view is surely Jerusalem. Hebrews 11 may thus also allude to the destruction of Jerusalem in its use of the Abraham story from Genesis. The author speaks of how Abraham and the patriarchs sojourned as in a foreign land (11:9). Abraham was “looking forward to the city having foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (11:10). People like Abraham, which surely includes the audience in their situation, are seeking a homeland (11:14). They are desiring a better homeland than the one from which they came, a heavenly one, and God has prepared a city for them there (11:16).

The author thus uses the story of Abraham’s sojourning in a foreign land as an allegory for the current existence of the audience in this world. The heavenly city that God has prepared shows up in Hebrews 12:22-23, where the author now draws on the Sinai story of Exodus (12:18-21) as an antitype of the new covenant assembly to which the audience belongs. “You have come to Mt. Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem and ten thousand angels in assembly” (12:22). The image combines an allusion to Mt. Sinai and the earthly Jerusalem to contrast the heavenly reality in which the audience now participates. While these images do not require us to see an allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem, they would be particularly meaningful if they did so allude.

It is harder to find clear echoes of Jerusalem’s destruction in other citations in Hebrews. Some, like David deSilva, would claim that Hebrews’ allusions actually work in the opposite direction. For example, 10:2 argues for the inefficacy of Levitical sacrifices with the rhetorical question, “Would they not have stopped being offered … once the worshippers had been cleansed?” On a surface level, this question seems to imply that Levitical sacrifices had not ceased being offered at the time of writing. deSilva thus dates Hebrews to the time previous to the destruction of the temple.

However, deSilva’s reading is not at all necessary and is in our opinion anachronistic. Several authors after 70CE did speak of the sacrificial system in the present tense, which negates our common sense on how the author might word things after the temple’s destruction. We also recognize in this particular case that the author was not so much addressing the time of the audience as the fact that sacrifices never stopped throughout “biblical history” as found in the Jewish Scriptures. Would the sacrifices throughout the time of the old covenant not have stopped a long time ago if any of them had actually taken away sins? No, God instead prepared a body for Christ (10:5). The setting of the comment is thus the time before Christ far more than the time of Hebrews’ writing.

If Hebrews were written not long after the temple’s destruction, a number of comments and uses of Scripture would likely echo various aspects of this event. For example, Hebrews 12:4-13 urges the audience to “endure leading to discipline” and quotes Proverbs 3:11-12. If Hebrews were written after the temple’s destruction, we can imagine that the audience might hear these words as thinly veiled admonition in light of the disgrace and discouragement that not only non-Christian but Christian Jews as well must have endured in the wake of Jerusalem's fall. “Although Jesus was a son, he learned obedience through the things he suffered” (5:8). So ought the audience to endure the Lord’s discipline as training.

The potential metaleptic carry over would be even more ominous in the light of the author’s citation of Deuteronomy 32, the Song of Moses. We already encountered the author’s use of one Greek version of this text in 1:6, where it may very well carry with it the overtones of coming judgment and vindication from Deuteronomy 32:43 (LXX). Intriguingly, the author draws on this passage twice again in Hebrews 10:30 and 31: “‘Vengeance is for me; I will repay,’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’” The first is from Deuteronomy 32:35; the second from 32:36. What is interesting about these citations is that the author applies them to believers who turn away from the living God (3:12), who “fall away” (6:6), who thus “continue to sin after receiving a knowledge of the truth” (10:26) and sell their birthright (12:16). The author turns a passage in Deuteronomy about the vindication of God’s people and the judgment of their enemies into the potential judgment of failed believers and, just perhaps, a thinly veiled explanation for the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple (cf. Matt. 22:7).

We find a similar series of quotations from a passage in Hebrews 2:13: “‘I will put my trust in him’ and ‘Behold I and the children God gave me.’” The first is based in Isaiah 8:17 (LXX) and the second in 8:18. In Isaiah, the context leading up to these verses speaks of the disobedience and hardness of God’s people (8:11-12; LXX). 8:14-17 speaks of the house of Jacob in Jerusalem lying in a trap, many falling, and God having turned his face from the house of Jacob. It is at this point that we hear the words Hebrews quotes, now put on the lips of Christ. If Hebrews were written after the destruction of Jerusalem, these words that at first glance seem so randomly placed on Jesus’ lips in relation to the audience, suddenly take on a different perspective. Despite the fact that God has seemed to turn his face from the house of Jacob, Christ remains as their leader to salvation.

4. Conclusion
In the preceding minutes we have tried to do two things. First, we have tried to show how Hebrews has reinterpreted various Pentateuchal Scriptures relating to the wilderness tabernacle in the light of its author’s theology. What in the Jewish Scriptures are literal depictions of literal structures that were actually thought to effect good relations and reconciliation with YHWH are now reconfigured as symbolic and allegorical pointers toward a new reality. That reality is of course the definitive atonement provided by Jesus Christ. The earthly house of God is now understood as a shadowy illustration of the true house of God, the heavenly one. This heavenly tent corresponds most literally to heaven itself, where God’s throne is and to which Christ ascended through the heavens. But in many respects the author’s metaphorical appropriation of the wilderness tent uses language that makes it a somewhat abstract “space” where Christ’s death on the cross truly atones for sins.

The final part of our presentation then looked for possible echoes of the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in the rest of the sermon, focusing particularly on the way the author used Scripture. The strongest possible allusions come from the author’s discussion of the sojourner Abraham seeking a city and a homeland, as well as the heavenly Zion as a counterpart to Mt. Sinai. But the author’s use of passages relating to God’s discipline and judgment may carry such overtones as well. Finally, the author’s use of Isaiah 8 has very strong connotations of God’s preservation of a remnant in the wake of the judgment of broader Israel. None of these citations prove that the author wrote after Jerusalem’s demise, but they certainly would cohere well with it and work toward what might constitute a broader cumulative case.