“The city was built in a square, and its length was equal to its width...The wall was made of jasper, and the city was made of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundation stones of the city walls were decorated with every kind of jewel. The first foundation was jasper, the second was sapphire, the third was chalcedony, the fourth was emerald, the fifth was onyx, the sixth was carnelian, the seventh was chrysolite, the eighth was beryl, the ninth was topaz, the tenth was chrysoprase, the eleventh was jacinth, and the twelfth was amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate having been made from a single pearl. And the street of the city was made of pure gold as clear as glass. I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the city’s temple” (Revelation 21:16 -22, The New Jerusalem).
Angkor Wat, a Hindu-Buddhist temple complex in Cambodia is considered the largest religious structure in the world. Dedicated to the deity Vishnu, the supreme being of the universe, it is described as "one of these temples, a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo". Yet, what of it and that of Solomon? What is the relevance of reverence other than relic of the bygone times?
The western wall of the Second Temple's courtyard stands as the main remnant of its physical structure on a plateau of rock named Mount Moria on the eastern flank of Jerusalem, which had for centuries dominated the skyline of the city. The Second Temple was built in 515 BC after the destruction of King Solomon’s First Temple that stood there for 410 years. In 586 BC, Nabuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon "set fire to the Temple of Yahweh, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem" (2 Kings 25:9). The confronting end of 2 Kings saw everything taken away from Jerusalem as the city was destroyed together with the temple in a colossal tragedy followed by another exile of the Israelites.
It is on the same Mount Moria many generations back that Abraham made a covenant with God. A man named Abram in Mesopotamia had come by a profound insight as it was taught by Jewish scholars - that there existed unique, intangible and omnipotent, a single deity that created this universe. Rather than stay in a city polluted by idolatry of other gods, Abram had chosen instead to leave his home, travelling with his family to the land that would one day be called Judaea. All this was part of the divine plan. God, appearing to Abram had told him that despite the great age of his childless wife, she would bear him a son and that his descendants would one day inherit a Promised Land. As a token of this, Abram was given a new name, Abraham, and commanded by God many divine instructions including sacrifice of the most precious treasure he had being the only son Isaac. As Abraham was willing to offer this, God confirmed the promise that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky as a covenant "and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me" (Genesis 22:18). Past and future, earth and heaven, mortal endeavours and divine presence - all had stood revealed as conjoined. Not long after, Jerusalem had come under Israelite control under a one-time shepherd boy and harpist by the name of David from a small town called Bethlehem. David had risen to become king over the whole of Israel and was shown the spot where the First Temple would be built by his son Solomon. Solomon - a king of wealth and wisdom that his name would ever after serve the Jews as a byword for splendour - made Mount Moria the mountain of the house of God. It was Solomon, after the completion of the temple, who had placed in the Holy of Holies the greatest treasure that the Israelites possessed: a gilded chest or the Ark, made to precise specifications laid down by God himself and in which his presence was manifest on earth. This then, was the glory of Israel: that its temple was truly the house of God.
Such a glory was not merely given: it had to be earned in this world of the Old Testament. The charge laid upon his people by God, to worship him as was his due, came with warnings. "See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse - the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse, if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 11 :26-29). Over the centuries that followed Solomon's building of the First Temple, the people had repeatedly strayed, and after four hundred years of disobedience, they had reaped a bitter harvest. First, the Assyrians conquered the north of the Promised Land: ten of the twelve tribes who traced their lineage back to Israel had been taken into captivity, and vanished into the maw of Mesopotamia. Not even the fall of Assyria to Babylon in 612 BC had seen them return. Then, in 587 BC, it had been the turn of Judah, the kingdom that took its name from the fourth son of Israel and of its capital, Jerusalem. The king of Babylon had taken the city by storm. Nothing of the temple built by Solomon, nor its fittings of cypress wood nor its gilded gates nor its bronze pillars ornamented with pomegranates had been spared. Only ruins and weeds remained. When in her turn Babylon had fallen and the Persians had wrested from her the mantle of empire, and Cyrus had given permission for the Second Temple to be rebuilt, the complex that arose on Mount Moria was merely a shadow of what had stood before. Starkest of all the reminders of vanished glories was the Holy of Holies. The Ark, upon which the glory of God Himself, in a cloud of impenetrable darkness had been accustomed to descend, was gone. No one could say for certain what its fate had been. Only the block of stone seen by Pompey the Great when he captured the temple and stepped into the chamber, bare and unadorned, served to mark the spot where it had once stood.
Throughout its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times and attacked 52 times. So it is not surprising that Pompey captured Jerusalem during the great siege of 63BC. What of the temple? Tom Holland described that in all the world, there stood only a single shrine regarded by the vast majority of his devotees as legitimate. Sacrifices were practised across the Mediterranean yet the mystery for which this temple was notorious lay deep within the complex: a chamber treasured by the Jews as the single holiest place in the world. With such reverence did they regard this room that no one was permitted to enter it except for their high priest and even then, only once a year. To the Jews, there was only the one God and that the temple stood as a replica of the universe that He alone had brought into being. In the robes worn by the high priest were to be seen mirrors held up to the cosmos, in the rituals he performed, an echo of the divine labour of creation at the beginning of time, on the golden plate he wore on his forehead, an awesome inscription that of the name of God himself, which sacred custom ordained should only ever be uttered by the high priest, and even then only once a year, when he went into the Holy of the Holies.
To desecrate the temple was to desecrate the universe itself.
So imagine when the temple was destroyed for the third time by Pompey. Pompey's men in capturing the temple had already stormed its outer courtyard. The priests, surprised as they were pouring libations and burning incense, had not so much as paused in their rites. Now, piled up in the outer courtyard where the gentiles were once allowed to worship but not enter further, priests lay slaughtered and it was their blood, borne on the water that gushed from the base of the altar that was being sluiced away. Pompey could not help but admire their fortitude in the face of death. Long after the rest of Jerusalem had surrendered, defenders there had persisted in defying the conqueror and now, the great rock on which it stood was piled with bodies and sticky with blood. Foreign invaders had desecrated Mount Moria again even as the high priest and his acolytes sought to cleanse it of the traces of the Roman siege, and to restore to the temple its accustomed rites.
Why would God have permitted an alien conqueror to trespass within the Holy of the Holiest unless it were to express his anger with its guardians? Perhaps its guardians were beguiled through ritual sacrifices and burnt offerings sought to please God in a temple which was said to contain His presence but could barely contain a sweeping trace of his holiness. Isaiah in the time of King Uzziah's end around 750-742BC already saw the Lord as so "high and exalted" that only "the train of His robe filled the temple" (Isaiah 6:1). It's as if in Isaiah's vision that the roof is taken off the majestic First Temple and all we can see is the hem of God's garment as He seats on the heavenly throne. An edge of His train fills the temple with His glory. The point is if anyone thinks God can be contained by a temple, whatever temple men might make, He is impossibly greater than what we can imagine. Let alone one created, built and later corrupted by human hands that by the time of the Second Temple, it consisted from the outermost court of the gentiles, to court of the women, court of the Israelites, court of the Israelites reserved for ritually pure Jewish men, court of the priests, the temple court with the Brazen Laver, Alter of Burnt Offerings and the inner Temple building itself with three district chambers: vestibule, sanctuary and the innermost chamber - Holy of Holiest. No wonder Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling as he overturned the tables of the money changers and sets of those trading animals for burnt offerings at the outer court of gentiles as he scorned "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations but you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11:17).
Just as centuries amid the calamities of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, prophets appeared to urge their countrymen to reform their ways or else risk obliteration so in the wake of Pompey's conquests, there were Jews who in a similar manner despaired of the temple establishment and what it had become. Many more Jews lived beyond the limits of the Promised Land than within them. Distance from the temple, its rituals and sacrifices and prayers would gradually have seen their sense of Jewish identity blur and fade but as it was, they did not need to travel to Jerusalem on one of the 3 pilgrim festivals held every year to feel themselves "in the presence of God". Rather, they had only to go to one of the numerous houses of prayer an instruction that were to be found wherever Jews were congregated: a house of assembly or synagogue. Here, boys would be taught to read, and adults schooled throughout their lives in the interpretation of some very specific texts. God's words transcribed onto parchment scrolls, were kept, when they were not being studied, in a box that deliberately echoed the long-vanished Ark: a marker of their holiness. Other people could claim possession of texts from gods but none were so charged with a sense of holiness, none so attentively heeded, none so central to the self understanding of an entire people as collection of writings cherished by Jews as their holiest scripture. Torah (תּוֹרָה), they called it 'teachings'. It is no surprise that theologian and author, Peterson Leithart, once stated (like many others along similar lines) that “The Bible is the speech of God. Every encounter with the Bible is an encounter with the living God, whose Spirit inspired the text and is active in its reception. This book is the bread without which you cannot live.”
Five scrolls portrayed the original working of God's purposes, from the creation of the world to the arrival on Cannan's borders, after many hardships and wanderings of Abraham's descendants, ready at last to claim their inheritance. The story did not end there. There are many other writings held sacred by the Jews. There were histories and chronicles, detailing everything from the conquest of Cannan to the destruction and rebuilding of the temple. There were records of prophecy, in which men who felt the word of God like burning fire within their bones gave it utterance. There were collections of proverbs, takes of inspirational men and women and an anthology of poems named psalms. All these various writings, by many different hands over the course of many years served to provide Jews beyond the Promised Land with much raved reassurance: that living in foreign cities did not make them any less Jewish.
Nor centuries on from Alexander's conquest of the world, did the fact that the vast majority of them spoke not the language of their ancestors but Greek. A bare 70 years after Alexander's death, there had begun to emerge in Alexandria large numbers of Jews who struggled to understand the Hebrew in which most of their scriptures were written. The mission to translate them, so the story went, had come from none other than Demetrius of Phalerum. Keen to add to the stock of the city's great library, he had sent to Jerusalem for 72 scholars. Arriving in Alexandria, these had set diligently to work translating the holiest text of all, the five scrolls or Pentateuch, as they were called in Greek (it was possible that the categorisation of the various Jewish holy books - what Jews today call the Tanakh and Christians, the Old Testament - derived originally from the way they were catalogued in the ancient library of Alexandria). Other texts had soon followed. Not merely books, they were hailed by Greek speaking Jews as ta biblia ta hagia - the holy books - as this phrase appears in 1 Maccabees 12.9. Demetrius, so it was improbably claimed, had defined them as 'philosophical, flawless and divine'. So a body of writings originally collated and adapted by scholars who took for granted the centrality of Jerusalem to the worship of their God was slipping its editors' purposes: the biblia came to possess, for the Jews of Alexandria, a sanctity that rivalled that of the temple itself. Wherever there existed a scribe to scratch their verses onto parchment, or a student to commit them to memory, or a teacher to explicate their mysteries, their sanctity was affirmed. Their eternal and indestructible nature as well. It was not constructed out of bricks or mortars to be levelled by a conquering army. Wherever Jews might choose to live, there the body of their scriptures would be present as well - a surer path to the divine than any idol could provide. The holiness of Jerusalem in Christianity, conserved in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible which Christians adopted as the Old Testament was reinforced by the New Testament in fulfilling the prophecies in ways unimaginable to the audience at the time.
The richness of scripture resonates in this modern era when these foundational events, that straddled the dawn of the 1st millennium BC on and the sobriety of a holy city in the heart of Jews, are recorded and reverberated through history until the 21st century. Just as the destruction of the temple by Pompey transpired about 40 years after Jesus' death as predicted, the true temple is rebuilt and resurrected as prophesied. The tabernacle was first built by Moses to symbolise the covenant presence of God amongst His people as a tent that would accompany Israelites through the wilderness and in which the glory of God would dwell among them wherever they go (Exodus 25), the true tabernacle stands against the test of time after the curtain of the physical Second Temple that separated the Holy of the Holiest was torn in two (Matthew 27:51). It is like an incarnate temple. For in Christ there is a new and lasting temple of the living God, with His people who are members of Christ, where permanent presence of God is forever amongst His covenant people as truly "a house of prayer for all the nations" (Isaiah 56:7). Like the temple, the church is never about its spire or space, structure or sacred decors to represent only a semblance of God's holiness but rather, it is where God's people dwell in Christ.
When the Jews sought to make sense of their temple’s fall, they did not look to philosophy. Instead, in pain and bewilderment, they turned to their God. It is perhaps precisely God who can turn what marks as the most despairing day in the Jewish Calendar, Tisha B'Av (תִּשְׁעָה בְּאָב), also into hope which in the Hebrew word of HaTikvah (תקותי) is interwoven with the meaning of expectation. So in the Hebrew context both biblically and linguistically, hope is powerfully more than just a dream but an expectation with a strong expression of faith. Unlike the English word that is often used to express speculative desires, the Hebrew hope invokes an association with God so that the term expresses confidence in a future outcome with a present divine strength. "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11).
So if someone were to ask what do I make of such antiquity in this age of apathy and apostasy, I'd say that every single scriptural text stands true in wonderous ways - unlike how I would have answered it once upon a time many years ago. This scriptural view is one I once believed to be bold and borderline preposterous that once upon that many years ago when a friend told me about "absolute truth". How a conclusion, so far and far-reaching from what I would once entertain as a belief beyond me, has formed the foundation beyond question of my life, worldview and guiding light now is perhaps, well, beyond anyone but God. Just as the New Testament profoundly fulfils the Old Testament with astounding and astonishing awe, God sent a friend from half way around the world into my life by the name of Isaiah to proclaim Yeshayahu (יְשַׁעְיָהוּ), salvation of God, to an ordinary girl like me. It brings home for me the relevance of everlasting certainty in an uncertain and fickle world that is wary and weary of certitude, conviction and conclusiveness.
So antiquity in an age of apathy and apostasy? Far more than meets the eye.
In acknowledgement of sermons on Isaiah by Tim Escott and Michael Jensen as well as Tom Holland's Dominion for the content of this blog.
