Anyone seen that altar? - 7 September 2009 |
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Hebrews 9:4 says that the ‘golden altar of incense’ was located in the Most Holy Place. Strange, because Exodus 30:6 says it was in the Holy Place, in front of the curtain, not behind it.
It’s fairly unlikely that the author of Hebrews has slipped up here – he seems to know his OT pretty well. It’s even less likely that the Israelites felt at liberty to shift the Tabernacle/Temple furniture around willy-nilly. So what’s going on?
One possibility is that we’re supposed to see that the division between the two sections of the tent had already been removed, so that the temple (the rebuilt tabernacle?) was already in the process of being dismantled before it was finally destroyed in AD 70. (Hebrews was almost certainly written before this date – see the present tenses in 5:3; 8:4; 10:11; etc.) The distinction between the MHP and the HP had therefore been removed; the temple/tent had a single section, not two separate sections. Consequently, anything that had previously been in the HP was (by the time Heb was written) to be regarded as being in the MHP too.
Makes sense, since the temple curtain (between the HP and the MHP) was torn in two when Christ died (Mk 15:38).
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Bible, Minister's Blog