1. The Old Covenant House of God
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BEDE: ON THE TEMPLE
commentary on the description of Solomon's Temple in 3 K 5:l751, just as Bede's earlier commentaries on the description of the Tabernacle in Ex 24:12-30 and on the account of the Second Temple in Ezra and Nehemiah also fill gaps in the patristic legacy. As will be seen, the theme of the Temple was peculiarly suited to Bede's wellknown objective of supplying teaching materials for the purposes of monastic formation and the education of spiritual teachers who had a crucial role in his vision of the regeneration and inner conversion of contemporary society. The inspiration of Gregory the Great is evident but both the form in which De Templo is cast and Bede's handling of individual features reveal a work of originality and insight, marking the culmination of a lifetime's thought and writing on the subject: the closest parallels to De Templo occur in three of Bede's own Gospel homilies.
The key to understanding the significance of the Temple image for Bede and his monastic contemporaries lies in the huge importance of the image in Scripture itself where its Christian interpretation is already well established. An indication of the major links in the chain of biblical texts concerning the Temple (which are all in some way used or assumed in De templo) may therefore give some idea of the scale and complexity of the materials at Bede's disposal and of the allusive subtlety with which he used Scripture to comment on Scripture in the light of his patristic reading.
THE TABERNACLE AND TEMPLE IN SCRIPTURE
1. The Old Covenant House of God The Book of Exodus describes the pivotal event in Jewish history, namely the deliverance of God's chosen people from slavery in Egypt and his covenant with them. It recounts their crossing of the Red Sea and forty-year exile in the wilderness before their final homecoming to the Promised Land. In the New Testament these events were read as having an underlying and continuing significance for Christians who perceived in the literal text divinely ordained prefigurings of their own deliverance from sin through baptism, and of their journey through this earthly life to the heavenly Promised Land and the new
Jerusalem (1 Co 10:14, 11).
The Exodus story was recalled and appropriated in the early liturgy for the Easter vigil and baptism of catechumens so that the new
INTRODUCTION
xix chosen people, gentile as well as Jewish converts to the Church, became the spiritual inheritors of the covenant made between God and his people in the desert and of the divine promise that they would become 'a kingdom of priests and a holy nation' (Ex 19:6; 1 P 2:9010). That deliverance and covenant had been graphically epitomised in the Tabernacle which God had instructed Moses to build, a tentlike structure in which the sacred shrine of the Ark of the Covenant could be housed during the long sojourn in the desert. Two golden cherubim were placed over the Ark in the innermost Holy of Holies and God promised, 'I will speak to you over the propitiatory and from the midst of the two cherubim' (Ex 25:22).
When the Jews became a settled people in the Promised Land, the Ark was transferred to the Holy of Holies in the Temple which David's son Solomon had been divinely inspired to build in Jerusalem
(3 K 8:l-20). Both the Tabernacle and its successor the Temple were seen as the house of God, the place of God's presence with his people.
As well as the detailed accounts of the Tabernacle in Ex 25-30,35110 and of the Temple in 3 K 5-8, the image of God's dwelling-place recurs right through the Old Testament in supplementary descriptions of the two successive buildings and their cults, in many allusions in the psalms and the prophets and in historical accounts of the fortunes of the Israelites typified in foreign desecrations and subsequent rebuilding of the Temple. The image carries the whole history of God's relationship with his people.
In a homily Bede chronicles this process from the construction of Solomon's Temple to its destruction by the Babylonians four hundred and thirty years later; from the return of the chosen people after their seventy-year exile, and the rebuilding of the Second Temple in forty-six years under Zerubbabel and Joshua, to its profanation with idolatrous images by Antiochus the Greek three hundred and fifty-six years later and its subsequent purification and re-dedication under Judas Maccabeus. Bede's summary ends with a quotation from St Paul: '"All these things were done as an example for us" (1 Co 1O:ll) and were written down for us, and so we must scrutinise them carefully for their spiritual ~neaning'~.
Paul's text, originally applied to the account of the Exodus, encapsulates an entire methodology of interpretation and was frequently cited in exegesis and applied to the whole of the Old Testament. It is quoted at the opening of De
Homily 2.24. Martin and Hunt 1991,248-49.