The Son and the City, Gendered Images

Moses and the Tabernacle

I see the greatest benefit of my seminary training as finding the big picture or metanarrative of Scripture in its Genesis to Revelation unfolding.  As I have mentioned before, the first class I took at seminary was covenant theology, and it made sense of so much that had previously been baffling. I had grown up in a dispensational church and been trained in dispensational Bible colleges before going overseas as a young woman.  I remember waking up in the mornings there wrestling, trying to understand passages in light of the right “dispensation.”  It was maddening at times. When I was free to understand the Bible as an organic whole, I could see and rejoice in types and shadows prefiguring things to come later, things about which the Bible is most concerned  (Col 2:17; Heb 10:1). So here I am, ten years after my covenant theology course, finding the Son and the Spirit-city of Revelation 21-22 prefigured throughout the Old Testament — in Noah and the Ark and in Abraham and the promised land flowing with milk and honey. Have you ever wondered why the land is said to flow with milk and honey? I have begun to suspect that it is because milk and honey are both conspicuously tethered to female beauty and life (cf. Song 5:1). Feminine figures of speech are attached to the land of promise. Milk needs no explanation, and the queen bee’s centrality to the hive was well-understood in ancient Egypt from the third millennium BC when bees began to be captured for their honey. 

Milk and honey are not the only feminine metaphors pointing us to a space set apart for life in the fullest sense of that word, prefiguring our end as the holy dwelling of God in the Spirit. Others have drawn our attention to the repeated references to tents and wells when women appear in the Genesis narratives. For example, Sarah is in her tent when three men visit, one a theophany of the eternal Son. In retrospect, we understand that he promises Abraham and Sarah nothing less than himself, a son, their Savior (Gen 18). Additionally, Sarah’s tent has a prominent place in Isaac and Rebekah’s love story. It is the place where Isaac finds comfort after Sarah’s death, ostensibly in the embrace of Rebekah (Gen 24:67). Women standing with tents as symbols of the dwelling place of God, especially with reference to the eternal love of the Spirit, is found twice in Song of Songs.  Unlike Mary Magdalene who is told, “Do not cling to me (now),” the bride of the Song clings and will not let go until she has brought her beloved home, “into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me” (Song 3:4). This promise belongs to you and to me as we cling to the Son by faith, until faith gives way to sight and we come home to the promised Spirit-city, the mother’s house.  That City above has given us birth unto a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead unto the glory and joy that awaits us with the incarnate Son in the Spirit. In this sense, the “mother’s house” represents the Spirit-city of our enthroned king as both our source and destiny, something also brought out in 1 Corinthians 11:12, “For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God” (cf. Rev 12:1). Our maleness and femaleness lead us to our alpha and omega — the Father and Son and their Radiance, the Spirit. Whether we call ourselves embodied souls or ensouled bodies, our existence as male and female points us to the throne of the Father and the Son as well as to a Glory flowing from that throne, a City — the enduring revelation of our personal triune God and Lord. And these belong to you and to me forever.

As a side note, the second reference to the mother’s house in the Song is found in the climactic and final chapter (8:2). The bride longs to embrace and kiss her lover and lead him to her mother’s house, where she will give him spiced wine to drink. It is hard for me to imagine a clearer reference to the Spirit’s work in bringing us to the Spirit-city, our end as belonging to God (cf. Matt 26:28-29). The woman of the Song both leads as lover and stands before us as mother, beckoning us to our end, where the Son awaits us — “His left hand is under my head, and his right arm embraces me” (Song 8:3).  It is worth noting that both references to the “mother’s house” in the Song lead to a command mentioned only one other time in the Song: “Do not awaken love before its time, ” (3:5; 8:4; cf. 2:7). The Father’s house is a mother’s house, “a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”  That is the womb from which we have come, the place of our origin. Our names were recorded there before the world began, and we will receive him there in the fullness of life after this world passes away (cf. John 14:2; 2 Cor 5:1). 

Turning from tents to wells in Genesis, Abraham’s servant finds Rebekah by a well where she performs an extraordinary act of hospitality for a stranger (Genesis 24).  Robert Altar portrays the magnanimity of Rebekah’s heart in that scene: 

“This is the closest anyone comes in Genesis to a feat of ‘Homeric’ heroism (though the success of Rebekah’s son Jacob in his betrothal scene in rolling off the huge stone from the well invites comparison).  A camel after a  long desert journey drinks many gallons of water, and there are ten camels here to water, so Rebekah hurrying down the steps of the well would have had to be a nonstop blur of motion in order to carry up all this water in her single jug.”¹  

What Altar calls Homeric in Rebekah’s service to Eliezer of Damascus, I would call eschatological. Beginning with Genesis 2 and the garden, the woman simply stands with the Spirit-city of God and her streams of living water. Something different happens with Jacob. Rachel meets Jacob by a well, and in stark contrast to the story of Rebekah, Jacob waters Rachel’s flocks. Women at wells in the Old Testament point us forward to more explicit references in the New Testament.  When we reach John 4, we find another Jacob, Israel, God’s firstborn son, by his well. Like Jacob, he offers the Samaritan woman water, Spirit-water from the Spirit city, which proceeds from himself, the Rock. From his throne flows a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy dwelling place of the Most High (John 4:14; 7:38; Ps 46:4). Grace flows from his lips and he says to her, “The king desires your beauty” (Ps 45:2, 11).  We have here nothing less than the Son and the joy set before him, and he offers her living waters.

As many others have pointed out, Eden’s sacred space was a replica of the heavenly mountain, pointing beyond the garden sanctuary to Sabbath rest in the heavenly city. Only in that place our hearts find final satisfaction in what we are restlessly seeking below but were meant to find in the city above. Eve’s creation within the garden points to that time and place, the visible joy that stands before God’s son Adam as he receives her.  Eve is nothing short of a bone and flesh replica of the garden city. She is a microcosm of the visible garden they inhabit, pointing to the joy set before them in the invisible, veiled garden of God above. Through her, Adam was to see something of what awaited them if only he obeys, if only he lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And through him, Eve was to see something of what awaits them in the Son, for whom she was made, if only she fulfills her mission, true to her type, a corresponding strength to overcome the serpent in the testing of their obedience. I have sought to bring out some of these things in Genesis, writing about sons (Noah and Abraham) and sacred space (Ark and promised land-city).

So after that lengthy introduction, I come to the Son and City in Exodus. As John Schmitt has pointed out, Exodus begins with the “sons of Israel.”² This new identity of God’s people as a single son, Israel, first called Jacob, will be an irrepressible, growing theme throughout the rest of Scripture until the end when the Son from heaven appears and the true sons of Israel are revealed (Rev 7:4-8; Rev 21:12).  The corresponding strength of the Son is the glory realm or Spirit-city. That city will unfold from embryonic garden to fully formed bridal city as we come across the woman’s symbolism repeatedly. As in Genesis, individual women mostly stay in the background in Exodus, although their mission is undeniable in the opening chapters. Women cluster at the beginning of Moses’s life, just as they will when the greater Moses appears. True to women’s representation of the realm of life, a theophany of the Lord as life’s Giver, five women defy Pharaoh’s death decree — the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, Moses’s mother, his sister, and Pharaoh’s daughter. All conspire to save the son who is beautiful (Ex 2:2; cf. Ps 45:2; Heb 11:23-26; cf. Song 4:7). We will see a similar “cluster” in the new covenant, women encircling a man, when the greater Moses appears in Mary, Elisabeth, and the prophet Anna (cf. Jer 31:22; cf. 31:1-40). These herald a new day when God’s purposes in creating us male and female are realized in our supernatural end in the city above. The five women in the opening two chapters of Exodus point to the Spirit as the giver, preserver, and nurturer of life.

If I could stop and set forth the church’s trinitarian theology at the heart of our representation. The church has come to understand that Father, Son, and Spirit simply exist as the one mind, will, glory, and power of God. There is equal ultimacy in their unity as one essence and their diversity as three persons in ordered procession and embrace. We should expect to see this glory replicated, leading our thoughts back to our Lord. Equal in glory to Moses, an ectype of the Son, is the tabernacle, an ectype of the Spirit-tent. The tabernacle will be nothing short of a microcosm of heaven, the “embodiment” of the Spirit who proceeds from the Son (Deut 32:11; Neh 9:19, 20; Is 63:11-14; Hag 2:5). The eternal and uncreated Glory, the Spirit, has a created manifestation in the heavens, “vouchsaf(ing) his blessed Presence to his creation.”³ This is the cornerstone of Meredith’s Kline’s work on the Spirit and “endoxation.” For Meredith Kline, the endoxation of the Spirit was an intimate drawing near of God to his worshiping creatures in divine love to welcome them into the beatific embrace of his heavenly Glory.”⁴ We see how the glory of the heavenly dwelling, as well as the glory of the earthly replicas in the likeness of the heavenly pattern, radiate that glory. Moses shines with the light of the heavenly city as he descends the mountain of God’s presence in the image and likeness of the heavenly Son. And he glows with the light of the tabernacle as an earthly son, even as the tabernacle “proceeds” from him and he mediates the construction of the heavenly replica.

According to Kline, heaven is the hypostatic union of the uncreated, infinite, eternal, unchanging Spirit and the created phenomenon of holy space. As I see it, the chain of typology unfolds like this: (1) The Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son internally from eternity. (2) The Glory-Spirit tent proceeds from the throne of the Father and Son above in the enduring revelation of the triune God in the heavenly temple. (3) The woman proceeds from the man in Genesis 2. (4) The earthly tabernacle proceeds from Moses. The tabernacle is patterned after the heavenly city, and that city is given a gender which begins in the prophets and is carried through the Bible even until the consummation of time in Revelation 19 and 21-22. You might say it like this — the heavenly city in final analysis has pronouns, and those pronouns are she and her.

Some call the descent of the Glory City at Sinai, whose final identity is feminized, the “highwater mark of the Old Covenant.” I think that Ezekiel 36-37 might rival Exodus 24-30 as the pinnacle of the old order. In other words, seeing myself as a son rising is just as compelling as seeing myself as a bride descending. Both of these things belong to us, awakening our love and leading us forward, whether the climax is sons going up in resurrection and ascension (Ezekiel) or whether the pinnacle is the bride coming down (Exodus). These give us our trajectory as ascending sons and a descending bride at the consummation of time. That simply is our enduring identity as belonging to God. Our maleness and femaleness are gifts driving us to that hope. 

We find Jerusalem above, the city that Abraham sought, prefigured not only in the garden, Ark, and promised land, but in every earthly sanctuary set apart for the worship of the living God. The woman simply stands with sacred space, identified with the Spirit. Perhaps for this reason, you find garden colors and images in the tabernacle — blues, purples, scarlet, and gold, and the artistic reproductions of lilies, gourds, and pomegranates. It is worth noting that before the priest-son enters the sanctuary, he must pass by the women ministering at the entrance. I suggest that they stand there as a reminder of what they represent, serving with their own donation, the laver made of mirrors. In the laver the sons and women see a beauty identified with the city above. Its water, a veritable sea of reflective glass, correspond with the paradise of God. Sons must pass by the laver and the ministering women to enter the tent or temple, and “sons of worthlessness” who desecrate the space or its symbol will be judged by God, as we have seen before in Genesis 6 (1 Sam 2:12, 22; 4:11) .

The word for the “mirrored” laver in Exodus 38:8 is the same word as “vision” used to describe the beauty of the wives of all three patriarchs ( יְפַת־מַרְאֶ֖ה)— Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel are considered reflections of the what they represent, Beauty. Capital “B” beauty simply is the Son and the City. In the words of Robert Jenson, “… beauty is realized eschatology, the present glow of the sheer goodness that will be at the end.”  For those of us who have never had much hope of meeting this world’s standard of beauty, we can rejoice in what the text is telling us. The standard of beauty is above, not below. Beauty simply is the dwelling place of God, the radiance of the Father and Son in the Spirit-city above. We will forever see our reflection in the waters of that city.

I would like to conclude by a simple suggestion. Can we consider whether our paradigm of gender is truly biblical? Can we consider what we believe concerning ourselves as male and female? Is the 2300 year old anthropology of Aristotle still present in our traditions, leading us to measure ourselves by ourselves? If we hold Aristotle up to the light, is he not darkness by comparison? Does not our triune Lord lead us in another direction that brings us to himself — Father, Son, and Spirit, our inheritance as sons in the Son and a bride in the Spirit? 

1. Robert Altar, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, 120.

2. John Schmitt, “Israel and Zion—Two Gendered Images: Biblical Speech Traditions and Their Contemporary Neglect,” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/horizons/article/abs/israel-and-ziontwo-gendered-images-biblical-speech-traditions-and-their-contemporary-neglect/2381E3A88E87F267FD5FFA35DAED13F6.

3. Meredith Kline, God, Heaven, and Har Magedon, 15.

4. Ibid.