God moves in

Chapter 8 is very long, possibly the longest chapter so far though I haven ' t been keeping track of that. The writers obviously see these events as extremely important, and indeed, this symbolism as resonated through history to the present day. The narrative strongly ties the Israelite religion to a place, a specific spot on earth. In the story from the beginning, they were first a decentralized tribal people without a clearly defined territory, then they were exiled and enslaved, then they were wanderers who carried the main symbol of their religious devotion with them, then they were conquerors but only gradually developed a centralized polity while the ark still had no fixed abode, then they established a capital and finally, built the temple and now install the ark in it ' s putatively permanent place.In this mythical moment, what will become the Jewish religion, and its associated ethno-nationalist identity, becomes inseparable from the city of Jerusalem and specifically the Temple Mount. (Modern Rabbinical Judaism is of course very different from the religion depicted here.) The essentiality of place meant that Jesus had to die and be resurrected in Jerusalem, and that Mohammed had to visit the city. It produced the crusades, and Zionism, and the modern state of Israel, all for the sake of this symbolic association of God with a specific place on earth.  There are several flaws in the story, of course. Although Ch. 8 says that the poles of the tabernacle are ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs