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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Hebrews 8:5 - 8:5
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
5. οἵτινες κ.τ.λ. Namely, the priests—who are ministering in that which is nothing but a copy and shadow (Heb 10:1; Col 2:17) of the heavenly things. The verb λατρεύειν usually takes a dative of the person to whom the ministry is paid. Here and in Heb 13:10 the dative is used of the thing in which the service is done. It is conceivable that there is a shade of irony in this—they serve not a Living God, but a dead tabernacle. And this tabernacle is only a sketch, an outline, a ground pattern (1Ch 28:11) as it were—at the best a representative image—of the Heavenly Archetype.
τῶν ἐπουρανίων. “Of the heavenly things,” R.V. Perhaps rather “of the heavenly sanctuary” (Heb 9:23-24).
κεχρημάτισται. “Even as Moses, when about to complete the tabernacle, has been divinely admonished …” On this use of the perfect see note on Heb 4:8, &c. χρηματίζω is used of Divine intimations in Mat 2:12; Luk 2:26; Act 10:22, &c.
Ὅρα … ποιήσεις. This is not a classical idiom, though not absolutely unknown to classical Greek (Lobeck, Phryn. p. 734). It is here taken from the LXX. (Exo 25:40). Ποιήσῃς would be better Greek.
πάντα. This expression is not found either in the Hebrew or the LXX. of the passages referred to (Exo 25:40; Exo 26:30); it seems to be due to Philo (De Leg. Alleg. III. 33), who may, however, have followed some older reading.
κατὰ τὸν τύπον κ.τ.λ. Here, as is so often the case in comments on Scripture, we are met by the idlest of speculations, as to whether Moses saw this “pattern” in a dream or with his waking eyes; whether the pattern was something real or merely an impression produced upon his senses; whether the tabernacle was thus a copy or only “a copy of a copy and a shadow of a shadow,” &c. Such questions are otiose, because, even if they were worth asking at all, they do not admit of any answer, and involve no instruction, and no result of the smallest value. The Palestinian Jews in their slavish literal way said that there was in Heaven an exact literal counterpart of the Mosaic Tabernacle with “a fiery Ark, a fiery Table, a fiery Candlestick,” &c., which descended from heaven for Moses to see; and that Gabriel, in a workman’s apron, shewed Moses how to make the candlestick,—an inference which they founded on Num 8:4, “And this work of the candlestick” (Menachoth, f. 29. 1). Without any such fetish-worship of the letter it is quite enough to accept the simple statement that Moses worked after a pattern which God had brought before his mind. The chief historical interest in the verse is the fact that it was made the basis for the Scriptural Idealism by which Philo and the Alexandrian Jews tried to combine Judaism with the Platonic philosophy, and to treat the whole material world as a shadow of the spiritual world. It is one of several narrow points on which were built huge inverted pyramids of inference, which even when it was intrinsically tenable, could still not be deduced from the passages quoted.