SKENE 2: Tent-dweller - Abraham

For our first example of ‘skene’ itself, we move from Paul to Paul’s favourite OT character, Abraham (19 mentions in the epistles – Moses only gets 10 !). He is foremost among the great heroes of faith listed in Hebrews 11: “by faith he lived as a migrant in the land God had promised him as though it were a foreign land, dwelling in tents” (v.9). There is no doubt that the tents Abraham lived in were simply and literally tents, but the two related verbs that the writer uses in this verse lead us towards the first of our metaphorical tents, and the first of the paradoxes associated with ‘skene’ in the NT. The two verbs are ‘katoiko’ and ‘paroiko’, both compounds of the simple verb ‘oiko’, which means to ‘dwell’ or ‘live in a house’ (‘oikia’ in Greek). ‘katoiko’ is a common verb, used throughout the NT (45 times), meaning to ‘dwell’ or ‘reside’ in a place, to ‘make your home’ there, to ‘settle down’ somewhere (the basic meaning of the preposition ‘kata’ is ‘down’). Its first and last uses in the NT are sufficient to illustrate its meaning. In Matthew 2. 23 Joseph, after returning from Egypt to the land of Israel, “came and settled down into a town called Nazareth” – he made it his home. And in Revelation 17.8, at the re-emergence of the Beast from the abyss, “those who dwell on the earth will be amazed” – though, interestingly, this does not include “those whose names are written in the book of life”, presumably because they are citizens of heaven and merely sojourners on earth, ‘paroikoi’, as we shall see shortly. But first we will look at two theological uses of ‘katoiko’ which are particularly noteworthy. In Ephesians 3. 17, Paul, in his magnificent prayer for his readers, prays that “Christ may make his home in your hearts through faith”; and the full import of this awesome prayer is made clear in Colossians, where Paul states that “in Christ the whole fullness (of God) was pleased to make his home” (1.19), and “in Christ the whole fullness of the Godhead makes his bodily home” (2.9). It is amazing enough that God dwelt in Jesus, but the thought that this same Jesus can live in us is truly mind-blowing. But one of the great truths revealed by a study of ‘skene’ is that God wants to live with his people, and in his people; and this truth we shall consider in more detail when we come to look at the incarnation. But the paradox is that those in whom God, through his Holy Spirit, makes his home are no longer ‘at home’ in the world: their true home, as we saw a moment ago, is in heaven. In this world they are ‘paroikoi’; perhaps ‘resident aliens’ would be a reasonable translation. This is the noun, in its plural form, derived from the verb ‘paroiko’, which means to ‘live as a foreigner among’. Abraham made his home in tents (‘katoiko’), but the land in which he lived (‘paroiko’), though promised to him, was not yet his, and he lived there as a foreigner and a migrant. This distinction is also made in the LXX version of Genesis 37.1: “Jacob dwelt (‘katoiko’) in the land where his father had sojourned (‘paroiko’), the land of Canaan”. The only other occurrence of this latter verb in the NT is in Luke 24.18, where Cleopas, on the walk to Emmaus, asks Jesus, without realising that it is Jesus, “are you the only one, even of those just visiting (‘paroiko’) Jerusalem, who doesn’t know what has been going on here these last few days ?” The use of ‘paroiko’ adds sharpness to the point: Cleopas is incredulous that any one, even a stranger, could be ignorant of Jesus’ crucifixion. Luke develops this point two chapters later (in Acts 2 !), when he refers to the Pentecost crowd as those “dwelling in Jerusalem” (‘katoiko’ – v. 5). Maybe Luke puts ‘paroiko’ into Cleopas’s mouth to emphasise the tragic irony of supposing that Jesus was a stranger in his own world, and in his own city, the City of David – a point John makes more directly (John 1.11).