SKENE 8 (b) 'hupodeigma'

The next word in this cluster is ‘hupodeigma’, an ‘outline’. This is a variation of the Classical Greek ‘paradeigma’, familiar in English from its derivative ‘paradigm’ – and particularly familiar to students of Greek who struggle to learn the paradigms of Greek verbs. A Greek verb can have more than 500 different forms (a statistic it is wise not to reveal to beginners!), but a paradigm provides an outline, or a framework, by which each individual form can be arrived at by adding the appropriate ending. In a less specialised context, a ‘paradigm of virtue’ is a model, or a shining example, and it is in this sense that ‘hupodeigma’ is used in John 13.15 by Jesus himself as he washes his disciples’ feet: “I have given you an example, so that what I have done for you you also should do”. Similarly, James (5.10) tells his readers to “take as your example of endurance in suffering the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord”. ‘Hupodeigma’ can also be used in the opposite sense, not as a shining example but as an awful warning, as in 2 Peter 2.6, where the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is used as “an awful warning of the fate in store for the ungodly”. A more literal translation of ‘the fate in store’ reveals an interesting link with ‘skia’: “of the things to come”, ‘ton mellonton’ again, so that one could translate ‘hupodeigma’ here as a ‘foreshadowing’. The other instance is, once again, in Hebrews, where the writer regards the Israelites who perished in the wilderness and never entered into their ‘rest’ in the promised land as “an example of disobedience” (Heb 4.11). Both ‘hupodeigma’ and ‘paradeigma’ are derived from the verb ‘deiknumi’, which means to ‘show’; and just as an example shows you how to behave, or how not to behave, so an ‘outline’ will show you what the finished structure will look like – a ‘blueprint’, perhaps. And it is in this sense that Hebrews uses the word both in 8.5 and again in 9.23. The writer has pointed out how, at its consecration, the Tabernacle and all its sacrificial and purificatory utensils were sprinkled with blood. “So”, he continues, “it was necessary for the outlines of the heavenly Tabernacle to be purified in this way, but the heavenly Tabernacle itself had to be purified by better sacrifices than these” – one of the dozen or so times in Hebrews that the New Covenant is described as ‘better’ or ‘greater’ than the Old. For this writer, then, the Tabernacle in the wilderness was just ‘a rough draft’ of the real thing in heaven.