SKENE 8 (c): 'tupos' iii

Our last two instances of ‘tupos’ carry us across the boundary from ‘example’ to ‘type’ in its explicitly biblical sense, and so lead us to the fourth word in our cluster, ‘antitupos’. 1 Corinthians 10. 1-11 is a passage similar in several respects to Hebrews 4. 1-11, where, as we saw earlier, the Israelites who died in the wilderness were presented as an example (‘hupodeigma’) of disobedience. Paul treats their fate in a similarly ‘typical’ way: “All our forefathers --- were baptized into Moses --- but God was not pleased with most of them, for they were laid low in the wilderness. These things happened as examples for us (‘tupoi’)”. In both these passages, ‘example’ is a perfectly proper translation: both writers are using the Pentateuch narrative as a source of moral and spiritual warning for the contemporary church, a warning against unbelief and immorality. The Israelites may have been God’s people, miraculously rescued from slavery in Egypt, but that did not give them a licence to behave as they pleased or to worship whatever gods they chose. Both passages treat this narrative as all history may be treated, as a lesson for future generations – though, as someone has sagely observed, “men learn nothing from history except that men learn nothing from history”. But Paul is going further in his treatment of the narrative than the writer to the Hebrews: he sees it not just as history (though it certainly is that), but also as allegory, in which the details of the story stand for, or foreshadow, something else, as though God were telling us a parable. So the crossing of the Red Sea represents baptism (v.2), and the ‘supernatural’ food and drink suggests the bread and wine of the communion service (‘supernatural’ is a better translation than ‘spiritual’, as David Prior says in his BST commentary, p. 167); but the most daring element of this interpretation is Paul’s statement that the rock from which water flowed when struck by Moses’ staff was Christ himself, an image which inspired the wonderful hymn “Rock of ages, cleft for me”. But despite all these spiritual privileges, Paul continues, the Israelites fell into sin – idolatry, sexual immorality and murmuring against God – and so many of them died, “killed by the destroying angel” (v. 10, NIV). Then Paul sums up the whole passage: “These things were (or ‘kept on’) happening to them ‘typically’, and were written down for our instruction; for we are privileged to live in the Messianic age, when all these types have been fulfilled”. I have rather freely paraphrased this last clause, which NIV translates rather more accurately, but, I think, less helpfully, “for us on whom the fulfilment of the ages has come”. The word I have translated, very literally, as ‘typically’ is the adverb formed from ‘tupos’ – ‘tupikos’, and it is here, I believe, that ‘tupos’ crosses the line from ‘example’ to ‘type’. . The difference between history and allegory is metaphor, but the difference between allegory and typology is God’s sovereign control of history – as has often been said, it is ‘his story’; thus typology is both metaphor and prophecy, waiting to be fulfilled in the coming of Christ and the inauguration of the Messianic age. So here Paul sees the stricken rock at Horeb from which flowed water to bring new life to a people dying of thirst (Exodus 17.6) as a type, a visual prophecy, of Christ stricken on the cross to bring the water of life to his people, though he himself was dying in an agony of thirst (John 19.38)