SKENE 8 (a) 'skia'

The word-cluster used here deserves a brief survey of its own. The three words in verse 5, which I have translated ‘outline’, ‘shadow’ and ‘model’ are, in Greek, ‘hupodeigma’, ‘skia’, and ‘tupos’. To these three may be added a fourth, which appears in 9.24, ‘antitupos’, which means much the same as ‘tupos’, and gives us the English ‘antitype’. We will begin with ‘skia’. It is possible that the writer is consciously playing with words here, as ‘skia’ and ‘skene’ come, as we saw earlier, from the same linguistic root, meaning ‘shade or ‘shelter’ (‘skotos’, meaning ‘darkness’, also belongs to this word-group). In the gospels and Acts it is used both literally and metaphorically – the latter in quotations of Isaiah 9.1: “--- the people who sit in darkness (‘skotos’) and in the shadow (‘skia’) of death” (Matt 4.10. Luke 1.79). Its literal meaning is found in Mark 4.32, a verse mentioned earlier, and to be revisited later, where “the birds of the heaven are able to make their nests under the shade” of the full-grown mustard tree, and also in Acts 5.15, where, in an echo of Jesus’ healing ministry in Gennesaret (Mark 6.56), the rapidly growing church brought out their invalids into the streets “so that as Peter passed by even his shadow might overshadow them”. The related verb used here, ‘episkiazo’, is used in two other interesting contexts: in all three synoptic accounts of the transfiguration, “a cloud overshadowed” Jesus, Moses and Elijah; and at the annunciation Gabriel told Mary “the power of the Almighty will overshadow you” (Luke 1.35). For Luke, then, this verb is associated with the awesome power and presence of God himself, so that it was really his shadow that was falling on the sick and healing them, and Peter was merely the agent who was casting it – but you have to be walking in the light to cast such a shadow! The only two other uses of ‘skia’ in the NT (there are only 7 altogether) are more relevant to our verse, and are also linked to each other: each one is paired with an antithesis. In Colossians 2. 13-15 Paul ‘gives them the gospel’ in a wonderful passage on the power of the cross and the forgiveness of sins; then in verse 16 comes one of his famous ‘therefore’s: “therefore let no one condemn you” over any Jewish rituals or festivals; “these things are a shadow of things to come; the substance is the person of Christ”. For Paul, as for the writer of Hebrews, all the requirements of the Mosaic law were ‘foreshadowings’ of Christ, and had now been fulfilled in him, in his sinless life and sacrificial death. A literal translation of the last few words of this verse would be: “but the body (‘soma’) [is] of Christ”. I have translated ‘soma’ twice, since in English the antithesis between ‘shadow’ and ‘substance’ is a natural one. For the last example of ‘skia’ we return to Hebrews, where the antithesis is more between the ‘shadowy’ and the clearly visible; and there is another link between the two verses, since both specifically state that the ‘shadow’ is a ‘foreshadowing’ of ‘things to come’ (‘ton mellonton’). Hebrews 10.1 is really a summary of the whole typological argument of the previous two chapters: “The law contains a shadow of the good things to come, but not their exact likeness” (‘eikon’, whence the English ‘icon’). It is worth noting here that Paul twice describes Jesus as the ‘eikon’ of God, the invisible God made visible in his incarnate Son (2 Cor 4.4, Col 1.15).For the Israelites in the wilderness their tents gave them shelter from the blazing sun of the Sinai desert, but God’s tent was a foreshadowing of Christ, in whom his people would, in the fullness of time, find shelter from the blazing fire of God’s wrath.