Endnote 6 – The Divine Warrior in His Tent

Ralph W. Klein (“Back to the Future: The Tabernacle in the Book of Exodus,” Interpretation 50 [1996], pp. 264–265) states that the priestly description of the Tabernacle represents an idealized version of a simpler tent, which “surely incorporates in some fashion aspects of Solomon’s temple.” G. Henton Davies (“Tabernacle,” in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 4 vols. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1962], vol. 4, p. 504) writes that “It is almost universally supposed that P’s tabernacle is based on Solomon’s temple.” Similarly, Ronald Ernest Clements (God and Temple [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965], p. 11) writes that the Tabernacle is a “description of a temple under the guise of a portable tent sanctuary.” For more extreme views, see John Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 14, 310, where he claims that not only tent shrines but tents in general were lacking until they were popularized by Arabs in the first millennium B.C.E.