Hank Smith: 00:00:01 Welcome to FollowHIM, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me Study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:00:09 I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:00:10 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:00:15 As together, we follow him.

Hank Smith: 00:00:20 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of FollowHIM. My name is Hank Smith, and I am your host. I’m here with my co-host. Now, listen closely here because this is important for our lesson today. He’s an ancient tabernacle, and his name is John Bytheway. John, you are, and I mean that in the holiest sense. He is an ancient tabernacle, John Bytheway. John, welcome. We’re excited this week to be studying the, I bet you can’t guess, the ancient tabernacle here in Exodus and Leviticus, and we have an expert with us. Tell everyone who’s going to join us.

John Bytheway: 00:00:58 Yes. We are excited to have Dr. Matthew Grey with us today, and he is an Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture and an affiliate faculty member of the Ancient Near Eastern Studies Program at BYU. He was born and raised in Chicago, served a full-time mission in the California Santa Rosa mission and attended BYU where he received a BA in Near Eastern Studies, and then received an MA in Archeology and the History of Antiquity from Andrews University, PhD in Mediterranean Religions with a major emphasis on archeology and history of early Judaism and a minor emphasis on New Testament Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

John Bytheway: 00:01:42 Before being hired by BYU in the Department of Ancient Scripture, Dr. Grey taught Institute of Religion at the University of Notre Dame at Oxford and also at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke, and since being hired at BYU, he’s taught courses in the New Testament gospel, second half of the New Testament, Jesus in his Jewish context, and the archeology of New Testament Palestine.

John Bytheway: 00:02:05 For almost 20 years, he’s been actively involved in archeological research and publication relating to the world of the Bible in Israel, Jordan, and Italy, and since 2011 has supervised excavations in the Roman era village and synagogue at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee region. He’s been an associate research fellow at the William F. Albright Institute for Archeological Research in Jerusalem and is a founding co-chair of the Archeology of Roman Palestine Program Unit of the Society of Biblical Literature.

John Bytheway: 00:02:37 Dr. Gray and his wife, Mary, have three children, Priscilla, Hannah, and John. Currently live in Springville, Utah. Hank, I’m continually amazed at the people that we bring on here and how they’ve been everywhere in so many different areas where he’s been. So excited to have Matthew Grey with us today. Welcome to the podcast today, Matthew.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:02:56 Thank you very much. It’s great to be here with both of you.

Hank Smith: 00:02:58 John, just on a personal note, there’s just nobody like Dr. Grey. I consider him a close friend, teach together at BYU. If I ever have a question, I know who I can ask. If it has anything to do with the Bible, I can go to my friend Matt Grey and he’s going to give me the answers. It’s like having an encyclopedia just available at any time with a fun personality.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:03:20 Well, that’s very kind of you, Hank. I’m not sure what kind of answer you get in those questions, but it’s always great to have those conversations with you.

Hank Smith: 00:03:25 I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while, just having Matt on, and I’m just really excited to share him with the rest of the world.

John Bytheway: 00:03:32 We’re grateful that you’re here because I think when people encounter these chapters, there’s a great tendency to go, “I just don’t get this, and it’s this really old ancient stuff, and what do I do with it?” So hopefully, some people will really get some answers today and myself included. I’m ready to take notes.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:03:48 That’s great. Well, thank you both. You’re very kind for having me on. Thank you.

Hank Smith: 00:03:51 Well, Matt, we want to hand over the reins to you and say, how do you want to approach the ancient tabernacle here? Both we have chapters in Exodus and Leviticus, and as John and I read through them all, we’ve learned how to sacrifice animals.

John Bytheway: 00:04:05 Move blood around.

Hank Smith: 00:04:07 Let’s turn this over to an expert and say, how would you approach this section of Come Follow Me?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:04:12 Great. Yeah. Thank you. So we’ll do our best. As you said, this is very technical, complicated material. The block of material that we’re looking at today, of course, is Exodus chapters 35 through 40, Leviticus 1, 16, and 19, and the material around it is equally as helpful. So in total, we’re looking at about 30 chapters’ worth of materials that’s extremely complex. It’s very technical, dealing with the ancient tabernacle in the wilderness, the ancient Levitical priesthood, the sacrificial rituals of ancient Israel that they would perform in this tabernacle or temple space. All of which is the foundational material for later Israelite temple worship.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:04:52 So I think what we might do is start with just a few background observations first. Let’s set up the context a little bit. Let’s talk about the challenges of studying this material along with the advantages, the reasons why we would want to study this material, and then I think what we might do is just go thematically through it. This is one of those blocks of scriptural texts that is very difficult to go through chapter for chapter with the cubits and the measurements and the sacrificial codes and procedures.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:05:19 So I think in this particular case, taking a step back and seeing bigger pictures and making larger observations might be a useful approach so that later as you’re doing personal study or studying in your Sunday school, you’re then able to plug in the specific chapters into that larger picture. So if that works for you guys, maybe we’ll start with some background context.

Hank Smith: 00:05:37 Even move forward.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:05:37 This is taking place right after Israel had their major experience with God at Mount Sinai, which happened in the first part of Exodus, the experience where God appeared on the mountain, the Israelites were at the base of Mount Sinai. Moses served as a mediating figure to go back and forth, and as part of that theophany or experience that they had with God, of course, came the revelation of the Torah itself according to the narrative and all of the laws that sometimes looking back we call the law of Moses.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:06:06 As part of that law of Moses’ instruction that was given at Mount Sinai and the narrative comes these several chapters dealing with the logistics of the ancient tabernacle, the ancient priesthood, the ancient sacrificial rituals, and so forth. As I said before, all of this ends up having a very close relationship to the later temple that would exist in Jerusalem.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:06:27 We’ve already spoke into this, but I’ll just mention again briefly that this is challenging stuff for modern readers, especially with all the measurements and the sacrificial details and so forth. I was once told that you’re a true biblical scholar when you not only know this material, but you’re actually really excited about it.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:06:43 So just to articulate why we would want to be interested in this material and why we should be excited, the value of studying this block of text is I think twofold. First is simply a scriptural literacy issue. If you just do the math and count how many chapters of the Torah is included in this block, if you take not only the assigned scripture blocks for the Come Follow Me lesson, but also the material around it, again, we’re talking about 30 chapters of the Pentateuch or of the Torah. That’s a significant amount that the writer and inspired editors of this text included.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:07:14 So clearly, this was extremely important to them, and even though as modern audiences we tend not to easily connect with some of this detail for a scriptural literacy sake, clearly, the writers of scripture and the editors of scripture wanted us to get to know this well. So I think there’s a scriptural literacy reason why we would want to study this, but as Latter-day Saints, I think we have an additional reason why this material in particular can be extremely valuable to know, and it has to do with the fact that as modern Latter-day Saints, we have a living temple tradition. I think this makes us fairly unique in the larger Christian world that we have buildings set apart that we designate as temples, that we attend to perform sacred rituals called the endowment, where we do very symbolic things, wear symbolic clothing, and do symbolic ritual gestures and move within symbolic space to have covenant experiences.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:08:05 So as Latter-day Saints for whom the temple is central to our religious experience, we have an interesting relationship with the temple. Unfortunately, though, a lot of young Latter-day Saints in particular find the temple a challenging experience. So what’s supposed to be the center of their religious life ends up becoming a little bit challenging sometimes because when they go to the temple, the types of rituals that they experience there are so foreign to what they’re used to from their regular church routine and their daily religious life that when they experience sacred clothing or sacred gestures or sacred space, it just becomes really foreign to them.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:08:40 A lot of Latter-day Saints, a lot of them don’t know how to easily process that, and they have an experience that sometimes it takes them time to come to terms with and to wrap their head around. I’m hearing students talk about phrase, temple anxiety. Sometimes they have anxiety going to the temple because they know that it’s special, they know that it’s central to our religious life, but they often just don’t know what to make of it and how to learn about it and understand what they’re doing there.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:09:02 So I think that one of the most important things that we can do for not only young Latter-day Saints but also anyone going to our modern Latter-day Saint temples is to develop a temple literacy. Just like we would with a scriptural literacy, getting to know our scriptural texts better, I think we can develop a temple literacy that comes from a lot better preparation than we sometimes offer.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:09:22 I’m really grateful to know that church leaders in recent past, President Nelson, Elder Bednar, Elder Packer before him, had all encouraged a more robust form of temple preparation. So I like to think about temple preparation for Latter-day Saints like learning a language. If you do not spend the time to learn the grammar and vocabulary of a certain language with let’s say German, and you don’t know that language, but yet you find yourself in Munich and now you’re just surrounded by German language and German culture, you can enjoy aspects of that, for sure, but when people start talking to you, it’s going to feel like a very foreign experience and there’s going to be a lot of confusion, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of frustration.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:09:59 Going to the temple, I think, can be a lot like that, where if you do not know the language of the temple, the language of ritual and symbolism, and yet you immerse yourself in this foreign environment, it’s going to feel very confusing, somewhat frustrating even, and that often is not conducive to any kind of spiritual experience.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:10:15 So using that language metaphor then, if learning the language of ritual and symbolism, the type of things that we would encounter in a temple space, if that is like learning a normal language, that means that we need to pay a certain price to learn the vocabulary. We need to learn the grammar. We need to learn how sentence structure works, and if we pay the price to learn that language and then go to that space, what was once a very frustrating and confusing experience can now become a very communicative experience where now all of a sudden you not only know what’s going on, but it is meaningful to you, and it’s revealing things to you. Whereas before, it felt like things were being concealed from you.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:10:53 So I like to think of temple preparation for Latter-day Saints as learning a language, something we need to do. We need to open the grammar books and start learning how sacred ritual and sacred symbolism works. In the terms of temple worship broadly throughout ancient and modern history, I don’t know if there’s a better place to go than to this block in the book of Exodus and Leviticus.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:11:15 So I really think that, again, just to finalize our learning a language metaphor, I think that this material in Exodus in a lot of ways should be the primer. It should be temple 101. It’s just simply the origins of ancient Israelite temple worship, how it functioned, how that sacred space worked, and if we can spend time really getting to know this material, it will be like learning the vocabulary and grammar of this language that will significantly inform our own modern temple experience.

Hank Smith: 00:11:44 Beautiful. That’s so important. As you and I were talking about this earlier, I remember you saying you don’t have to know everything when you first get started, but, man, if you know a little bit, if you’re going to go to Munich and you know a little bit of German, you’re going to have a much better experience than if you know nothing.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:11:58 Exactly right.

Hank Smith: 00:11:59 You’re going to be able to find the bathroom and be able to find a good restaurant and just the little tiny things, and it doesn’t take a lot to get started into temple language, and then the more often you go, I think the more you learn the language. One thing I’ve been surprised with in the last few years at BYU is as I’ve studied the Old Testament, how much more I’ve understood our temple experience, our modern temple experience. There’s been aha moments as you study the Old Testament and even the new and go, “Oh, oh. I’m seeing it now. I’m seeing it more.”

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:12:30 We’re the ones who I think sometimes separate out the intellectual learning process from the spiritual experience process, and I think it’s really important to note that Joseph Smith, for example, did not see that false dichotomy. He said that, for him, learning was part of the spiritual experience. So it doesn’t come cheaply, but if we can pay the price to learn this language, it makes all the difference in the world to facilitate profound spiritual experience in that temple space.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:12:54 Having said that, I do want to make a few nuanced comments about that, though, because I think it’s really important to note that temple literacy for modern Latter-day Saints definitely includes looking at the similarities between the ancient temple within the book of Exodus and Leviticus and the modern temple, but I think it’s just as important to recognize the differences. I think that temple literacy means that we understand those points of contact and those points of shared conceptual vocabulary between the ancient temple of Israel and the modern Latter-day Saint temple experience, but also the significant differences because it really is not exactly a one-to-one comparison.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:13:29 Sometimes we just automatically assume that everything we would do in a temple today is exactly what happened anciently, and that’s actually not the case. I think there’s some really key differences that we also need to know because those are extremely instructive. I think that there are cultural differences when talking about these two different temple systems, ancient Israel and the modern Latter-day Saint endowment. We’re talking about one that is literally part of the ancient Middle East and the other that is part of the modern Western world. Those are two very different cultural settings.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:13:58 I’ve always appreciated restoration scripture emphasizing that God, in fact, works with different people of different times and speaks to them according to their language and cultural understanding. So that’s something that we see both in the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants has that teaching as well. So I think that’s observation number one to point out in terms of the differences. There will definitely be cultural differences. Ideas of sacrificial animal slaughter and incense burning resonates with the spiritual and religious sensitivities of ancient peoples in a way that it doesn’t today, and there are going to be those cultural differences to be sure.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:14:31 I think there’s also what we might call dispensational differences for lack of a better word. We need to remember with the ancient temple, we are talking about a time when an ancient Israelite community is living a Torah-centered community life, with a Pentateuch-centered religious system as opposed to modern Latter-day Saints who live very much in a Christian setting.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:14:51 So we’re both coming at this from different maybe dispensational perspectives. I think that’s really important to note, especially in light of some of the things that Joseph Smith revealed. Section 84 of the Doctrine and Covenants talks about how the ancient Aaronic priesthood system looks different than the modern Melchizedek priesthood system. So I think that there are those dispensational differences that we need to be aware of.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:15:13 Then finally, I think that it’s important just to note that when we’re talking about the modern temple experience, how many of Joseph Smith’s revelations dealing with the temple include language like, “I’m about to reveal things to you that have not been known since the foundations of the world”? So in other words, Joseph Smith himself is setting up an expectation that there are things that are part of the modern temples that were not part of temples in antiquity.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:15:35 So I think that those differences are really important to note, and to keep our eye on that is just a responsible way to study. Having noted those cultural dispensational and revelatory differences, though, I will say that there is some really key shared conceptual vocabulary that we can learn by studying how the ancient Israelite temple functioned in its context, in its time, and in its place. We can learn things like how sacred space operates, how sacred space can be partitioned out and go from zone to zone, how sacred clothing works for priests functioning in that sacred set apart space, how ritual gestures and certain ritual actions can work, and that is the basic vocabulary for later development in various religious communities, not just Latter-day Saint communities but a Catholic mass, a Greek Orthodox service. All of which draw upon that great tradition of ritual and symbolism that’s really to start in this block of material from the book of Exodus.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:16:31 So again, just to plug that idea of temple literacy, focusing on both the similarities and the differences between biblical and restoration temples, as well as the important cultural context of each, I think those are just some really important nuanced observations to make before we proceed.

John Bytheway: 00:16:46 Matt, you’ve used just a couple of phrases that I’d love our listeners to make sure that we’re on the same page. When you say Pentateuch, I mean, we say this one a lot, but if you could just explain the idea of sacred space. I love that in what we’re looking at, you could move that, the tabernacle. We don’t have mobile temples now, but if you could talk about sacred space, and the Pentateuch, and the Torah, just quick definitions?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:17:08 Yeah, sure. So the words Torah and Pentateuch in some ways can be interchangeable. Both are references to the first five books of Moses in the Hebrew Bible or what Christians call the Old Testament. Pentateuch is just a Greek term for the five books, and Torah is the word for the law or the way or the teaching. So those are just two different technical terms that are often used for Genesis through Deuteronomy. Of course, in our conversation today, we’re right in the middle of that material.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:17:35 So when we talk about Torah-based or Pentateuchal material, that’s what we’re talking about. So we’re going to be focusing on those passages from Exodus, really frankly from Exodus 25 through 40, and then Leviticus 1 through 16, and even though technically our lesson is a little bit slimmer than that, really, it’s that entire block from Exodus 25 through Leviticus 16 that we’ll be talking about today.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:17:58 So everything we’re going to be discussing in our overviews of this material comes from that block of scriptural text from the Torah or the Pentateuch, and we’ll get to sacred space in just one moment. I’ll just say again that’s a lot to cover. So clearly, we won’t be able to do everything in exhaustive detail today. So I would strongly encourage everybody to do what Elder Holland suggested recently in an interview and get a good study Bible and some good study resources and reference materials and just work your way through this. I think that’s extremely important. Elder Ballard also recently taught that we need to consult experts and expert materials in terms of supplemental resources, and I think it’s just extremely valuable to get both Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint perspectives as we’re working through it.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:18:38 I just want to say one more thing before we get to your really important question, John, about the nature of sacred space, and that is, how do we interpret this very technical as we go from the different courtyards of the tabernacle? We’re going to talk about the priestly system and clothing. I think the idea of how to interpret this is also a final observation we want to make upfront because there are a lot of different interpretations from a lot of different faith communities.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:19:00 Every time you go online to look and to research on the tabernacle, you inevitably come across a lot of different and very enthusiastic interpretations. We as Latter-day Saints are not the only ones to be perhaps overly enthusiastic about our search for hidden meanings and so forth. From a Christian perspective, a lot of Christian communities will look back on this material and see references to Jesus or hidden gestures towards the death of Jesus.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:19:24 As Latter-day Saints, I noticed that a lot of people within our community do a similar approach and then sometimes we’ll even overlay that with trying to find meanings for the Latter-day Saint plan of salvation hidden in here. I think those are all really interesting exercises and projects, but I do want to keep in mind that in the context of ancient Israel, those were probably not the primary ways to view this material.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:19:46 So what we’re going to do here, at least as I walk us through this overview, is not pay attention as much to some of these very different and very enthusiastic interpretations of potential meanings. What I want to do is really focus on the text itself, what does the text say about this space and about these rituals, and try to understand it in its ancient Israelite context, which is an ancient Middle Eastern setting.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:20:09 So there are going to be some differences to how we might see that today, but I think if we can wrap our head around that first and spend most of our time with that today, that historically contextualized and scripturally focused approach, then listeners or viewers can proceed how they feel best in terms of other meanings that they find important or significant or that resonate within their modern faith tradition. So I just wanted to make that final observation about how we might interpret this material. So let’s go ahead and talk about it in terms of its ancient biblical and ancient Israelite cultural setting.

Hank Smith: 00:20:41 Matt, John, before we jump into the actual text itself and the details, let me ask you something. As a father and as a religion teacher, I want to help my students and my children be better prepared for temple experience, something they’ve looked forward to their entire lives, something they’ve sung about, thought about, been taught about, they’ve had pictures of the temple in their room, and yet, that first day in the temple, they can come away confused or disappointed, and that’s heartbreaking. So how do you think this material could help us as parents and grandparents better prepare our teenagers to become more temple literate?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:21:22 I think that in Latter-day Saint culture broadly, there is a real reticence to talk about the temple in any way outside of the temple. I remember when I was young and getting ready to go to the temple, temple preparation basically consisted of someone telling me that the temple is a symbolic place, it’s sacred, and I’m not sure if I can say anything else so I won’t say anything else.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:21:41 Obviously, I didn’t go in very well-prepared or very well-informed, but the reality is just by even studying this canonized material within the scriptural text, we are given all sorts of ways to understand sacred space, sacred clothing, sacred rituals, and just by spending time as parents or grandparents, as teachers of ancient scripture at BYU, helping our students to become more familiar with this ancient ritual space and these ancient ritual actions and gestures, that in and of itself is preparing people to go into the modern Latter-day Saint temple experience just with a framework and to better process what they’re going to experience when they see sacred clothing or sacred rituals or hand gestures or spaces.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:22:23 So I feel like one of the best resources that we have for temple preparation has always been right under our nose, but it’s our reticence to say too much that keeps us from really engaging with this material in a way that could provide robust and exciting temple preparation for young Latter-day Saints rather than the throw them into the deep end and let them figure it out one day. So I’m a big advocate of integrating a responsible and contextualized study of the ancient temple into our modern temple preparation. Recognizing the similarities and the differences, both are really instructive as we prepare.

John Bytheway: 00:22:55 I think I probably could have done a better job of preparing my kids and other people when I was a bishop. I do remember telling people, “Look, you’re going to walk into about 3,000 BC, which is great, and this is a restored church and there’s things that have always been part of the gospel that are restored now, but what I want you to do is look for Christ in every way you can while you’re there.” I hope that helped them. I think today I learned some things that maybe I could have done even better, but I always felt like you’re going into a world of symbolism, and it was a different way of teaching and doing things back then, and just knowing that hopefully will help you see, “Oh, we’re going to be taught by symbols today instead of just by words,” but look for Christ in those symbols. That’s how I used to try to prepare people, but I think what we’re doing today could be even more specific. I’m excited to hear, Matt, how you take some of the language in these chapters and prepare people for hearing similar things in our modern temple experience.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:23:59 Okay. So the first observations that I think we should make about the ancient Israelite tabernacle is, first of all, the nature of tabernacle space. I think it’s really instructive. I just wanted highlight three main aspects of this. The first one is, John, what you had asked about earlier, the idea of sacred space. What is sacred space? So the word sacred or holy in ancient Hebrew is kodesh, and the word means literally something that is set apart or different from all of its surroundings.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:24:26 So if something or someone or some day is holy or sacred, it literally means it’s set apart from everything around it. The image that we’re bringing up on the screen here is a wonderful artistic reconstruction of the way in which the tabernacle is described in the book of Exodus. This is done by an archeological illustrator named Balogh Balage, who’s a Hungarian artist who does wonderful artistic reconstructions of all sorts of archeological discoveries from the biblical world. His website is called archeologyillustrated.com, some wonderful images. We’re going to use a few of his images today just to help to visually make sense of what we’re describing here.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:25:04 If you look at this first image, which is an artistic reconstruction of the tabernacle in its space out there in the Sinai desert, you’ll notice that this space is physically set apart by a series of outer curtains. All the tents in the background, that’s where the Israelites will live in these desert wanderings in the narrative. That’s their daily what’s called profane or secular space, right? That’s where they’re cooking their meals, that’s where they’re living their lives, but by these outer tent curtains, this is taking certain space and setting it apart, making it holy, dedicated to the God of Israel, and this space is now the sacred space of God’s dwelling. So that’s observation number one is sacred space is set apart space.

Hank Smith: 00:25:45 For those who are listening, you can come to our YouTube channel, look up FollowHIM on YouTube, and you can see our interview here or you could also come to our website, followhim.co, followhim.co. Okay. Matt, let’s get back to what we were describing here.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:25:58 So just two or three more observations about the nature of this tabernacle space first, and then we’ll talk about a little bit of its functionality. So once we’ve identified this as sacred or set apart space, holy, set apart to the God of Israel, the next observation is that the way that the book of Exodus describes this space is that it’s God’s dwelling. As we know, this is going to be the portable version of the later stationary temples that will be built in Jerusalem in the later biblical periods as proto temple space or sacred space. This was seen in ancient Israel as God’s dwelling. This is his tent.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:26:35 So if Israelites dwell in their tents in the desert, God dwells among his people by living in his tent or his house. Later on, the stationary permanent temple in Jerusalem will be referred to as the house of the God of Israel. So this is God’s dwelling place. So there’s going to be a lot of language in these Exodus and Leviticus chapters about God dwelling with his people in his tent, “I will dwell among you. I will be your God. You will be my people.” This is all very central to the covenantal language of ancient Israel.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:27:06 So in addition to seeing this as God’s house would’ve been seen in ancient Israel, sometimes we also can see images here of the original garden. There’s a lot of similarities in the way that the tabernacle will be decorated and the way the garden of Eden is described in the narratives of Genesis chapters two and three. So that combined idea of this being God’s house, God’s dwelling place, and that God’s house or dwelling place is very much adorn like the garden of the book of Genesis. I think those are two really important observations to make about the nature of this sacred space as seen through the eyes of ancient Israel.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:27:42 Then finally, the last thing I’ll say about the nature of this space is that if this place is seen as God’s house or God’s tent or God’s dwelling among the larger community of Israel, that makes this sacred or set apart space the meeting place between the heavenly realm and the earthly realm. So this idea of seeing temple space as the meeting of heaven and earth, this is where Israel comes to commune with the God of Israel. This is the one place on earth that you can enter, and in its sacred nature, it’s set apart to allow you to commune with the heavenly realm.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:28:16 So between the ideas of being God’s house and God’s dwelling place, a lot of garden imagery here, but also the idea of the temple or the tabernacle space as being the meeting place between heaven and earth, and that way, by the way, it functions like the mountain narratives of a lot of the earlier Genesis stories where patriarchs would go to mountains, build altars, but it’s that same idea of where heaven and earth meet.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:28:39 So I think that all of those observations would feel very at home in ancient Israel. Certainly, there’s a lot of those concepts that would still resonate with modern Latter-day Saints going to the temple today as God’s house, as holy space, as the meeting place between heaven and earth, and as the place where you can go to commune with the God of your community.

Hank Smith: 00:28:56 I’ve heard it said before, Matt, that you’ve got these two circles, heaven and earth, and in the garden before the fall, they’re overlapping, and then you have the fall and they separate, and then you can bring them back together, and where they touch, where they’re starting to come back together and they overlap, you could call that little area, the two circles, the temple. I’ve seen that on the Bible Project.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:29:18 So certainly, the creation stories and the Garden of Eden stories from the book of Genesis definitely have a lot of imagery that resonates with the ways in which these writers describe the sacred space of the tabernacle. So there’s definitely a connection between tabernacle space and creation and Edenic space in the Hebrew Bible. Frankly, a lot of the tabernacle design and description was itself patterned after Israel’s experience at Mount Sinai, this place where they would come to meet God. God was at the top of the mountain. They were at the bottom of the mountain. In that story of Exodus 19 through 24, there’s basically three zones of sacred space on that mountain. There’s Israel at the bottom where they would offer the sacrifices. There’s the place in the middle where certain individuals like Aaron and some of the elders would go, and then there’s the highest part of that mountain, which is where Moses would encounter the God of Israel to facilitate that theophany and that covenant making experience.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:30:12 In a lot of ways, that cosmic mountain experience that Israel had at Mount Sinai will itself be replicated in this tabernacle temple space. It’s like the tabernacle allows the Sinai experience to continue to be a living, ever-present reality among Israel going forward to keep them connected with the God that appeared to them on Mount Sinai. So yeah, a lot of temple, a lot of mountain, garden imagery, heaven and earth meeting. It’s a lot of really powerful imagery here, both for ancient Israel and I also think for modern Latter-day Saints as well.

John Bytheway: 00:30:40 I don’t mean to jump ahead here, but so then think about the temple then in Jesus’ day. Wasn’t one of the courts called the Court of Gentiles? I mean, is there also a three-part division there then in Solomon’s temple?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:30:52 Yeah. That’s a great question. So in later temples as built in Jerusalem, there would be additional courtyards that were added to the original three courtyards of the tabernacle space. So by the time you get to the temple in the days of Jesus in the first century, the Temple of Herod, in that case, still had the tripartite or threefold spaces of the ancient Israelite temple. They were still the outer court of sacrifice, the inner court with the Menorah and the table of showbread, and then the holy of holies. Of course, the arc of the covenant was gone by then, but beyond those three main sacred zones of Herod’s temple then were also added additional courtyards that did not exist in the earlier Israelite period like the Court of Women or the Court of the Gentiles, and it’s all part of Herod’s attempt to expand the temple complex in ways that included much more of the social and economic dynamics of Jerusalem, but the same threefold sacred zones of the ancient Israelite temple were still very much in place at the center of Herod’s temple complex.

John Bytheway: 00:31:51 I love what you said. Sacred means set apart means kodesh. This is some set apart space. I think I’ve often heard it explained this was like a portable temple, a portable sacred space as they moved around in the wilderness until they could find a permanent home type of a thing.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:32:08 Yeah. This is the house of God dwelling with them in his tent as the Israelites are living in their tent, and as they get settled into the promised land and start building their own permanent homes, then God gets his own permanent home in the space of the Jerusalem temple.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:32:20 Pick up maybe where we left off then, so we had just gone through a few preliminary observations about the nature of tabernacle space, the idea of sacred space, God’s dwelling and the meeting place of heaven and earth. So this next image, again, produced by Balage Balogh, who does a great artistic reconstruction of aspects of the outer court of the ancient tabernacle, this gives us an opportunity to make a few preliminary observations about the functionality of this tabernacle space. What actually happened here? What was the purpose of the rituals that would be performed in this space?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:32:53 For here, I think it’s useful to mention basically three general observations. Number one, because this is seen in its ancient Near Eastern context as the house of God or the dwelling tent of God and it’s his house, a lot of the rituals of this space were viewed by the ancient Israelites as rituals that were designed to maintain God’s presence. We want to do things that will not only allow God to be comfortable living among us, but that will encourage him to be living among us.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:33:20 One of the differences between an ancient Israelite mindset and probably a modern Christian or a Latter-day Saint mindset would be that in this ancient setting, one of the ways in which you attract the God of Israel to keep him in his house is by offering certain things that provide a sweet savor or a pleasing odor. There’s a lot of that language that the book of Exodus uses to describe the smell of the barbecuing meat or the smell of the incense rising from the incense altar. All of which were used to maintain the presence of the God of Israel in this space. It’s a very common idea in the ancient Middle East.

Hank Smith: 00:33:53 The actual smell you’re talking about.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:33:55 Exactly. Yeah. It was very common in the ancient Near East to imagine the community living in God’s house, but if it’s his house, he needs a table and he needs food and he needs things that will keep him wanting to come back. So as part of that ancient Middle Eastern culture, the Israelites were very attuned to that sensitivity, which is if this is God’s house, we need to keep him happy. We need to make sure that he’s constantly smelling the barbecue and smelling the incense. So anytime in the book of Exodus or Leviticus you read language of the pleasing odor or a sweet savor, that’s very common ancient Near Eastern language for maintaining the presence of the deity in that space. So that’s one observation. They needed to maintain God’s presence.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:34:34 The second functionality of this space, meaning the purpose of the ritual activities in the space, was to provide sacrifices or to offer sacrifices that would provide Israel with the necessary purification to be in God’s presence. The holiness concepts, the idea of a ritual purity are very important to these ancient Israelite communities, and the idea that to maintain God’s presence among us, we need to be ritually pure and maintain those standards of holiness.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:35:00 So these sacrificial rituals that would be performed in the outer court of the tabernacle were often designed to provide purity or sanctification or even languages of reconciliation and atonement. Out of all the biblical material, both Old and New Testaments, Exodus and Leviticus have by far the most references to ideas of atonement and reconciliation, all in the concept of the sacrificial rituals that would occur in this temple space. So that’s functionality number two.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:35:28 Then functionality number three is this is also going to be the space of priestly mediation. What I mean by that is in ancient Israel, not everybody within the community could enter the sacred space of God’s house and perform certain rituals in this ancient Israelite setting. There was one group of priests that were set apart based on their lineage, and this set apart group of Levites or Aaronic or Aaronide priests were set apart to be mediators between Israel and God, their intercessors.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:36:00 So the idea being that the rituals of this space were designed to be facilitated by these priestly mediators who would represent Israel through some ritual actions, they would represent Israel to God, but then through other ritual actions, they would represent God to Israel. So there’s this mediating link between Israel and God, between heaven and earth, and this set apart priesthood system of Exodus and Leviticus is designed to have these priests as that mediating link.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:36:30 As you could probably imagine, centuries later in the context of early Christianity, looking back on this material, you can imagine New Testament writers finding both in the sacrificial rights of atonement and in the idea of priestly mediation, some really great metaphoric vocabulary to help understand the death of Jesus, right? Jesus is our great mediator or our great high priest. He’s the great intercessor between the community and God, between heaven and earth or Jesus’ death is like the great atoning sacrifice. He’s like that animal only it’s in some bigger eternal sense. That’s going to be the language that New Testament writers will use looking back on this space and using the functionality of this tabernacle space to provide them with all sorts of rich vocabulary to try to make sense of Jesus’ death and his role in a post-crucifixion and post-resurrection world.

Hank Smith: 00:37:23 I’ve noticed that in the book of Hebrews that the writer of the book of Hebrews is very much interested in making those connections between the ancient tabernacle and Jesus. Is that right?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:37:32 That’s exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. The book of Hebrews is the New Testament version of what we’re reading today. So Hebrews, again, centuries later in a post-crucifixion context, will look back on this tabernacle material, the rituals of sacrificial atonement and the rituals of priestly mediation, and will use those aspects of the ancient tabernacle to describe Jesus. So Jesus is our great high priest or he’s our great atoning sacrifice, and Hebrews is great example of a New Testament commentary on the tabernacle material we’re reading today.

John Bytheway: 00:38:04 I love this idea of the priest mediating not only representing Israel to God, but sometimes representing God to Israel. I don’t know. It just sent me to Alma 13. You remember this verse? “The priests were ordained after the order of his Son in a manner that thereby the people might know in what manner to look forward to his Son for redemption.”

John Bytheway: 00:38:27 Whenever I’ve read Alma 13, and this is talking about Melchizedek, though, Melchizedek priesthood, but it sounds like if you watch what the priests do, you will learn something about what Jesus does. Is that a fair interpretation of that do you think?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:38:40 Yeah, I think so. So I think Alma 13 is playing very much in the same rhetorical space as the book of Hebrews, right? In fact, it’s drawing a lot of language, a lot of similar language between Hebrews and Alma 13, a lot of the order of Melchizedek as opposed to the order of Aaron, the idea of a great mediating high priest rather than the earthly shadow of that ultimate priest. So there’s a lot of language there in Alma 13 that resonates very well with what we see in Hebrews as a Christian commentary on this space.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:39:11 How about what we do now is walk through both the priestly mediation part in a little bit more detail and then shift over to the sacrificial rituals themselves as we walk through the different courtyards. If that sounds like a good plan, let’s go ahead and start.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:39:25 Let’s look at the priests a little more carefully. When we’re talking about the priesthood that functioned within this ancient tabernacle space, we need to remember that there are a few key differences between how ancient Israel viewed its priestly system and how modern Latter-day saints would view priesthood today.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:39:40 One of those key differences is that in ancient Israel, priesthood was based on lineage rather than issues of morality or ethics or righteousness or even feeling called to certain priesthood offices. We’re talking about a group of Levites and priests that were set apart based on lineage.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:40:00 To understand this ancient priestly system, we have to remember that out of all the 12 tribes of Israel, the Torah separated one of those tribes, the tribe of Levi, as the group that would be the priestly mediators for the rest of the community. I think it’s helpful to imagine it as three concentric circles. If you imagine the outer circle being the larger tribe of Levi, if you were born into the tribe of Levi, you were, by definition, a Levite, and among all those Levites, they would be the temple servants, right? So the Levites would be the ones who would set up and take down the tabernacle accoutrements, and they would be the ones who would mop up the courtyard floors at the end of the day. In later Israelite history, they would be the ones to sing hymns, to accompany the various sacrifices. Those were all the ways in which Levites were the temple servants.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:40:50 Now, within the larger tribe of Levi, those Levites who were descended from Aaron were called the Aaronic or Aaronide priests. They were the ones who were set apart to be the ritual specialists. So if the larger Levite tribe would be the temple servants, the Aaronic or Aaronide priests within that tribe would be the ritual specialists who would help facilitate sacrifice, who would help facilitate the incense burning, and who would actually perform the rituals that mediated between Israel and God. So that’s the difference between the Levites and the Aaronic priests.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:41:27 Within that Aaronic priestly circle would be one final circle in the middle of the first born of Aaron. That line was designated as the line of high priests. This is a phrase that to modern Latter-day Saints calls to mind ideas of Melchizedek priesthood office. That’s not what we’re talking about here. When the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible talks about Aaronic high priests, what they’re referring to is the presiding Aaronic priest, and that presiding Aaronic priest was typically taken or at least ideally drawn from the line of Aaron’s firstborn, and that Aaronic high priest or presiding Aaronic priest would be the one who would function as the ultimate mediator between Israel and God. He would be the one who once a year would go through the veil into the holy of holies to make atonement or intercession or purification for all the community of Israel. Those are your three concentric circles to understand how the ancient Israelite priesthood functioned.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:42:27 Some similar vocabulary to what we might use today, but in terms of how it actually functions, it does look quite different. So just as a quick review then, so we have the Levites in the outer circle as the temple servants. Among those Levites, the Aaronic priests as the ritual specialists, actually performing the ceremonies on behalf of Israel, then the presiding Aaronic priest or Aaronic high priest as being the ultimate mediator of this lineage-based system.

Hank Smith: 00:42:52 Matt, if I’m of the tribe of Ephraim or Manasseh or something, I don’t work in the temple.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:42:58 That’s right.

Hank Smith: 00:42:59 Would I come over? Would I come over and look inside? What would I be doing?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:43:04 So in just a minute, we’ll shift over to how do these actual spaces work, how does the outer court work and the inner court, and then at that point, we’ll see how non-Levites, among the Israelite community, how they would interact with the space, but within the space itself, it’s the Levites, the priests, and the high priest who will be doing all of the work of intercession or mediation between the community and the God of Israel.

Hank Smith: 00:43:26 They wore different clothes. Correct?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:43:28 They did. Yeah. So that’s the final observation I want to make about the Levitical or Aaronic priests is the way in which they were set apart in the Pentateuch or in the Torah in Leviticus chapters eight and nine and in Exodus 28, 29, and 39, and 40. So there’s actually about six whole chapters here. If you want to learn more about the ancient priesthood and how they were ordained and how they were consecrated, how they were set apart, Exodus 28, 29, 39 through 40 and Leviticus eight through nine is the material where that will be all summarized.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:44:02 So the way in which Aaronic priests and Aaronic high priests were set apart or consecrated actually had a really interesting series of rituals starting with a washing in water. So to set them apart, they would be washed with water. Then they would be clothed in sacred clothing. Again, sacred meaning set apart clothing, clothing that will look different than anyone else in the community. We’ll talk more about that clothing in just a moment.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:44:28 Then finally, after they were washed with water and dressed in sacred clothing, they were then finally anointed with consecrated oil, and then there would be a whole series of sacrifices that would be performed after that, but it was that series of rituals that would set them apart to function.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:44:44 Now, they were naturally born into a priestly system, but before they began their ministry within the tabernacle space, they would have to go through those set apart rituals of being washed, clothed, anointed, and then offer certain sacrifices, and once they’ve gone through that process, they are now formally sanctified or ordained to be able to function in this tabernacle space.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:45:04 So what I want to do, though, as having mentioned the general rituals of setting these priests apart, I do want to take just a minute and look at the clothing that set them apart. So after they were washed and before they were anointed, they would be dressed in sacred clothing that is described in Exodus and Leviticus. This is another one of those moments where it’s not exactly the same as what we would do in the temple today, but there’s a lot of shared conceptual vocabulary in how these ancient priests were dressed for this temple space and how sacred clothing in a modern Latter-day Saint temple might work as well.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:45:35 So let me just give you a few quick examples. Let’s start with the Aaronic priests. For those who are being set apart to be the ritual specialist or the Aaronic or Aaronide priests, they would be dressed in the following items, and this is all directly from Exodus 28 and 29. They would be dressed first in a white robe, a long white robe that would physically set them apart from anyone else, and I think it’s important to point out that that is different than how most people would dress.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:46:00 I know we’re used in our Bible art and especially in our Jesus art, we’re used to seeing Jesus walking around in a long white robe. That’s just not historically accurate. Most people would’ve worn other types of clothing. The only people in Israelite or Jewish antiquity that you would see walking around in long white robes are the priests functioning in the temple. So that set them apart because it was different. Most people did not wear long white robes, but the priests did.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:46:25 So they were given long white robes of priesthood. Then they were given a cap to go on their heads and you can see, by the way, I’ve highlighted two of the figures, a priest and a high priest, from that earlier Balage painting of the tabernacle courtyard. So I’ve enlarged those just so we can envision how each one are dressed. We’re now talking about the one on the left, of course, the Aaronic priest. So after dressing them in the long white robe of priesthood, they were then given a cap or sometimes you can translate it as a turban or a bonnet, but it’s a cap that would go on their head. Then the third piece of clothing would be a sash that would go around their waist.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:47:01 So the three main items of clothing would be the white robe, the white cap, and the white sash, and other than that, the priest would be barefoot because the space in which they’re functioning is sacred space, holy, set apart space, very much like Moses at the burning bush, right? You might remember at the burning bush Moses was told, “Take off your sandals because the ground on which you’re standing is holy, sacred ground,” and a temple or a tabernacle space was seen as holy sacred ground as well. So just like Moses at the burning bush, these Aaronic or Aaronide priests would function barefoot on sacred space.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:47:35 Then the final piece of clothing that the Aaronic priests would wear is what I think the King James calls it linen breeches, which is basically something that, again, is very unique in the ancient world, and that is underwear. Most people in the ancient world did not have underwear. That’s a very modern article of clothing, but in ancient Israel, the priests did wear underwear. Like I said, the texts sometimes call them linen breeches or linen undergarments. The idea was that they went from the waist down to about the knees.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:48:02 The reason why priests were unique in wearing this underwear, this undergarment, linen breeches from their waist to their knees, is because as part of their duties in the outer court, they would often ascend a ramp that would bring the sacrificial meat up to the altar. As you can imagine, if you’re gathered in the temple courtyard and you’re seeing this priest walking up a ramp, there is a very real potential that you could see more than you wanted to see in that particular setting. So the language is to cover their nakedness. They were given linen breeches so that they could minister the altar without any concern about being exposed in a way that most people probably just didn’t want to experience that day when they went to the temple.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:48:40 So those are the main items of clothing, the robe, the cap, the sash, barefoot, and then the linen breeches. That’s the clothing that set priests apart to function in the space of the temple. So if you were an Israelite going to the tabernacle space and you wanted to interact with the priest for a sacrifice, that’s how you would know. To get their attention is based on how they were dressed.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:49:00 Now, the high priest had additional items of clothing to set him apart in his particular role. You’ll notice from the image on the right, and again, this is all from Exodus 28 and 29 and 39 and 40, that the high priest or the presiding Aaronic priest had the exact same clothing as the regular priest. He also had the long white robe, the white cap. He was barefoot. He had the linen breeches on underneath as well, but he would have additional clothing to further set him apart, and the text describes the following.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:49:29 Number one, he was given a blue coat to go over his white robe. Okay? At the hem of that blue coat would be sewn in miniature pomegranates and bells that would rotate all around the hems of his garments. Pomegranates, of course, is a very powerful fertility image in the ancient world. You pop it open, lots of seeds in there. So the idea of fertility and bounty is definitely inherent in the pomegranates that are on the robe. Other images that could deal with fertility in the ancient biblical world, of course, would be fig leaves or those types of things, but in this case, it’s a pomegranate because of the seeds that are inside. So it’s a fertility symbol, and the bells, of course, so you can constantly hear the high priest no matter where he is functioning within the tabernacle space, making that slight noise there.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:50:14 In addition to that blue robe with the pomegranates and bells at the hems, the high priest also had item of clothing that the text calls an ephod. An ephod, it’s basically an apron. It’s a piece of cloth that wraps around your front, and in this particular case, the ephod had various colors woven in and out. So it’s this ephod or apron that would wrap around the front of the high priest. It would be over everything else, and the ephod was connected to a couple items.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:50:42 Number one, it was connected to a breast plate. So the breast plate would be fastened onto the ephod or this apron that he would wrap around himself had a breastplate that had 12 stones, precious stones, set into plate, and each one of the stones has an inscription naming one of the tribes of Israel. Similarly, on the shoulder pieces of the ephod were stones that were set that also had inscribed the names of the tribes of Israel, only with six on one shoulder and six on the other. So between the inscribed stones on the breastplate and the inscribed stones on the shoulder, the high priest bore the names of Israel into his tabernacle rituals, right? So again, it’s the idea that he represents Israel to God as shown by these inscribed stones. So I think that’s a really interesting observation about this particular item of clothing.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:51:31 Of course, also, Latter-day Saints are often interested to note that it’s also a pouch underneath the breast plate that contains two other stones called the Urim and Thummim. So the high priest would have access to these two stones. It’s really hard from the text of the Bible to know exactly how these functioned, but they do seem to have performed some kind of divinatory role. I mean, they somehow indicated God’s will to the high priest in certain ways. We don’t know if they were little pebbles or they were dice.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:51:56 Later, Jewish tradition indicated that they would light up and offer revelations in some interesting ways. So there’s a lot of interesting later legendary explanations for how the Urim and Thummim worked. So we don’t know for sure from the text of Exodus, but all we know is that there are these divinatory stones that are placed within the pouch under the breastplate that somehow gave the high priest access to ascertain the will of God in various circumstances. So those are the main items that are associated with the ephod, the apron, the breastplate, the shoulder stones inscribed with the names of the tribes of Israel.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:52:27 I’ll just point out one other thing about the ephod before we finish this segment, and that is I know it’s really easy as modern readers to read through the coloring and the fabrics and all these kind of things, but in this case, it’s actually an important observation to make to read those details because if you read the details carefully, you’ll notice that the coloring and fabric of the ephod matches exactly the coloring and fabric of the temple veil inside the holy place.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:52:52 So it seems like the high priest’s garments themselves signified that he had special access to the temple veil. So it’s almost like the ephod, the garments of the high priest, and the temple veil match in both the color and material suggesting that the high priest will have access to that space at least once a year on the day of atonement.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:53:10 Beyond those items of clothing then, the final items I will mention is high priests did have the white cap as well, but the high priest had a gold plate that would go on the front of the cap, and it was that gold plate that was inscribed Kodesh L’Yahweh or Kodesh L’Adonai, a holiness to the Lord, and the idea being that not only does he bear the names of Israel on him through the breastplate and the shoulder stone, so he represents Israel to God, but he has the name of God sealed on his forehead. So he also represents God to Israel as well. So he’s that ultimate mediator and the names of both Israel and the God of Israel are inscribed on his person in the form of his sacred clothing.

Hank Smith: 00:53:49 These were clothes to be worn, Matt, do we know in the temple space only or did they wear this around camp?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:53:56 No. As far as we can tell, the text doesn’t go into great detail about this, but certainly in later Judaism, this would be clothing that would only be worn in the sacred space of the temple. So we don’t know how this would work in the tabernacle, but in later temple structures like Solomon’s temple and Herod’s temple, there were actually adjacent storage rooms where the priest would go and remove their sacred clothing, put on their street clothing, and then go back into society, back into the community. So as far as we could tell, it probably would’ve been the same assumption in the book of Exodus that the priests and high priest had their own tents and had their own street clothes that they would’ve lived in, but when they functioned as priests or as the high priest, it’s this clothing that would’ve set them apart to facilitate the rituals in that sacred space.

John Bytheway: 00:54:37 I like this idea. It’s set apart clothing for a set apart place.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:54:41 That’s right.

John Bytheway: 00:54:42 That’s appropriate to that place. It’s set apart. I like that idea. I just wanted to point out to our listeners that there’s a similar graphic to the one that you’re showing on page 85 in the Come Follow Me manual that shows there’s three priests that are outside that are all in white, and the one that is inside, the inner part of the tent is the picture that you have on the right with the darker blue, the breast plate. So what did you call them? The presiding high priest?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:55:14 Yeah. Those wearing white are the Aaronic or Aaronide priests, and the one individual who’s dressed in the additional garments would be the presiding Aaronic priest, what we sometimes call the high priest.

John Bytheway: 00:55:24 Yeah. So not meaning an office in the Melchizedek priesthood the way we use it today, but the presiding Aaronic priest is called the high priest.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:55:31 Yeah. I think that’s a better way to understand the function of this particular individual within that Israelite priestly system.

Hank Smith: 00:55:37 This seems like he’s decked to the nines. I mean, is that what I’m supposed to see here? This is nice stuff. He’s got gold thread and purple dye that I know was difficult to get in that time. So he looks good.

John Bytheway: 00:55:54 I love that everything means something. All of those stones represent a tribe.

Hank Smith: 00:55:59 Is Aaron our first high priest then?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:56:02 According to the narrative in Exodus, yeah, Aaron’s the first high priest who is set apart. He’s the first one to be washed, to be dressed in these clothing, these items of clothing to then be anointed, and then perform a series of sacrifices to initiate his high priesthood. The way that Exodus and Leviticus described the continuous nature of that high priesthood is that it was meant to be Aaron’s first born son who would then continue in that office.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:56:24 In later Israelite and early Jewish history, of course, this was always a very contested office. It didn’t always pass down from eldest to eldest as originally intended. There were certain moments where it was the second born of that firstborn line or even later, the intertestamental period, occasionally, this would become a position of political appointment. So in the later biblical world, the office of a high priest could be very contested and become even the object of a lot of sectarian disagreement over who was the legitimate high priest. Those are all things that feed into the conversations of Jewish sectarianism in the time of Jesus. So maybe during New Testament year, we can revisit that conversation and talk about the nature of this priestly system in the New Testament period, but at least in the book of Exodus and Leviticus, this is the ideal of how this system is supposed to function.

Hank Smith: 00:57:08 This is great. It’s such an interesting thing. I mean, here they are, they’re brought out of Egypt, and the Lord says, “We’re going to build this structure with these clothes, and this is how I am going to teach you and communicate with you.”

John Bytheway: 00:57:25 I love the idea of set apart clothes because why do we have to dress up for church? If somebody walked in in a T-shirt and flip flops, which happened on my mission all the time, we would love them and welcome them in, of course, but if you can, it’s nice to have set apart clothing for a set apart experience. I love that idea here.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:57:48 I think the holiness concept is so important in so many ways. I mean, there’s so much about our life as Latter-day Saints, which, by the way, the word saint means the holy ones. It means the set aparted ones, and holiness, sacredness, and sanctification, that’s all the same word in Hebrew and in Greek, by the way. So all of those words indicate a set apartedness.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:58:06 So whether it be a set apart day or a set apart space or a set apart people, I mean, that’s the whole idea of holiness, holiness to the Lord or keeping a day holy or whatever. Yeah. I think it’s a really important concept to recognize. Frankly, I think it’s a concept that helps us to realize why so much of the mosaic law feels so arbitrary, the whole dietary law. Why do you keep kosher? It’s not because there’s anything eternally significant about not eating pork products, it’s because they needed something to set them apart. Don’t eat pig because everyone else around you does.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:58:35 I think that we have a lot of those holiness laws today as well. Frankly, I don’t know if you guys would agree with this or not, I wonder if the word of wisdom is basically a holiness law. I mean, there’s nothing eternally significant about not drinking wine. Jesus drank it. Section 27 says we get to drink it again at the second coming, but the idea is that we need something to set us apart, something to make us different from everything around us.

Hank Smith: 00:58:55 Everybody drinks coffee.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:58:56 Exactly. If that’s something, it’s a holiness law.

John Bytheway: 00:58:58 Something I can use to teach my children, why do we dress up? Because this is different. This is the Sabbath day. It’s different. It is set apart from the rest of the week, and now we’re going to go to church and it’s set apart from the other places we go during the week like the grocery store and America First Credit Union. It is set apart. So everything we’re doing is a little different and we can show our sign to God as President Nelson has reminded us at Ezekiel 20:20.

Hank Smith: 00:59:26 Matt, let me ask you one thing. Is this anything they’ve seen before? Is this anything out of Egypt? I mean, is this all just so brand new that they’re going, “What are we doing?”

John Bytheway: 00:59:38 Because Egyptians had temple endowment stuff, right?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:59:41 That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. That’s a great question. It’s unique. There’s certain things about it that’s unique, but not entirely unique. So in the larger ancient Near Eastern culture that they’re living in, Mesopotamians had temples, Canaanites had altar space, Egyptians had temples, and all of these had priestly officiants who ministered in these sacred spaces.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 00:59:58 So the idea of sacred space, God dwelling here, we need to perform rituals to keep his attention, and we have certain people set apart in their clothing to perform ritual, none of that is unique. That is the ancient Middle Eastern world that Israelites are part of. This is just now focusing on let’s now make this into the cult of the God of Israel and, of course, not cult in the modern negative sense, but just in the ritual system sense. If you’re studying ancient Near Eastern studies, a lot of this is going to sound very familiar in many cultures.

Hank Smith: 01:00:22 He’s speaking to them in their language, in the way they would understand. I just wonder if this was all and they’re going, “What are we doing?”

Dr. Matthew Grey: 01:00:28 Yeah. Now, this would’ve been very, very comfortable to them, I think. All right. So now that we’ve discussed the Levitical priesthood and how the Levites and Aaronic priests and high priests are set apart and how they function, what I think we’ll do now is now let’s turn to the tabernacle space itself. In this case, this gives us an opportunity to look at how the space is laid out and how the different zones of this space work.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 01:00:53 Again, going back to that idea that we’ve been discussing of holiness or set apart space, as you can see from this artistic reconstruction, the tabernacle is going to be set apart space that itself will be divided up into three zones, this demarcation of sacred space. There’s going to be an outer court, which is outside the inner sanctuary. Then within the tent sanctuary is going to be an inner court or a holy place, and then beyond that on the furthest inside is going to be the holy of holies, and each one of these spaces increase in degrees of holiness, right?

Dr. Matthew Grey: 01:01:26 So these are zones of sacrality or zones of holiness that become increasingly strict the closer you get to the holy of holies, which, again, represents the presence of God. It’s just another brief reminder that this space that we’re not looking at is meant to represent God’s presence, and that the rituals in this space are meant to maintain that presence and to maintain the holiness that the God of Israel emanates. So it needs to be a place of ritual purity, ritual purification, and holiness as rituals proceed further and further into the space called the holy of holies.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 01:02:00 So again, as modern Latter-day Saints, again, just to keep our eyes on the similarities and the differences, there’s a lot of differences here between this ancient Israelite setting and our modern Latter-day Saint temples, but there’s also a lot of shared conceptual vocabulary, the idea of sacred space that itself is partitioned off into certain zones. You actually move space to space, and each space you pass through a curtain or a veil or a partition that gets you into the next space, and then it gets you into the next space until you finally get into the throne room of God, the presence of the deity in the holy of holies. So I think there’s a lot about just the nature of the space taking a step back into seeing how it functions and seeing how it operates that itself is instructive, both biblically and in the restoration.

Dr. Matthew Grey: 01:02:42 What I thought we’d do now is let’s just go space by space. I thought we would do a quick overview of what’s the furniture and main activities of the outer court, then we’ll go to the inner court, and then we’ll go to the holy of holies just to get a feel for how these particular spaces worked.

John Bytheway: 01:03:00 Please join us for part two of this podcast.