building 3: practices of making

In reflecting further on the story of how and why Solomon built the Temple, I want to cite Gabriel Josipovici again, because without being cynical he is very skilled at teasing out some of the oddities of this narrative.

Like most modern readers, including myself, Josipovici is interested in human motives; but as Erich Auerbach famously taught us, this is just the sort of thing about which the narrators of the Hebrew Bible are notoriously reticent. This does not necessarily mean that they are uninterested in motive; they could, perhaps, be very interested in motive and yet aware that, as Rebecca West is said to have commented, there’s no such thing as an unmixed one.

In any case, Josipovici is quite alert to the possible distance between how Solomon describes his actions and what those actions, taken as a whole, actually amount to. I got into some of that in my previous post, when I spoke of the ways in which Solomon seems almost to be manipulating or even coercing the Lord into blessing Israel (and of course its new king).

Well, there’s another variety of coercion here. Let’s return to 1 Kings 5:

King Solomon drafted forced labor out of all Israel, and the draft numbered 30,000 men. And he sent them to Lebanon, 10,000 a month in shifts. They would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniram was in charge of the draft. Solomon also had 70,000 burden-bearers and 80,000 stonecutters in the hill country, besides Solomon’s 3,300 chief officers who were over the work, who had charge of the people who carried on the work. At the king’s command they quarried out great, costly stones in order to lay the foundation of the house with dressed stones. So Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders and the men of Gebal did the cutting and prepared the timber and the stone to build the house.

As Josipovici notes, “This massive deployment of a labor force to hew and cut stone is more reminiscent of the Israelites in Egypt than of the willing makers of the Tabernacle” (p. 100).

It seems to me that this point relates to one that Josipovici makes a little later:

It is important to note that the [Tabernacle] is a tent and not a stone building. It is made of poles and curtains and is only itself when in action, so to speak, as an animal cannot be adequately understood in terms of bones and skin, but needs to be studied in movement, as a living whole. So the tent is always going to be more than the kit that makes up its parts. Each time it is erected, therefore, the process of making is renewed. (p.104)

That’s a brilliant point, I think: the Tabernacle is always being made, it is new every morning. It is therefore something like the cosmos, which in a sense was constructed in six days after which its Maker rested, but in another sense is constantly undergoing making: as Chesterton famously said, “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.”

In any case, if we put those two passages from Josipovici together, we get a fairly comprehensive contrast between the Temple and the Tabernacle: the former made on the initiative of the king, built of stone, built by conscripted labor, built once, fixed and permanent; the former made at the commandment of the Lord, built of woven cloth and carved wood and a bit of metalwork, built by the artisans of the children of Israel, erected repeatedly and moved when the people moved — the people whose relationship to the Lord is repeatedly figured as walking. (Thus, as noted in my previous post, the Lord to Solomon: “If you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever.”)

It is as though in making the Temple Solomon has reversed, if not actively repudiated, the practices of making that God had commanded Moses to pursue. Whether he meant to or not, Solomon in building the Temple has encouraged the people of Israel to place their trust in technological power — technological power as a manifestation of political power. A straight line runs from the demand for a king in 1 Samuel 8 to the construction of this mighty and gorgeous edifice, a building that, God warns Solomon, may well be destroyed, thus making Israel “a proverb and byword among all peoples.” A Tabernacle is a technology that curbs idolatry; a Temple, however well-intentioned its maker and however devout the priests who serve in it, runs the risk of encouraging idolatry.

Text Patterns

February 15, 2017