Texts in Conversation
Ezekiel 43 describes God declaring the temple as the place of his throne and presence forever with Israel. The Greek Septuagint changes this to focus on God's name dwelling there, likely to remove the implication that God is physically present.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Ezekiel 43:7
Hebrew Bible
6 I heard someone speaking to me from the temple, while the man was standing beside me. 7 He said to me: “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will live among the people of Israel forever. The house of Israel will no longer profane my holy name, neither they nor their kings, by their spiritual prostitution or by the pillars of their kings set up when they die. 8 When they placed their threshold by my threshold and their doorpost by my doorpost, with only the wall between me and them, they profaned my holy name by the abominable deeds they committed. So I consumed them in my anger.
Date: 600–501 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Ezekiel 43:7
Septuagint
6 And I stood, and look, there was a voice out of the house of one speaking to me, and a man stood near me, 7 and he said to me, Son of man, you have seen the place of my throne, and the place of the soles of my feet, in which my name shall dwell in the midst of the house of Israel for ever; and the house of Israel shall no more profane my holy name, they and their princes, by their fornication, or by the murders of their princes in the midst of them; 8 when they set my door-way by their door-way, and my thresholds near to their thresholds: and they made my wall as it were joining myself and them, and they profaned my holy name with their iniquities which they committed: and I destroyed them in my fierce anger and with slaughter.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... In the ideal Temple described by Ezekiel (xliii 7) God will make His dwelling in the midst of His people forever, or as the LXX has it: “My name shall dwell in the midst of the house of Israel forever.” (The latter is interesting in view of the Johannine interest in the name.) When the Prologue proclaims that the Word made his dwelling among men, we are being told that the flesh of Jesus Christ is the new localization of God’s presence on earth, and that Jesus is the replacement of the ancient Tabernacle. The Gospel will present Jesus as the replacement of the Temple (ii 19–22), which is a variation of the same theme ..."
Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 77.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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