architecture of transcendence in temple and bible

I am reading Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford, 2004): "Transcendence is what remains unmanifested when all manifestation has reached its limits. But a church can be meant as a means for human transcendence, or for the transcending of ordinary experience and ordinary consciousness. The transcendent is not only that which exceeds one's capacity for participation but that which expands one's capacities through participation." (p. 102).

I'm also reading Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (Continuum, 2003). She says the conception of time underlying the Jewish temple myth (and hence the Bible) was neither linear, as we always imagine, nor cyclical, as we usually think of in the 'sacred cosmos' of other cultures, but inner/outer, hidden/manifest, in/visible etc in a way that was symbolized by the Holy of Holies in the temple. The Holy of Holies represented the ever-present Origin (no reference to Jean Gebser's work, which I haven't read); what was behind the veil was Day One of creation, the Beginning. Outside was the rest of creation, the visible world.

And the point of it was the (apo)theosis of the king and/or of the high priest as Adam.

This is the story behind the imagery of Hebrews when it talks about Christ.

Meanwhile, Duane Christensen (see his work generally at bibal.net writes to Ernest McClain at the bibal yahoogroup,

I too came to the conclusion that the fact that 110 is the sum of the squares of 5, 6 and 7 is without significance years ago, before I knew anything about either harmonic theory or the importance of the numbers 23 and 32 [which happen to sum to 55]— the so-called *kabod-numbers*, as spelled out by Casper Labuschagne. I was curious about the meaning of the number 110, however, and so I went to the see two Egyptologists at UC Berkeley to learn about its role in the culture of ancient Egypt. I got quite a long list of references showing that the number 110 is an "ideal" age of some sort in Egyptian culture—but no reasons as to why.

I played with the numbers in Genesis at that time and found a number of things perhaps, which I am now learning can be explained better in light of the system of musical metaphor you are proposing. I found that certain numbers appear to be associated with different eras in the chronological setting of the stories in Genesis. The starting point in this inquiry was simply the observation of the curious role of the number 140 in tying together the Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Job—as the number that is apparently linked to the Patriarchs of Genesis 12-50. There are probably other reasons why the number 140 was selected, but the only thing I could come up with at that time was the fact it was the sum of the squares of one through seven: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 + 49 = 140. Whatever its explanation, the number appears to be of central importance:

1) Abraham was 140 when Isaac married Rebekah 2) The marriage of Isaac and Rebekah lasted 140 years 3) Jacob was 120 years old at the time of Isaac's death and spent 20 years in Haran with his uncle Laban before his return to Palestine. By one calculation he would have been 140 years old at the time he wrestled with the angel at the Jabbok, as opposed to the 99 of Rashi's calculations. 4) And of course his twin brother Esau would have been 140 years old at that time, which marks their reunion in Palestine.

5) And of course Job lived 140 years after his testing.

Since the number 140 is the sum of the squares of one through seven, I simply guessed what number might be associated with Israel in the period of the 12-tribe confederacy and added up the sum of the squares of one through twelve, which comes to 650. I then noted that 110 + 140 + 650 = 900 [the square of the sum of the squares of the digits one through four].

I then noticed that Abraham was 160 years old when his grandson Jacob/Israel wasa born. And the number of years between the birth of Shem and Terah in Genesis 11 is 320 (= 160 x 2). If one multiplies 900 x 160 = 144,000.

At the time I simply asked the question: "Is it possible that this curious number, which becomes the community of the elect within apocalyptic speculation (cf. Rev. 14:1) began in ancient Israel as simply the symbolic lapse of time from the promulgation of the Torah of Moses to the eschaton, conceived in terms of a grand reversal of past events in ancient Israel according to the formula:"

Joseph—New Israel—Fathers—New Creation
(110 + 650 + 140) x 160 = 144,000

I was building on the work of Isaac Kikawada at UC Berkeley who suggested that Israel understood the future as a grand re-run of the past in reverse— or a projection of the past into the future. Once again, it must be remembered that I knew nothing at all about the theory of harmonics and the principle of inversion in the model of a menorah-pattern [or seven tones within an octave]. I was just playing with numbers in a very elementary way.

This is what I concluded in the article I published at that time:

"Even if that original schema envisioned the promulgation of the Torah as a literary prophet-surogate, the door was open for another reading as well, in terms of the literal advent of a new Moses who would usher in a new age in human history as it relates to the people of God. The appearance of this new Moses would lead to the establishment of a future kingdom of Israel. This epoch would be succeeded by an ideal age, corresponding to that of the "fathers" in ancient times—the millenium of subsequent tradition. This 'age of the fathers' would culminate in a new creation where the people of God would eventually become what God intended them to be in the beginning of time.

It may not be possible to recover all of the information preserved within the scribal shorthand of the genealogical systems of biblical Israel. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the numbers in the received tradition are not to be taken as mere historical memory. The mysterious numbers are theological statements that contain within them a look into the future as well as the distant past."

--Like, "not to be taken as mere historical memory"??

How could anyone ever have taken these numbers as historical, except in a universe where "symbol" and "history" were one? (Which would be an interesting observation about fundamentalism.) They've got to be about transformation— the same as in the temple— but if only we understood!

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