reported during the days of the Tabernacle and while Solomon’s Temple stood, but apparently it was no longer seen in Zerubbabel’s Temple, as it was one of the five things that some Jewish writers maintained was missing from this later temple.
Dr. Bernard in his notes on Josephus disagrees. He argues from Josephus’s records that as the mysterious Urim and Thummim were said to be in Zerubbabel’s Temple, the other four significant “missing” things must have been there as well.
The first reference to the Shechinah is found in the Targums. A Targum in Aramaic literally means a translation or an interpretation, so the Targums were translations of portions of the Hebrew Bible — or, indeed, the whole of it — into Aramaic. At one time the word meant a translation of the Old Testament into any language at all, but was honed down over the years to refer specifically to a translation from the old Hebrew into the later Aramaic.
The word Shechinah comes from an old root meaning “to rest,” “to settle,” or “to dwell.” It is not found in the Bible itself, but was widely used by later Jews, and borrowed from them by Christians. It signified the visible majesty of the Divine Presence, particularly when God was thought to be especially there in the area between the Cherubim on the lid of the sacred ark.
The Targums were produced to meet the spiritual and religious needs of the great majority of Jewish worshippers who found it difficult if not impossible to cope with ancient classical Hebrew.
When the Herodian Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, the Targums came into their own. Synagogues had to replace the lost temple, and the central readings in the synagogue services needed to be translated into Aramaic for the benefit of most of the worshippers. As time went on, the Targums assumed the role of commentaries, and a special meturgeman attempted to explain away any confusions or doubtful meanings.
Wise sayings, proverbs, aphorisms, allegories, and legends crept into the Targums as time went on, so that the later ones were very different from the straightforward translations that had been the main purpose of the originals.
From its special use in the Targums, the concept of Shechinah came to signify the actual presence of God on Earth as far as the early Jewish theologians and scholars were concerned. One reason for this was a fear on the part of the writers of the Talmud, Midrash, and Targums that some of the clearly anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the earlier writings might cause serious misunderstandings. The idea of a God who looked like an amorphous cloud of glowing mist — rather than a human being — undoubtedly seemed theologically safer to them than the earlier concepts of an undeniably humanoid God who walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening looking for Adam and Eve.
Some theologians have considered the existence of a parallel between the concept of the Shechinah and the idea of the Holy Spirit. Other, mainly medieval, theologians have tried to work out theories of the Shechinah as a separate Divine Being, Someone or Something created by God, perhaps a personified representation of Divine Glory or Divine Light.
ARAMAIC
It was after the Exile in Babylon that Aramaic became the preferred spoken language of the Palestinian Jews, and so replaced their original Hebrew. Just as Latin lingered among European academics and ecclesiastical scholars long after it had ceased to be spoken by Roman Legionaries, so Hebrew lingered among Jewish academics and scholars until well after the first century of the Christian era, although by then Aramaic was firmly established in the eastern Mediterranean area.
In one of the sadder short stories of H.G. Wells, a character goes in search of Light but falls to his death in the process — the Wellsian concept of Light in the mind of the tragic hero in this particular story comes surprisingly close to the medieval theological concept of the Shechinah.
Yet another Jewish idea connected with the Shechinah was that it would return when the long-promised Messiah came. In the Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Jesus, when the disciples Peter, James, and John witnessed him shining with his rightful Divine Glory on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, the Shechinah could well have been put forward as an explanation.
To what extent can this extremely mysterious and powerful Shechinah light be associated with the records of the Exodus? Many of the biblical accounts surround it with a cloud, so that the brilliant radiance of the Shechinah shines through the cloud. In the Exodus account, “The Lord went before the Israelites by day in a pillar of cloud and by night in a pillar of fire.” Philo interprets this as, “The fiery appearance of the Deity shone forth from the cloud.”
Philo’s ideas are always well worth considering. Philo Judaeus, who was also known as Philo of Alexandria, was born in 15 B.C. and died in A.D. 50. He was a brilliantly intelligent, Greek-speaking, Jewish philosopher and theologian, whose great pioneering contribution to human thought was his attempt to reconcile faith with reason — an exceedingly difficult but supremely worthwhile intellectual task. Philo came of an extremely wealthy and influential family in Alexandria. He studied at one of the Greek Gymnasiums, where he mastered mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, grammar, and logic. He also made a deep study of rhetoric, like all other young academics of his time and place.
METURGEMAN
The meturgeman, meaning “interpreter” or “translator,” refers to a person who stood beside the reader of the Torah in the ancient synagogue and recited the Aramaic translation of the Bible. Rules set forth in the Talmud and other rabbinic literature state that the meturgeman was to stand upright next to the reader, reciting orally (not from a written text), and not raising his voice louder than that of the reader. These rules were invoked in order to preserve the importance of the original Hebrew text.
Unlike his more ascetic scholarly colleagues, Philo had the profound good sense to enjoy life as well as to think about its philosophical meaning. He was a keen boxing fan, an enthusiastic theatre-goer, and a devotee of chariot racing. When he wasn’t pursuing any of these sensible and healthy interests, he was enjoying an evening of good food and lavish entertainment: he was, in short, a practical bon viveur as well as a great thinker. Philo’s love of a “middle way” between the extremes of Jewish scriptural fundamentalism on one hand and a liberal disregard of the old laws because they were considered to be “only parables” on the other, would have made him quite a comfortable member of the present-day Anglican Church. He is far and away our most valuable, reliable and informative source of knowledge of the Hellenistic Judaism that was practised in Alexandria in his day.
The highlight of Philo’s career, however, was an occasion in the year A.D. 39 on which he displayed great courage and integrity when he dared to lead a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to complain to Caligula about a recent pogrom in their city: the ignorant and prejudiced Greek orator Apion, who was opposing Philo, had just delivered a despicable racist attack on the Jews. Philo was on the point of refuting Apion’s nonsense when Caligula decided he did not wish to hear any more arguments at that time. Philo, one of those rare beings who dared to risk the wrath of Caligula, told his colleagues not to be disheartened because God would very shortly deal with the insane Roman emperor. Shortly afterward, to everyone’s delight, Caligula was assassinated. A man like Philo definitely deserves to be heard.
So what was this strange and mysterious Shechinah that was associated with the even more mysterious Ark of the Covenant?
Looked at disinterestedly and objectively, the ark was not an exclusively Jewish artifact. The ancient Egyptians used Arks for religious purposes, as well, and there is a possibility that when Moses led the Israelite slaves out of bondage in Egypt, the ark and its contents came with them. Had Moses with his secret inner knowledge of the Egyptian Court — he had, after all, been raised as an Egyptian prince — brought some great and powerful ancient treasure away
