Date

3-10-2026

Department

Rawlings School of Divinity

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Bible Exposition (PhD)

Chair

Kyoohan Lee

Keywords

covenant, sacred space, presence, Pentateuch, Joshua, Israel, God's chosen people, tabernacle, temple, Sinai, promised land, ark of the covenant, crossing, Jordan River, Red Sea

Disciplines

Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

This dissertation thesis is that sacred space, divine presence, and covenant are a theological triad that gives form to the canonical progression from Eden through the Pentateuch into Joshua and finds its eschatological orientation in the indwelling Spirit. The project as a whole, and its treatment of Genesis–Deuteronomy and Joshua in particular, maintains that the presence of God is never conceived independently of a covenantal relationship and is thereby always concretized, i.e., spatialized in and through the site or locale of the sacred space: Eden, the tabernacle, the land, and the sanctuary at Shiloh. Each of these stages in the Old Testament storyline has a teleological function, one that both fulfills and anticipates. Methodologically, it is a canonical-theological undertaking of a specifically “canonical-linguistic” focus, concerned with the exegesis of representative Hebrew terms שָׁכַן (šākan, “to dwell”; LXX: σκηνόω, skēnoō, “to dwell, to tabernacle”); קֹדֶשׁ (qōdeš, “holiness”; LXX: ἁγιασμός, hagiasmos, “holiness, sanctification”); נַחֲלָה (naḥălāh, “inheritance”; LXX: κληρονομία, klēronomia, “inheritance; allotted possession”); מְנוּחָה (menûḥāh, “rest”; LXX: ἀνάπαυσις, anapausis, “rest, cessation, relief”), sensitive to the contextual, narrative and intertextual factors that bear on their canonical formation. The outcome is a portrait which, on the one hand, demonstrates that Eden is a proto-sanctuary, where the priestly vocation attested in עָבַד (ʿābad, “to serve, work, worship”; LXX: δουλεύω, douleuō, “to serve as a slave, to render service”) and שָׁמַר (šāmar, “to guard, keep, watch”; LXX: φυλάσσω, phylássō, “to guard, protect, keep”) in concurrence with Yahweh's covenantally contingentהִתְהַלֵּךְ (hithallēḵ, “to walk about / to conduct oneself”; LXX: περιπατέω, peripatéō, “to walk, live, or conduct one’s life”) anticipates both the tabernacle and the land as successive phases of a theology of divine presence. The tabernacle in turn echoes Yahweh'sמִשְׁכָּן (miškān, “dwelling place”; LXX: σκηνή, skēnē, “tent, tabernacle”) as a contingent and mobile presence. In contrast, Deuteronomy and Joshua reframe this presence in territorial terms, pivoting on מְנוּחָה (menûḥāh, “rest”; LXX: κατάπαυσις, katápausis, “cessation, place of rest”) and נַחֲלָה (naḥălāh, “inheritance”; LXX: κληρονομία, klēronomia, “inheritance; allotted possession”), a sanctified geography nonetheless made conditional by Israel's covenant unfaithfulness. Joshua can thus be read as a hinge canon in which the movements of conquest, settlement, and covenant renewal at Shechem recast the land as liturgical, ordered by worship, covenantal faithfulness, and the dwelling of YHWH, rather than imperialistic plunder.

The dissertation concludes with an argument that this Old Testament trajectory anticipates its pneumatological orientation, in which Christ, as the true temple, and the indwelling Spirit universalize and eschatologize sacred space into t

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