7 - The necessity of blood

Summary

In Genesis 15, God's promise to Abraham, that he will have descendants ‘as many as the stars of heaven’, is sealed by the bisection of a heifer, a she-goat and a ram, and in the holy space ‘between the pieces’, at sunset, while Abraham is in a ‘deep sleep’, the covenant is made and a vision of his children's future shown. Many later writers generalise this as a vision of salvation or the end of the times, or specify a revelation of the heavenly Jerusalem. The previous chapters have tried to show that Hebrews presents itself implicitly as such a vision ‘between the pieces’, in the place of sacrificial death, in which past and future are summed up in the present, and in which the barrier separating earthly and heavenly realities is cast down.

It goes without saying that any such vision is, in the Biblical perspective, a revealing of the deepest truth; however, such a fusion is hard to achieve or to sustain, and it is not surprising that interpretation falls back from it into questions about whether Hebrews is really concerned with past or future, old covenant or new, sacrifice or faith, salvation in history or in the realm of Platonic Ideas.