Bede: On the Tabernacle

Although The Venerable Bede is remembered today chiefly for his work as an historian, his contemporaries and later medieval readers knew him as a Christian teacher specializing in the interpretation of the Bible. The primary audience for his biblical exegesis was composed of 8th-century Anglo-Saxon monks and missionaries engaged in the ministry of pastoral care. This volume contains an English translation of Bede’s allegorical commentary on the tabernacle of Moses, which he interpreted as a symbolic figure of the Christian Church. Written in the early 720s at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, De Tabernaculo was the first Christian literary work devoted entirely to this topic and the first verse-by-verse commentary on the relevant portions of the Book of Exodus. In his commentary, Bede expounded the literal meaning and spiritual significance of the divine revelation of the law to Moses on Sinai, the construction of the tabernacle and the clothing of Aaron and his sons with ornate priestly vestments. His principal sources were Jerome, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville, as well as the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman natural historian Pliny. This was one of Bede’s most popular works, appearing in a great many manuscripts from every period of the Middle Ages. In the 12th century, when it inspired similar treatises by Peter of Celle, Peter of Poitiers, Richard of St. Victor and Adam of Dryburgh, much of this work was copied into the most influential of all medieval biblical commentaries, known as the Ordinary Gloss .