Abstract: The prohibition against graven images in the Old Testament is not merely a polemical rejection of idolatry: it is a positive theological statement. God has already given his only authorised image — the living human being. Created in his image and likeness, vivified by a direct divine inbreathing and constituted in a relational unity that mirrors communion, the human being is from the beginning ordered towards becoming the dwelling place of God. This article explores the convergence of three biblical realities — the creation of man in God’s image, the building of the woman from the man’s own flesh and bone, and the theology of the Ark as God’s sacred dwelling — in order to recover a sense of the grandeur and sacredness of the human being that Scripture itself affirms, while maintaining the irreducible distinction between Creator and creature. The Old Testament does not collapse these two poles; it holds them in a tension that points beyond itself towards the full revelation of indwelling in Christ.
Introduction
There is a striking paradox at the heart of the Old Testament’s theology of the image. God commands: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image” (Exodus 20:4). Yet Genesis declares, without qualification: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him” (Genesis 1:27). The prohibition and the affirmation belong together. Israel does not fabricate an image of God because God has already provided one — the living human being. In every other ancient Near Eastern religion, the image of the deity is placed in a temple, a constructed sanctuary, as the locus of divine presence. In Israel, the only legitimate image is the human person himself. This is not a metaphor. It is a theological claim of the first order, and its implications have not been fully drawn out.
The goal of this article is to draw them out, by following three converging lines of biblical evidence: the creation of man in God’s image, the building of the woman from man’s own flesh and bone, and the theology of the Ark as the most sacred expression of divine dwelling. These three realities belong to a single trajectory, one that reaches its culmination in the prophetic promises of interior indwelling and points forward to their fulfilment in Christ.
I. Created in His Image: The Living Representation of God
Genesis 1:26–27 is the foundation: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.” In the ancient Near Eastern context, the “image” of a deity was placed in a temple as the locus of presence. Israel refuses this. The only legitimate “image” of God on earth is the human being himself. This displacement is not incidental: it means that what other religions concentrated in a stone or metal statue, Israel concentrated in a living person. Man is the image — not a copy, not a reflection, but the unique, authorised, living representation of God in creation.
But the “image” is not a deposit of divine substance. It is a relational and functional reality: man is configured for communion with God, for dominion exercised in God’s name, and for a mode of existence that corresponds to God’s own. Psalm 8:5 expresses this in terms of a vocation freely bestowed: “You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.” The grandeur is real. But it is received, not seized.
What deepens this reality is the account in Genesis 2:7: “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” The gesture is without parallel in creation. God does not command; he breathes. The breath — the nishmat — comes directly from God, in an act of unparalleled intimacy. Job 32:8 will echo this: “It is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.” There is in man a principle that is immediately related to God’s own life-giving action. Not a fragment of the divine essence — the Old Testament never says that — but a life received in a uniquely personal and direct communication. The human being is from the beginning oriented towards God in a way that nothing else in creation is.
Do we realise this? Do we realise that God said “do not make of me an image” because we are his image? The full weight of this has barely been absorbed. The human being is sacred — not by his own achievement, but because of what God has placed in him and called him to be.
Note: In one of his sermons on the Gospel passage (Matthew 22:20–21), St. Augustine draws the analogy between the coin bearing Caesar’s image and the human person bearing the image of God: “‘Whose image and inscription is this?’ They answered, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ As Caesar looks for his image on the coin, so God looks for his image in man.” (Augustine, Sermon 113, 2 (PL 38, 648)) In another closely related formulation, Augustine sharpens the implication in a more exhortative way: “If Caesar demands his image on the coin, does not God demand his image in you?” (Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 94 (95), 2 (PL 37, 1214)) The underlying theological logic is consistent: just as the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his imago, so the human person belongs to God because he bears the divine imago Dei (cf. Genesis 1:27). The saying of Christ thus becomes, in patristic exegesis, not merely a teaching on political obligation but a profound anthropological and theological claim about belonging, identity, and restoration—the implicit call being that the image of God in man, obscured by sin, must be “rendered” back to God in its integrity.
One also finds similar lines in other Fathers (for example, Tertullian and Origen), but Augustine gives the most concise and influential formulation of this precise image–coin parallel.
II. He Builds the Woman: Flesh of His Flesh
Genesis 2 adds a further dimension, and the language is deliberately architectural. The verb used in Genesis 2:22 is not the ordinary verb for ‘create’: it is bānāh — to build. ‘And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he built into a woman.’ This is the same verb used for constructing sanctuaries and cities. Creation here takes the form of a divine construction, and such a construction, in biblical logic, is never neutral: it designates a space ordered for indwelling, a place where one may abide, find rest, and even delight. The semantic field of bānāh thus implicitly evokes not only structure but habitation, not merely form but a place prepared for presence. In this light, the woman appears not simply as a being placed alongside the man, but as one ‘built’ in view of relational indwelling. And the man’s response is equally precise: ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ (Genesis 2:23).”
This language of shared nature — bone of bone, flesh of flesh — is not a description of identity of substance in any metaphysical sense. But it is the language of the closest possible correspondence, a unity of nature ordered to communion. The two are made for one another, in a way that mirrors, analogically, the communion God seeks with his creature. And the text moves immediately to unity: “the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
When God says in Genesis 2 that “it is not good for man to be alone,” there is a theological depth here that goes beyond the social or relational need of the creature. God himself (the true Adam, Jesus is the New Adam), one might say, is seeking a dwelling place that corresponds to him — a place of his own nature, of his own making, that can truly receive him. Isaiah 62:5 brings together architectural and nuptial imagery in a single verse: “As a young man marries a virgin, so shall your builder marry you.” The “builder” (bonayikh) is God himself. Creation is already presented as a divine construction ordered to indwelling and covenant.
III. The Woman as Dwelling Place of the Man: An Old Testament Theology of Interior Space and Communion”
There is no single Old Testament text that explicitly formulates, in a doctrinal manner, the idea that the woman is the dwelling place of the man; nevertheless, a coherent constellation of images—particularly in Genesis, the Wisdom literature, and the Song of Songs—converges to present the woman as a locus of reception, rest, and interiority for the man, not through abstract definition but through a sustained symbolic pattern. The foundational text remains Genesis 2, where the woman is not created independently but is “built” from the man, as the Hebrew verb indicates: “the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he built into a woman” (Genesis 2:22), suggesting an ordered relationality inscribed in her very origin. The man’s response is not utilitarian but contemplative and recognitive—“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23)—and the narrative culminates in a decisive anthropological movement: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The verb dabaq (“to cleave”) denotes a form of adhesion, even existential attachment, and is elsewhere used for adherence to God—“You shall fear the Lord your God; you shall serve him and cleave to him” (Deuteronomy 10:20)—thereby suggesting that the woman becomes, for the man, a place of abiding, even of vital attachment. This structural intuition is deepened and interiorised in the Song of Songs, where the woman is repeatedly portrayed as a space into which the man enters, rests, and delights. The imagery is one of intimacy and repose: “My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh that lies between my breasts” (Song of Songs 1:13), while the garden symbolism becomes paradigmatic: “A garden locked is my sister, my bride” (Song of Songs 4:12), followed by the invitation, “Let my beloved come to his garden and eat its choicest fruits” (Song of Songs 4:16), and its fulfilment, “I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride” (Song of Songs 5:1). Here the woman is not merely alongside the man but is presented as an enclosed, interior space—“garden”—into which he enters; moreover, this garden imagery evokes Eden itself, the primordial locus of communion, rest, and divine presence, thus implicitly aligning the woman with a restored space of relational fullness. A parallel structure appears, in a sapiential register, in the personification of Wisdom as feminine, who offers herself as a place of reception and nourishment—“Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed” (Proverbs 9:5)—while the negative counterpart, the “strange woman”, is likewise depicted as a “house” into which one enters, but which leads to death: “Her house sinks down to death” (Proverbs 2:18); in both cases, the underlying symbolic grammar remains consistent, namely that the woman is figured as a space of indwelling, whether for life or for destruction. Even the motif of repose is expressed in relational terms within the Song: “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me” (Song of Songs 2:6), indicating a reciprocal resting, yet one in which the body of the beloved functions as a place of support and repose. Taken together, these texts do not yield a formalised doctrine but articulate, through spatial and relational imagery—“cleaving”, “garden”, “house”—a theological anthropology in which the woman is presented as a locus of interiority, entry, and rest for the man, thereby providing a substantive exegetical grounding for the intuition that she may be understood, in a profound symbolic sense, as his dwelling place.
IV. The Ark: The Image of Sacred Man
The Ark of the Covenant is the most concentrated and most protected expression of divine presence in the entire Old Testament. Its construction is described in terms of absolute holiness: “You shall overlay it with pure gold, within and without shall you overlay it” (Exodus 25:11). God himself designates it as the place of encounter: “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat… I will speak with you” (Exodus 25:22). It contains the two tablets of the Word of God. No one may touch it directly without dying: “Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God… and God struck him there… and he died” (2 Samuel 6:6–7).
Why this absolute holiness? Because what bears the immediate proximity of God cannot be handled by human hands. The holiness of the Ark is not arbitrary severity; it is a theological statement about the nature of divine presence: it cannot be domesticated, reduced, or disposed of at human pleasure.
Now, is the Ark not an image of what man was before the Fall? Created as the living image of God, vivified by a direct divine inbreathing, placed at the heart of a primordial sanctuary — man was originally the place where God was immediately present. The holiness attached to the Ark is a pedagogical and cultic expression of the holiness to which man himself is called, and which he originally possessed. The Ark does not replace the human vocation; it reveals it under veils adapted to a fallen condition. It is both revelation and remedy. It reveals what man was; it protects what sin has made dangerous.
In this sense, this way of understanding the Ark is justified: God is showing us, in this sacred object of pure gold, overlaid within and without, untouchable, containing his Word — this is how sacred you are. This is what I see when I look at you. You are my dwelling place. The Ark is a mirror held up to man, showing him what he has lost and what he is called to recover.
It is entirely in keeping with this reading that the Church’s exegetical tradition identifies Mary as the true Ark of the Covenant. The parallels between 2 Samuel 6 and Luke 1 are well established. In 2 Samuel 6:9, David says: “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” In Luke 1:43, Elizabeth says: “Why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” The Ark remains three months in the house of Obed-edom (2 Samuel 6:11); Mary remains about three months with Elizabeth (Luke 1:56). Mary is the true and living Ark because she bears not the tablets of the Law but the Word himself. She is the “image and beginning” (Lumen Gentium 68) of what the whole Church and every redeemed human being is called to become: a living dwelling of God.
V. The Tent and the Temple: Dwelling as Goal
The trajectory of the Old Testament points consistently in one direction. “Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8). The Hebrew is stronger than it first appears: not “in it” — in the sanctuary — but “in their midst.” The sanctuary is the sign; the people are the true horizon of the dwelling. God pitches his tent among them, but the tent is never the final word.
Solomon himself says at the dedication of the Temple: “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27). No constructed space can contain God. The Temple relativises itself. And Isaiah intensifies this: “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me?” (Isaiah 66:1).
This movement of relativisation is not a rejection of the Temple; it is a reorientation. It opens the question: where, then, will God truly dwell? The prophets provide the answer, and it is interior. Ezekiel 36:26–27: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you… and I will put my Spirit within you.” God’s dwelling is to be the human heart, renewed and made capable of receiving him. Isaiah 57:15 holds the two poles together: “Thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit.'” The transcendent God dwells in the humble heart.
And when Ezekiel sees the vision of the dry bones and hears the promise: “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live” (Ezekiel 37:14) — this is not merely restoration. It is a new creation, passing through death. Saving is raising from the dead. It is infinitely greater than the first creation, because each act of repair, each work of restoration of the damaged image, is a marvel of divine love and power. The work of re-creation surpasses the work of creation, because it passes through the death of the Son.
VI. God’s Longing and Man’s Grandeur
There is a dimension of this theology that theology has sometimes been reluctant to speak directly: the desire, the longing, the joy of God in finding his dwelling place. This must be said with precision. God does not “need” man in any metaphysical sense; he is perfect and complete in himself. Psalm 50:12 is unambiguous: “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine.” Divine aseity is not in question.
And yet Scripture does not hesitate to speak, in the language of analogy and of covenant, of a divine delight that approaches what we can only call longing. Isaiah 62:5: “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” Zephaniah 3:17: “He will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” Hosea 11:8: “My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” These are not statements of divine need; they are revelations of freely willed love — a love that, within its own sovereign freedom, has chosen to find its joy in man.
When the Good Shepherd seeks the hundredth sheep, he is not merely exercising pastoral duty. When the Eternal Son becomes incarnate, it is not merely to repair a juridical deficit. He is seeking his dwelling place. He is returning to his image. The Incarnation is the definitive “pitching of the tent” among us — “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), using the verb eskēnōsen, “pitched his tent.” And the goal of the Incarnation, as John 2:21 makes clear — “he was speaking of the temple of his body” — is ultimately to dwell not in his own body alone but in us: “If anyone loves me… my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).
We are more sacred than a tabernacle or a chalice — not because of what we are in ourselves, but because of what God has made us and called us to become. The chalice contains the Body of Christ for a moment; the human being is called to contain him for eternity.
VII. Jesus’ Baptism on the Cross: Restoring Humanity as God’s Dwelling
When Jesus speaks of his baptism, declaring, “I have a baptism to be baptised with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished” (Luke 12:50), he is not merely anticipating a ritual or even the baptism of the Jordan. He is articulating, in profound depth, the purpose of his incarnation and mission: to enter fully into the condition of fallen humanity, to immerse himself in the consequences of sin, and to restore the image of God in which humanity was originally created. In Genesis, man is created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27), and this image signifies more than a resemblance; it indicates a living correspondence, a relational and functional capacity to bear God’s presence. Sin, however, distorts this image and disrupts the communion for which humanity was made. The human being, though still the image of God, bears now the marks of separation, a loss of the original transparency to God, a rupture represented by the exile from Eden: “And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8).
The mission of Christ is, in this sense, a work of repair, but infinitely more profound than a simple correction. It is a re-creative act. As the prophet Isaiah foretells of the Servant, he bears our wounds and heals our transgressions: “He was wounded for our transgressions… with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). The healing of the image is not a surface restoration; it is an immersion into the very depth of human brokenness, a passage through the consequences of sin and death. Baptism, then, is emblematic of this work. Paul makes the connection explicit: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3–4). Salvation, in this sense, is not a return to an original creation but a passage through death into resurrection, where the human being is restored and vivified in a manner surpassing the initial creation.
The Old Testament prepares this understanding of restoration in imagery and promise. Ezekiel speaks of a people whose hearts are hardened, whose communion with God is broken, and proclaims the divine promise: “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you” (Ezekiel 36:26–27). Here, restoration is not simply moral correction but a radical interior transformation, enabling God’s Spirit to dwell within. Likewise, the vision of the dry bones affirms the re-creative power of God: “Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live” (Ezekiel 37:5). Hosea echoes this promise: “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (Hosea 6:2). The language of resurrection and new life is already present in the prophets, foreshadowing the New Testament fulfilment in Christ.
In the New Testament, this work reaches its culmination. The incarnation is a deliberate immersion into human nature: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men… he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7–8). Christ’s baptism into death restores the divine image within humanity and raises it from the dead. Paul affirms: “God, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ… and raised us up with him” (Ephesians 2:5–6). Each step of this restoration is a marvel, a creative act, echoing the original creation itself. Psalm 51 offers a poetic reflection of this reality: “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10). The verb employed—bara, to create—resonates with the act of Genesis 1, indicating that God’s work of salvation is, in effect, a second creation, bringing life where death and sin had triumphed.
The profound significance of this restoration is further highlighted in the interiority of God’s presence. The human being, once restored, becomes the locus of divine indwelling: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). Christ’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection do not merely restore an external image; they make the human person capable of bearing God’s Spirit within, enabling a communion that surpasses the original Edenic state. The Ark in the Old Testament, sacred and untouchable (2 Samuel 6:7), foreshadows this reality. Where the Ark protected and concentrated God’s presence in the wilderness, Christ’s work transforms the human person into the living Ark, the place where God’s presence can freely dwell.
In this light, the statement that Christ “needs to be immersed in his image” must be understood analogically: not as necessity imposed on God, but as the freely willed act of entering into the fallen condition in order to repair, restore, and re-create. The work of salvation is infinitely more than creation, because it raises the image from the ruins of sin, repairing each crease and each wound, each act of restoration akin to a new act of creation. Every human life, restored in Christ, is a work of marvel: the image of God, lost by sin, renewed by Christ, and vivified by the Spirit. In this way, the human being—created in the image of God, wounded by sin, and restored by baptism and resurrection—becomes, in the fullest sense, a dwelling place of God, a living temple, and a testament to the grandeur and sacredness of God’s salvific work.
Re the diagram above, please read: Jesus Entering Deeper in Us
Note: John’s Gospel consistently elevates women as theological figures through whom the mysteries of divine love are revealed, particularly in the context of Christ as the Bridegroom. The encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4–26) exemplifies this profoundly. When she asks Jesus for the living water, he responds: “Go, call your husband, and come here” (John 4:16). This instruction is not incidental; it reveals a deeper truth: the gift of divine love—the Holy Spirit, the living water of God’s presence—can only be received in the context of a true recognition of one’s relationship to Christ. Jesus is the Groom, the true Husband, and the woman, wandering or faithful, is called to return to him as his bride. He is the true well of Jacob, the source of life (John 4:10, cf. Genesis 29:1–12), and she is his dwelling place. This nuptial imagery finds deep roots in the Old Testament. Ezekiel portrays Israel as a bride who has abandoned her Groom: “Your breasts were formed, and your hair grew; yet you were naked and bare. When I passed by you again and looked upon you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread my cloak over you” (Ezekiel 16:7–8). In Ezekiel 16:15–22, the prophet continues, describing Israel’s pursuit of other lovers, symbolising idolatry and infidelity, and the consequent call to return. Likewise, Hosea presents Israel as the unfaithful spouse whose restoration is inseparable from divine covenantal love: “I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14). These texts show that God’s covenantal relationship is fundamentally nuptial: Israel, the bride, is intended to be the dwelling place of God’s presence, and fidelity restores the intimate communion. John recasts this imagery in the encounter at the well: the woman is called to recognise Jesus not simply as a prophet or provider of physical sustenance, but as the Bridegroom, the one to whom she belongs, and only in returning to him can she receive the living water of the Spirit. In this light, the New Adam and the New Eve motif emerges: Christ, the Bridegroom, seeks the bride, longs for her return, and offers her restoration; she is his flesh and bone (Genesis 2:23–24), and he is the spring from which her life flows. This encounter reveals a profound theological truth: divine love, the gift of the Spirit, and the restoration of humanity are inseparable from the recognition of our call as God’s dwelling place, the beloved to whom the Groom comes seeking union, fidelity, and communion.
Conclusion
The human being is not a fragment of God. The Old Testament never allows that boundary to collapse. But the human being is uniquely created as the living image of God, formed by an immediate divine inbreathing, placed within a primordial sanctuary, constituted in a relational unity ordered to communion, and destined — by a free act of divine love that surpasses all expectation — to become the place where God truly dwells. The Ark, the Tent, and the Temple do not replace this vocation; they reveal it, protect it, and prepare for its fulfilment.
The prohibition “do not make of me an image” and the declaration “God created man in his own image” are two faces of the same truth. God has given his image already. It is the human being, sacred, immense, and called to a depth, a width, a length, and a height that no created measure can contain. “Who has understood the mind of the Lord?” (Isaiah 40:13). And who has understood the human being, created to receive it?
The Old Testament does not resolve the tension between divine transcendence and human indwelling. It holds it open, with increasing urgency, as a promise. That promise is fulfilled in Christ, who repairs, restores, and raises from the dead the image that sin had broken — making it once again, and now definitively, the dwelling place of God.
Jesus’ baptism and passion are a deliberate immersion into the consequences of human sin, restoring the divine image that was marred by the fall and raising humanity to newness of life through death and resurrection (Luke 12:50; Romans 6:3–4; Philippians 2:7–8). This restorative work is not a simple return to creation but a re-creation, an interior transformation in which God’s Spirit dwells within the human person, making them a living temple capable of bearing his presence (Ezekiel 36:26–27; 1 Corinthians 3:16). In Christ, every human being becomes a marvel of God’s salvific work: restored, renewed, and vivified, surpassing even the original creation, and revealing the sacred grandeur of humanity as God’s dwelling place.
Read also: “You Shall be my Segullah” (Ex 19:5), Towards a Nuptial Theology of the Covenant
Bibliography
Sacred Scripture
The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
Key texts: Genesis 1:26–27 (image and likeness); Genesis 2:7 (divine inbreathing); Genesis 2:22–23 (building of the woman); Genesis 2:15 (man in the garden); Genesis 3:8 (God walking in the garden); Exodus 20:4 (prohibition of images); Exodus 25:8–22 (construction of the Ark and Tent); Exodus 29:45 (divine indwelling among Israel); Leviticus 26:12 (God walking among his people); Numbers 3:7–8 (priestly service); 1 Kings 8:27 (Solomon’s prayer); 2 Samuel 6:6–7 (Uzzah and the Ark); Psalm 8:5; Psalm 50:12; Isaiah 40:6; Isaiah 57:15; Isaiah 62:5; Isaiah 66:1; Ezekiel 36:26–27; Ezekiel 37:14.27; Hosea 11:8; Zephaniah 3:17; Job 32:8; Job 33:4; Ecclesiastes 12:7.
Magisterium
Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 1964. § 68 (Mary as image and beginning of the Church).
Patristic and Theological Sources
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (On the restless heart ordered towards God.)
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I, q.93 (On the image of God in man).
John Paul II. Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. Translated by Michael Waldstein. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006. (On the nuptial meaning of the body and the original solitude.)
Biblical and Exegetical Studies
Beale, G.K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004.
Daniélou, Jean. From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (Sacramentum Futuri). London: Burns & Oates, 1960. (On the Ark and Marian typology.)
De La Potterie, Ignace, S.J. Mary in the Mystery of the Covenant. Translated by Bertrand Buby. New York: Alba House, 1992. (On the Ark typology in Luke 1.)
Walton, John H. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. (On the image of God in its ancient Near Eastern context.)
Question: Can you explain the following: “The Ark does not replace the human vocation; it reveals it under veils adapted to a fallen condition. It is both revelation and remedy. It reveals what man was; it protects what sin has made dangerous.”
Answer: Before sin, there is no need for mediation in the strict sense. Man is created as a living “dwelling place” of God. Genesis expresses this not abstractly but symbolically: “The Lord God walked in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). The Fathers consistently read this as indicating a real familiarity between God and man. St Irenaeus, for instance, writes that “God dwelt with man and conversed with him” (Against Heresies, IV, 14, 1). In other words, what later theology will call “indwelling” is not yet veiled, structured, or protected—it is immediate.
After the Fall, that same reality becomes dangerous. Not because God has changed, but because man has. Scripture itself insists on this rupture: “You cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). What was once life-giving presence becomes, in a fallen condition, something that must be mediated, filtered, and even shielded.
This is where the Ark of the Covenant enters. It does not introduce a new idea—that God dwells among his people—but reintroduces the original vocation in a form adapted to wounded humanity. The Ark is, in a real sense, a controlled, localised, and veiled form of the divine presence. The text is very explicit about both its reality and its danger. On the one hand: “There I will meet with you… from above the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:22). On the other hand, when the Ark is mishandled: “The anger of the Lord was kindled… and God struck him there” (2 Samuel 6:7).
So the Ark reveals what man is meant to be: a place where God dwells and speaks. But it does so “under veils”, that is, through an external object, with precise rituals, boundaries, and prohibitions. It is no longer interior and spontaneous; it is safeguarded, almost quarantined. St Gregory of Nyssa captures this pedagogical dimension when he says that divine realities are given “in a manner proportioned to those who receive them” (Life of Moses, II, 162).
That is why one can say it is both revelation and remedy. It is revelation because it discloses, in symbolic and external form, the true destiny of man—to be the meeting place with God. But it is also remedy because it protects both God’s holiness and man’s fragility. It prevents a direct contact that would now be destructive. It disciplines access, introduces mediation (priests, rites), and creates a sacred distance.
The deeper theological point is that the Old Covenant structures are not arbitrary; they are “therapeutic”. They correspond exactly to what sin has done. Sin has disintegrated man’s interior capacity to receive God; therefore God re-establishes his presence outside of man, in signs, until man can again become, in himself, what the Ark signifies.
This is why the tradition will later see a progression. The Ark is not the end. It points beyond itself. Jeremiah already announces its obsolescence: “They shall no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord’… it shall not be made again” (Jeremiah 3:16). Why? Because what it signifies will be restored interiorly. The New Covenant will return to the original vocation, but now through redemption: “We will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).
So the sentence can be rephrased more analytically like this. The Ark does not substitute for man’s calling to be God’s dwelling; it makes that calling visible in an external, safeguarded form. It reveals the original design (man as temple), while at the same time compensating for the fallen condition (by veiling, limiting, and protecting the divine presence).