The Holy of Holies: 
On the Constituents of Emptiness 

 

The punishment for an improper appearance in the Holy of Holies had been made quite clear by Yahweh. Aaron himself had to wear a specified robe with a golden bell when entering this chamber "that he may not die." The Talmud explains that a "layman" attempting to perform a service in the Holy of Holies would be condemned to "death." And a later tradition held that high priests entered the Holy of Holies with a rope tied around their ankle - in case they were struck down by God for some transgression and their bodies needed to be removed without anyone else daring to enter the space. No doubt, a disrespectful interloper - like the Roman Pompey - into God's own sanctuary, this most private and rarified of places, would suffer at the hands of the Lord a terrible death, a punishment no amount of earthly power could resist.

 

And Pompey did die under terrible circumstances - he was stabbed while seeking sanctuary in Egypt after being defeated by Caesar. However, this was in the year 48 BCE - about fifteen years after his transgression. And in the interim Pompey had had many successes. It sure looked as if he had gotten away with it.

1

Belief systems often have to deal with unpleasant facts like this intruder's survival. Good things happen to presumably bad people. Bad things happen to presumably good people: King Josiah, for example, although much beloved by the authors of the Bible for his fidelity to the Yahweh-alone cause, died ingloriously at the hands of Egypt's pharaoh in 609 BCE. This is the problem of evil - one the most powerful of the traditional arguments against belief in a just Deity (or deities).

3

Believers usually manage to come up with explanations for such apparent glitches in the system of divine reward and punishment: God, they conclude, decided to wait for the proper moment to bring Pompey to justice. Or, when all else fails, they mutter: God works in mysterious ways. Still, the fact that Pompey walked out of the Holy of Holies alive itself contributed to its emptiness.