After the foregoing explorations, we can now begin to formulate a biblical theology of the temple.
As we have noted, the idea of a physical building wherein God dwells appears late in Israel's history, appearing for the first time only in Judg 9:4, when when Abimelech used the silver he had taken from a pagan temple to hire a gang of ruffians and, with them, slaughtered seventy of his brothers in his ancestral home. Yahweh's presence in Israel's life has already been an established fact, but the institution of a temple, a fixed place where God was supposed to dwell as conceived in later sections of the OT was originally foreign to biblical faith. All the germinal events that established Israel's relationship with and faith (i.e., as a set of fundamental belief about the nature and person of God) had taken place without the idea of a temple. The temple was, therefore, un-necessary to the faith of ancient Israel.
This said, Israel did have a tabernacle.
