Bricks and Stone Temples
This is a continuation of Bricks and Stones. Last time we used the metaphor of building with irregular stones versus uniform bricks to highlight the importance of accommodating neurodiverse individuals in organizations, advocating for personalized and inclusive approaches rather than uniform, standardized ones. I finished by saying that the picture is actually from the Bible, and this time we’re looking at its use in the Old Testament.
Bricks are first mentioned in Genesis 11, where people want to build a tower reaching to the heavens. There’s obviously occult symbolism going on there – some people have suggested it’s a temple for worshipping the stars. It’s clearly an attempt by people to get to God on their terms.
It’s the Tower of Babel, and it goes horribly wrong.
The second time we see bricks in the Bible, it’s when the people are enslaved in Egypt, and their job is to make bricks; they get punished if they don’t hit their quotas.
Brick symbolism in the Bible is not good. It’s pagan temples, people trying to reach God by their own efforts and God’s people being enslaved.
Stones are different; stones are better. Jacob has a dream in Genesis 28, which deliberately contrasts with the Tower of Babel – they both feature towers with their top in the heavens, but this one is from God rather than built by people. And the story begins and ends with Jacob setting up a stone rather than a brick.
Or after the people escape from Egypt and reach Mount Sinai, the first set of laws God gives the people after the 10 Commandments is all to do with how they worship him. They are not to make idols or representations of God, and they must make altars out of earth or natural stones – they aren’t even allowed to use chisels, let alone bricks. (Exodus 20:25). And so time and again, the people worship God at sites made of natural, uncut stone.
There’s something really important there. Human effort and design, as represented by bricks, leads to hubris and downfall. Stones express something about dependence on God.
Even hundreds of years later, when Solomon came to build the Temple, he ordered that it needed to be built of quarried stone rather than brick, and that they had to be finished at the quarry because no chisels were to be allowed at the Temple building site.
Stones rather than bricks are also needed for one of the most memorable uses of this metaphor. In Psalm 118:22 it says
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
This came from the LORD;
it is wondrous in our sight.
“There is a stone”, says the Psalmist, “that the builders threw away because they couldn’t see how to fit it in. But it turned out that in God’s plan, it was one of the most important stones; it just had to be put in the right place.”
Now isn’t that a wonderful passage on inclusion?
This passage is picked up and used to talk about Jesus five times in the New Testament – three times by Jesus himself, and twice by Peter.
He is the oddly-shaped stone par excellence. He is the one who is excluded more than we are, because he isn’t shaped like people want him to be.
