In discussing the forecourt, before getting to the items in the inner sanctuary, we are told that Solomon made ten tables, five for the South and five for the North (Second Chronicles 4.8). What were these tables for?

Later, Ezekiel is given plans for an ideal Temple that is close enough to Solomon’s to answer our question: “And in the vestibule of the gate were two tables on either side, on which the burnt offering and the sin offering and the guilt offering were to be slaughtered” (Ezekiel 40.8). When one looks at Leviticus 1-6, this is confirmed. No animal ever died on the Tabernacle altar.

In fact, the altar was never the place of appeasing God’s wrath through a death. Rather, one needed blood that had already been shed to sprinkle on the altar in order to have the right to approach the altar. The altar was not the place of God’s wrath but a holy place one could approach only after God’s wrath was placated. The propitiation was made by the offerer slaughtering his representative animal so that the Levite could then show God this had happened by putting blood on the altar. At that point the animal was allowed to ascend into God’s presence. In some cases the animal was to be partially eaten by the Levite and even the offerer. It was not unclean or unholy. There is nothing to indicate that it represented sin on the altar.

Weirdly, this indicates that the cross was not an altar but a table. After Jesus died and was buried we see the tomb described in Temple imagery. One holds back while another enters first. Two angels sit at either side of a resting place with linen garments beside them. From there Jesus, the sacrifice, rises up and (with a disanalogous forty days) ascends in a cloud to God like smoke from a fire.

So why is it considered so wrong to speak of the Table of the Lord’s Supper as an altar? Granted, the word may play into doctrinal and practical errors, but calling the Lord’s Supper a “table” is actually no less prone to those sorts of mistakes than is an altar. If some tradition wants to refer to it as an altar, I certainly don’t think we should act like the term alone must be corrected as some sort of misunderstanding of the Bible.

Of course, the real altar, like the real Temple, would not be architecture, but people.