Whatever its outer genre may be – letter, sermon or tract – and however it was composed and delivered, Hebrews claims for itself the image of a liturgy, a symbolic action in the sacred sphere: more particularly, a covenant-renewal rite, of which the book's words comprise a long prophetic exhortation. This is its inner genre, its fictive character, and this is the medium of its proclamation of a new and better covenant. In its presentation of holiness as deeply ambivalent power, in its reworking of Israel's sacred history through the interlocking marginal roles of Priest and Stranger, in the interwoven images of the readers’ situation in the sacred margin, apparently random signs are organised around an ideal image of life before God (an image very different from that of the ‘Camp’ which dominates the Priestly document), with a cumulative force and a shape which is far from arbitrary. It is this, rather than the argument, which provides the work with its controlling principle and its theological centre. For what in fact does the complexargument of Hebrews amount to, except another variant, or trans-formation into cultic language, of the common Christian kerygma of Jesus as the Christ? Such a claim – that Jesus the Christ is thehigh priest – has only as much force as the symbols it employs,and it is to giving force to the necessary network of symbols thatthe book is directed – a reinterpretation of the symbolism of theold covenant, through reapplication of its symbols in the light of Christ.