the curtain hung inside the tabernacle or the temple to shut off a sanctuary room, above all the innermost room where God's presence dwelt.
The word names a cloth by what it does: it hangs across an opening and keeps what is behind it out of sight. In the Bible it is never a household drape. It belongs to the tent of worship in the wilderness and to the temple in Jerusalem, where heavy embroidered hangings divided the building into rooms and told worshippers how far in they were allowed to go. Behind the last of them lay the innermost room, which only the high priest entered, and only on one day each year.
Because the curtain marked a limit, the word carries a whole idea about access to God. All three accounts of the crucifixion report that the temple curtain tore, and the letter to the Hebrews works with the same picture: hope reaches into the place behind the curtain, where Jesus has already gone, and a new and living way now leads through it. The object does not change between those settings. What changes is whether the writer is describing the building or the boundary the building stood for.
One complication is built into the vocabulary. The sanctuary had more than one screening curtain, an outer one at the entrance to the first room and an inner one before the innermost room, and this single Greek word can name either. That is why Hebrews 9:3 has to say "the second curtain" to be precise. Hebrew was more exact: it had one word for the inner curtain (פָּרֹכֶת) and another for the screen at the entrance (מָסָךְ).
Nuances
Which curtain of the Jerusalem temple the crucifixion accounts (Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45) report as torn.
- majorityThe inner curtain, the hanging before the Most Holy Place, so that the tearing signals that the way into God's presence has been opened.; Daniel M. Gurtner, The Torn Veil: Matthew's Exposition of the Death of Jesus (SNTSMS 139; Cambridge University Press, 2007); R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 2007), on 27:51
- minorityThe outer curtain at the temple entrance, which was visible to onlookers and, according to Josephus, embroidered with a panorama of the heavens, so that its tearing forms a public sign matching the tearing of the heavens at Jesus' baptism.; David Ulansey, "The Heavenly Veil Torn: Mark's Cosmic Inclusio," Journal of Biblical Literature 110 (1991): 123-125