The Dwelling Is Joined Together and Carefully Divided

The mishkan, the dwelling itself, is these linen curtains; the boards come later. “Fine twined linen” is linen of twisted, many-stranded thread. “Cunning work” is ma’aseh choshev, the work of a designer who plans a woven pattern; in 1611 cunning meant skilled, with no hint of trickery.

Each curtain is about forty two feet by six. On the usual reconstruction the twenty eight cubits run across the roof, ten cubits wide, and hang nine down each side, stopping a cubit short of the ground.

Five curtains sewn edge to edge make a panel twenty cubits wide, and two such panels make forty. That covers the thirty cubit length of the roof with ten cubits to spare, which hang down over the back wall.

The “selvedge” is the self-edge, the finished border of woven cloth that will not unravel; the word is still used by weavers. The loops are blue, tekhelet, the costliest of the dyes, and they sit where only the joining edge would show.

The loops must “take hold one of another”; the Hebrew maqbilot means facing or corresponding, each loop exactly opposite its partner. Fifty along a four cubit edge leaves no room for a careless spacing.

A “tache” in 1611 English was a clasp or buckle; the Hebrew qerasim are hooks. Verse 33 will hang the veil “under the taches”, so this line of gold clasps sits directly above the boundary of the most holy place.

The goats’ hair layer is called the ohel, the tent, over the mishkan, the dwelling. The Book of Exodus keeps the two words distinct here: a linen dwelling and a black hair tent pitched over it.

Thirty cubits against the linen’s twenty eight: the extra cubit on each side is what verse 13 will use to cover the linen’s lower edge. Eleven curtains give forty four cubits of width against the linen’s forty.

The panels are unequal, five and six. The sixth, extra curtain is folded double at the front, making a lip over the entrance where the linen beneath would otherwise be exposed.

Because the panels are five and six, and the front one is folded, on the usual reconstruction the goats’ hair seam falls a little behind the linen seam below it. The two joins do not line up, so no gap runs straight through both layers.

Brass clasps now, not gold. The phrase “that it may be one” repeats verse 6 for the outer layer: the tent, like the dwelling, is many pieces made into a single thing.

The spare half curtain trails over the back. The Talmud (Shabbat 98b) compares the tabernacle to a woman walking in the street with the hem of her garment trailing behind her.

The extra cubit on each side lets the goats’ hair reach below the linen, so rain and dust meet hair before they reach the woven cherubim. The verb “to cover it” names the purpose plainly.

The two top layers, red rams’ skins and tachash hide, are the only coverings in the chapter given no measurements at all. Numbers 4 uses tachash skins again to wrap each piece of furniture for travel.

The qerashim are traditionally solid boards, but acacia seldom grows large enough for planks this size, and a board ten cubits by a cubit and a half would be very heavy. Some scholars have argued for open frames instead; the Hebrew does not settle it.

Ten cubits is about fifteen feet. With the west wall, this makes the innermost room a cube of ten cubits each way; Solomon’s most holy place was a cube of twenty (1 Kings 6:20).

The “tenons” are yadot, literally hands: every board stands on two hands set into its sockets. The phrase “set in order one against another” uses a word related to the rungs of a ladder, pieces fitted in parallel.

The Hebrew uses two words for south here, the Negev side, toward Teman. Twenty boards a cubit and a half wide give the thirty cubit length of the side wall.

The sockets, adanim, are bases, and they are silver. Exodus 38:25–27 reveals where the metal came from: the half shekel paid by every man counted in the census, a “ransom for his soul” (30:12). The walls stand on ransom money.

North and south walls are identical, and the entrance is on the east, where verse 22’s west wall is the back. Eden’s gate was also on the east (Genesis 3:24), and the priests would enter moving westward, toward the ark.

Forty sockets on each long side, sixteen at the back and four under the veil pillars (verse 32) make exactly a hundred silver sockets, and 38:27 says each was cast from a talent of silver: a hundred talents in all.

“Westward” is yammah, literally seaward, because in Canaan the Mediterranean lies to the west. It is a word for west spoken from the land the people have not yet reached.

The corner pieces, meqtsu’ot, are named only in this description and its repetition in chapter 36. How they joined the side walls is one of the tabernacle’s open questions, and the Talmud and Josephus reconstructed them differently.

“Coupled together” is to’amim, twinned, the word used of Rebekah’s twins in Genesis 25:24. The two corner boards are made as twins, joined at the foot and bound under one ring at the top.

Eight boards on the back wall, and forty eight in the whole frame: twenty, twenty and eight. Under them stand ninety six silver sockets, two to a board without exception.

A “bar” is beriach, the crossbar that locked a city gate; Samson carried off the gates of Gaza “bar and all” (Judges 16:3). Here it holds a wall together instead of shutting one.

Five bars on each of three walls makes fifteen. The east side has no bars because it has no boards: it is the door.

The middle bar runs “in the midst”, and 36:33 says it passed “through the boards”. The Targum attributed to Jonathan embroidered this into a legend: one bar, cut from Abraham’s tamarisk at Beersheba, that bent miraculously round all three walls.

Every board is covered in gold, so the inner walls shone with it, yet from outside nothing showed but skins. The whole sanctuary used twenty nine talents of gold (38:24).

The word for “fashion” is mishpat, the same word as the “judgments” of 21:1. Here it means the right order of a thing, its specification. The frame is to be raised according to what it was designed to be.

The veil is the parokhet, woven with cherubim like the curtains of verse 1. Matthew 27:51 records that at Jesus’ death the veil of the temple was torn “from the top to the bottom”, from the end no human hand could reach.

The hooks are vavim, and vav is also the name of a Hebrew letter shaped like a peg. Four pillars stand on silver here, while the outer door of verse 37 stands on bronze.

The veil hangs beneath the gold clasps of verse 6, twenty cubits from the entrance, which leaves the inner room ten cubits deep. “The most holy” is the Hebrew superlative “holy of holies”, formed like “song of songs”.

Only the mercy seat is named here as set in the most holy place, since it and the ark are one assembly. Leviticus 16:2 later restricts entry to the high priest alone, once a year, lest he die.

Coming in from the east, the table stands on the right and the lampstand on the left, facing each other. The golden altar of incense, which stood with them, is not given until 30:1–6, well after the rest of the furniture.

The door hanging is “wrought with needlework”, ma’aseh roqem, embroidery worked on a finished cloth, where the veil was woven with its pattern in the loom. The two craft terms mark the entrance as a lower grade of work than the veil within.

Chapter 36:38, describing the finished work, adds that these five pillars had capitals and fillets overlaid with gold. Their sockets are bronze, the first bronze in the structure, where the tent meets the court.