Israel's Names Are Carried Into the Holy Place

“Take thou unto thee” is haqrev, bring near, the verb from which qorban, an offering, is built. Aaron and his sons are brought near the way a gift is. Of the four sons listed, Nadab and Abihu will not live to serve long; Eleazar and Ithamar carry the line on.

“Glory” is kavod, the word used for the glory that settled on the mountain in 24:16; “beauty” is tif’eret, splendour or adornment. The priest is to be dressed in the vocabulary of the presence he serves.

“Wise hearted” is chakhmei lev: in this chapter wisdom means skill of hand. The grammar is striking too: the garments are made “to consecrate him”, so the clothes themselves do part of the setting apart. “The spirit of wisdom” returns in Deuteronomy 34:9, of Joshua.

Six garments are listed, and not in the order they are then described: the breastplate comes first here but after the ephod below. The “broidered coat” is a checkered weave, tashbets. The mitre is a turban, and the gold plate and the breeches are not on this list at all.

Gold joins the sanctuary’s colours here for the first time as a thread. Exodus 39:3 explains how: the gold was beaten into thin plates and cut into wires, then worked in among the blue, purple, scarlet and linen.

The ephod’s shape is uncertain, perhaps an apron or a sleeveless vest. The word travels widely: the boy Samuel wore a linen ephod (1 Samuel 2:18), David danced before the ark in one (2 Samuel 6:14), and Gideon’s gold ephod became a snare to his house (Judges 8:27).

The ephod hangs from two shoulder straps, joined front and back. That is why the stones of verse 9 sit on the shoulders: they are set where the garment is fastened and bears its own weight.

“Curious” in 1611 meant made with care and skill, from the Latin curiosus, not strange. The band, cheshev, is woven “of the same”, all one piece with the ephod rather than a separate belt tied on.

These are the names of “the children of Israel”, Jacob’s twelve sons. An inference follows from verse 10’s “according to their birth”: the stones would carry Levi and a single Joseph, not the tribal list of Numbers in which Ephraim and Manasseh replace them.

The order is birth order, from Reuben to Benjamin. Josephus (Antiquities 3.7.5) says the six eldest were on the right shoulder, a detail Exodus does not give.

A signet was the seal a man carried and pressed into clay as his signature; Judah handed his to Tamar as a pledge (Genesis 38:18), and Pharaoh put his ring on Joseph’s hand (41:42). The names are cut with the permanence of a seal.

A “memorial” is zikkaron, a reminder, the word used of the Passover in 12:14: “this day shall be unto you for a memorial.” The feast was a memorial kept in the calendar; these stones are a memorial worn on a man.

“Ouches” is the English nouche, a brooch or clasp, misdivided: “a nouche” was heard as “an ouche”, the same slip that turned “a napron” into “an apron”. The verse is a single clause, and the settings it orders anchor both the stones and the chains that follow.

“Wreathen work” is literally rope work, gold twisted like cord rather than forged into links. These chains will later hang the breastplate from the shoulders, so the rope-like twist carries weight.

The Hebrew choshen is of uncertain origin. It is called the breastplate “of judgment”, mishpat, because of what verse 30 places inside it; the name looks forward to its use before it is described.

A span, zeret, is the spread of the open hand from thumb to little finger, about nine inches. Folded double, the square forms a pouch, which is where the Urim and Thummim of verse 30 are kept.

The identity of most of these stones is uncertain, and the King James names follow the Greek translation. The first, odem, comes from the root for red, the root of Adam and Edom, and is probably carnelian.

The yahalom here cannot have been a diamond, which ancient engravers had no tool to cut; it may have been a hard white stone such as jasper or rock crystal. The nophekh, “emerald”, may be turquoise, mined in Sinai since Egyptian times.

The leshem, “ligure”, is unknown; the King James takes ligurius from the Greek, itself obscure. The achlamah, “amethyst”, was linked by later Jewish tradition to chalam, to dream, as a charm against bad dreams, an association the text does not make.

The tarshish stone seems to be named after a place, as Tarshish is the port Jonah sailed for. The shoham is the only stone that appears both on the shoulders and in the breastplate. Yashpeh is the source of English jasper.

Ezekiel 28:13 lists nine of these same stones as the covering of the king of Tyre “in Eden the garden of God”, and Revelation 21:19–20 builds the foundations of the new Jerusalem from a similar list. Here each stone is simply a name.

The chains of verse 14 return, now attached to the breastplate itself. From here to verse 28 the instructions read like a fitting sequence: each ring and chain in order, so that whoever makes it can assemble it.

Two gold rings go on the upper corners of the breastplate. These are the points from which it will hang.

The twisted chains run through the upper rings. The breastplate is now suspended from its top edge, but not yet tied at the bottom.

The other ends of the chains are fixed to the gold settings on the shoulders. The same settings that hold the onyx stones now also carry the breastplate, so the two sets of names are physically joined.

The lower rings are set on the breastplate’s inner edge, “in the side of the ephod inward”, facing the garment. From the front no fastening would be seen.

Two more rings go on the ephod itself, low on the shoulder straps near the seam, “over against the other coupling”, just above the woven band. They are the anchors for the bottom corners.

The “lace of blue” is petil tekhelet, a blue cord, and Numbers 15:38 uses the same phrase for the blue cord every Israelite was to put in the tassels of his garment. The high priest’s fastening and the ordinary man’s fringe share a thread.

In Hebrew the heart, lev, is the seat of thought and will as much as feeling. The Song of Solomon 8:6 joins the same two images as this verse, a seal and a heart: “Set me as a seal upon thine heart.”

The words mean “lights and perfections”, and the Greek rendered them “manifestation and truth”. After the exile, Ezra 2:63 records that certain priestly claims had to wait “till there stood up a priest with Urim and with Thummim”; by then no one could use them.

The robe, me’il, is a long outer garment, here all blue. Hannah made the boy Samuel a “little coat”, a small me’il, every year (1 Samuel 2:19), and Saul tore the skirt of Samuel’s me’il as he turned away (15:27).

A “habergeon” in 1611 was a sleeveless coat of mail, and the Hebrew tachra seems to mean the same: a neckline bound like armour. Leviticus 21:10 forbids the high priest to rend his clothes, and Caiaphas does exactly that in Matthew 26:65.

Pomegranates were among the fruit the spies brought back from Canaan (Numbers 13:23), and Solomon set two hundred of them round the capitals of his temple pillars (1 Kings 7:20). Here they are made of yarn, in the three colours, hanging from a hem in the wilderness.

The verse repeats the phrase as the hem repeats the pattern: a bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate. Exodus gives no count, and later Jewish tradition supplied one, seventy two bells.

Ecclesiasticus 45:9 says the bells were made so that the sound “might be heard in the temple, for a memorial to the children of his people”. The popular picture of a rope tied to the high priest’s ankle is a medieval legend with no source in the Bible.

The plate is a tsits, literally a blossom or flower. Zechariah 14:20 imagines the same words, “Holiness unto the LORD”, engraved one day on the bells of horses, holiness reaching the most ordinary things.

The “mitre” is a mitsnefet, a turban wound from cloth (tsanaf means to wind round), nothing like a bishop’s pointed hat. The plate is tied onto it at the forehead with a blue cord.

“Accepted” is ratson, favour, the technical word for an offering that God receives with pleasure; Leviticus 1:3 uses it of the whole burnt offering, which is to be offered “of his own voluntary will”, literally for his acceptance.

The coat is a ketonet, the word for Joseph’s coat in Genesis 37:3 and for the coats of skins God made for Adam and Eve (3:21). The girdle is embroidered, needlework, rather than woven like the ephod’s band.

The sons’ “bonnets” are migba’ot, from a root meaning a rounded height, suggesting a domed cap. They too are made “for glory and for beauty”, the phrase of verse 2, though their clothing is plainer than their father’s.

“Consecrate” renders the Hebrew idiom “fill their hand”, the standing phrase for ordination. It is used when Micah installs his son as a household priest in Judges 17:5. Three verbs follow each other here: anoint, fill the hand, sanctify.

The breeches are the only garment in the chapter for the lower body. Ezekiel 44:18 still requires them in his vision of the restored temple, with linen turbans, and adds that the priests must wear nothing “that causeth sweat”.

The breeches were not in the list of verse 4, and they apply inside the tent as well as at the altar. On the Day of Atonement, Leviticus 16:4 has the high priest lay aside the gold and colours and wear only linen, breeches included.