The Giving Stops, and the Making Continues

The Hebrew verb can be read as a future, “and Bezaleel shall work”, which would make this verse the end of Moses’ speech from 35:30; the King James reads it as narration, the work beginning. “Wrought” is simply the old past tense of work. “The sanctuary”, miqdash, is the holy place, the word God used in 25:8.

“Whose heart stirred him up” is the phrase used of the givers in 35:21, now applied to the workers. Moses calls the named masters and every skilled volunteer together, and the verse ends on the purpose, “to do it”. Some brought materials; these brought themselves.

“Withal” is the 1611 form of “with”: the offering was handed over to make the work with. Moses stands in the middle, receiving what the people brought and passing it to the craftsmen. Yet the gifts keep arriving “every morning”, a daily trickle after the main collection had already gone to the workshop.

“Wise men” here means the craftsmen of 35:10, not sages. They put down tools and come in person, “every man from his work”, which says how serious the surplus had become: the report is made by people who had to interrupt the job to make it.

“More than enough” turns on dai, the Hebrew word for enough, the word the Passover song Dayyenu repeats: “it would have been enough”. The craftsmen measure the gifts against “the work, which the LORD commanded to make”, which assumes they know exactly how much the design requires.

“Restrained” is vayyikkale, the verb used in Genesis 8:2 when “the rain from heaven was restrained” after the flood. The proclamation calls even the bringing of gifts “work”, mela’khah, the same word as the labour the Sabbath forbids in 35:2. Men and women are addressed separately, as in 35:22.

The Hebrew sets two words together that seem to contradict each other: dayyam, it was enough for them, and hotter, it was left over. Rabbinic readers argued over how a supply can be both exact and excessive; the plain sense is that it covered the whole work with some to spare.

The subject slides from plural to singular in the middle of the verse: the skilled workers made the curtains, and “made he them” with cherubim. The singular is usually taken as Bezaleel, named as maker in 37:1. The King James “cherubims” adds an English plural to a Hebrew word that is already plural.

Twenty eight cubits by four is roughly forty two feet by six. “All of one size” matters for a structure meant to be taken down and put up again for decades: any curtain could hang in any position. Ten of them sewn together give a fabric forty cubits by twenty eight.

The ten curtains are sewn into two panels of five, each twenty cubits by twenty eight. The Book of Exodus says only that they were coupled; the inference usually drawn is that the two halves stayed separate so that the fabric could be folded and carried in manageable loads.

“Selvedge” is the English weaver’s word for the self-edge, the finished side of a woven cloth that does not unravel. The Hebrew says only “edge”. The loops are blue, the colour of tekhelet, even on this hidden join where no one standing inside would ever see them.

A hundred loops in all, fifty on each panel. The Hebrew says the loops were maqbilot, “facing each other”, which the King James renders as holding one curtain to another. Each loop had to line up exactly with its partner, so the spacing on the two panels had to match.

Chapter 26:33 says the veil was to hang “under the taches”. The line of fifty gold clasps across the roof therefore stood directly over the boundary between the holy place and the most holy place. “So it became one tabernacle” is the command of 26:6 reported as done.

The goats’ hair layer is called the tent, ohel, as distinct from the dwelling, mishkan, beneath it. Black goats’ hair is what Bedouin tents are woven from to this day. There are eleven curtains, one more than the linen layer, so the outer tent is bigger than the thing it covers.

Thirty cubits against the linen’s twenty eight: the extra length let the goats’ hair hang a cubit lower on each side and cover the fine curtains completely, as 26:13 explains. The protective layer is longer and wider than what it protects.

The panels are unequal, five and six. According to 26:9, the sixth curtain in the larger set was doubled over at the front of the tent, giving a folded edge above the entrance. The asymmetry is designed, not a miscount.

The loops here get no colour. The inner loops of verse 11 were blue; on the outer tent, the Book of Exodus names nothing but the number, fifty on each edge. The finer materials are kept for the layer nearer the presence.

Gold clasps inside, bronze clasps outside. The metals run in a gradient through the whole sanctuary: gold in the dwelling, silver in its foundations, bronze in the tent, the court and the altar. How near a thing stood to the ark decided what it was made of.

Neither covering of skins is given a size, here or in 26:14, though every curtain beneath was measured to the cubit. The red rams’ skins lie over the goats’ hair, and the tachash skins over those, as the weatherproof top layer that anyone outside would actually see.

“Standing up” is omdim, upright, the boards set on end. The word for board, qeresh, has been contested since the nineteenth century: some, like A. R. S. Kennedy, argued for open frames rather than solid planks, which would be lighter and would let the coloured curtains show through from inside.

Ten cubits by one and a half is about fifteen feet by twenty seven inches. Twenty boards of that width make a wall of thirty cubits, and the height gives the dwelling its ten cubits. Solid acacia planks of these dimensions would be very heavy, which is part of the argument for frames.

The tenons are yadot in Hebrew, “hands”, two projecting pegs at the foot of each board. “Equally distant one from another” renders meshullavot, a word of uncertain sense, perhaps joined or set in line like the rungs of a ladder. Every board was cut to the same pattern.

“Southward” is teimanah, toward the teman, the south. In Hebrew orientation a person faces east, the sunrise, so the south is on the right hand, and teman is related to the word for right. The entrance of the dwelling will face east.

Each silver socket, adan, weighed a talent, according to 38:27, so forty talents of silver lay under this one wall. Two sockets per board, one for each tenon, means the boards stood in the silver rather than on the ground.

“Toward the north corner” uses pe’ah, which here means side or quarter rather than an angle; in 1611 “corner” could carry the same sense. The north wall matches the south board for board, twenty against twenty.

The silver in these sockets came from the half shekel paid by every man numbered, called “atonement money” in 30:16, and 38:25-27 traces it into these very bases. The gold boards stood on ransom silver. The verse abbreviates the south wall’s formula, dropping the tenons, since the pattern is now established.

The west was the back of the dwelling, the side farthest from the entrance, where the ark would stand. Six boards of a cubit and a half give nine cubits, and the two corner boards make up the width of ten.

“Corners” translates a rare word, mequtsa’ot, angle pieces. How these two boards turned the corner has never been settled; reconstructions from Josephus to modern scale models differ, and the Book of Exodus gives only enough to show that they were specially made.

“Coupled” is to’amim, literally “twins”, the word used of Rebekah’s sons in Genesis 25:24. The corner boards were doubled, joined at the bottom and up to the top ring. The same construction is repeated at both western corners.

Forty sockets north, forty south, sixteen west, and four for the veil’s pillars in verse 36: a hundred in all, which matches the hundred talents of silver that 38:27 says “were cast the sockets of the sanctuary”. The numbers in this chapter can be added up and checked against the later inventory.

The bars are beriach, the word for the bar that secures a city gate (Deuteronomy 3:5). Five run horizontally along each side through gold rings, tying separate boards into a wall. The verse ends mid sentence; the count continues in the next.

The west wall receives five bars, as many as the long walls, though it is only a third as long. Fifteen bars in all hold the frame together on three sides; the east side is open, closed only by the hanging of verse 37.

“To shoot through” is lavriach, to bar across. Whether the middle bar ran through a hole bored in the boards or along their face is not said. A rabbinic tradition in the Talmud (Shabbat 98b) held that it bent around all three walls by miracle, a reading the Hebrew does not require.

The rings are called battim in Hebrew, “houses”, homes for the bars. Everything wooden is overlaid: boards, bars and all. Acacia gave the frame its strength and gold gave it its surface, and from inside the dwelling no bare wood would be seen.

The veil, parokhet, is woven by the choshev, the pattern weaver, with cherubim worked into the fabric itself. The last cherubim in Genesis stood east of Eden to keep the way to the tree of life (3:24); here they are woven into the curtain that closes off the inner room.

The veil’s pillars are gold overlaid with golden hooks, yet stand on silver sockets and are given no capitals. The four sockets complete the hundred of verse 30. The pillars hold up a curtain; they carry no roof, since the fabric overhead rests on the boards.

The door hanging is roqem, needlework, embroidered rather than woven with figures, and no cherubim are named on it. Veil and door use the same three colours and linen, but the inner curtain carries figures and the outer one does not. The entrance was a screen of cloth, not a hinged door.

“Chapiters” are capitals, the heads of the pillars, and “fillets” are bands or connecting rods. They are gold, “but” their sockets are bronze: the entrance pillars stand on the metal of the court, not the silver of the dwelling. The doorway is where the gradient of metals changes.