The Furnishings Are Made to the Pattern

The ark is aron, a chest, the word used for Joseph’s coffin in Genesis 50:26, not tevah, the word for Noah’s ark and for the basket that carried the infant Moses (2:3). Two and a half cubits by one and a half by one and a half is roughly three feet nine inches long and two feet three wide and high.

“Within and without” is the phrase Genesis 6:14 used of Noah pitching his ark inside and out. Gold on the inner faces means gold no one would ever see once the lid was on. The “crown” is a zer, a raised moulding running around the top edge.

The rings are cast in a mould, not beaten. “Corners” here is pa’amot, literally “feet”, which is why Jewish and Christian interpreters have disagreed about whether the rings sat low near the base or high near the lid. The Book of Exodus does not settle it.

The poles are made the way the chest was made, acacia overlaid with gold. The means of carrying the ark is of the same material as the ark itself, as though the transport were part of the object rather than an accessory to it.

Putting the poles into the rings is the first thing done with them, before the lid is even made. The purpose clause, “to bear the ark”, is the whole reason the rings exist: this is a chest built to travel on men’s shoulders.

The mercy seat matches the ark exactly in length and breadth, so it sits flush as its lid, but no thickness is given. The Talmud (Sukkah 5a) set it at a handbreadth. Unlike the chest beneath it, the kapporet has no wood in it at all: it is solid gold.

“Beaten out of one piece” is miqshah, hammered work. The cherubim are not cast separately and fastened on; they are raised from the same gold as the lid by beating, which is how the chapter will describe the lampstand too.

The Hebrew places them “from this end” and “from that end”, one at each extremity. The Book of Exodus stresses twice that the cherubim came “out of the mercy seat”, so the lid and its guardians are one object with no seam between them.

“Covered” is sokhekhim, screening or sheltering, from the root that gives sukkah, a booth. The wings rise upward while the faces turn inward and downward toward the lid. The figures do not look at the viewer; they look at the place between them.

The table is two cubits by one, and its height, a cubit and a half, is exactly the height of the ark. The furniture of the dwelling is built to a common scale, with the ark and the table standing level with each other on either side of the veil.

Like the ark, the table receives its own crown, a gold rim. Its overlay is “pure gold” but, unlike the ark, it is not said to be gilded within, since a table has no inside to gild.

The border, misgeret, is a frame a handbreadth wide, about three inches. Whether it rose around the tabletop as a lip to keep things from sliding off or ran between the legs as a brace is disputed. It receives a crown of its own, so the table has two gold mouldings.

Here the Hebrew for feet is raglayim, real legs; the table stands on legs where the ark sat as a chest. The rings go “upon the four corners that were in the four feet”, where the load comes down.

The rings sit close by the border, which suggests the frame braced the legs at the point where the carrying poles took the weight. The Book of Exodus does not say this; it is the engineering inference most reconstructions draw.

“To bear the table”: Numbers 4:7-8 says that when the camp moved, the table was covered in blue and scarlet cloth with the bread still on it, “the continual bread shall be thereon”. The poles were made for a table that went on being set while it travelled.

“Spoons” are kappot, palm shaped pans used for incense (Leviticus 24:7 sets frankincense on the bread). The last phrase is a known slip in the King James: “to cover withal” translates a Hebrew verb for pouring, and these are the jugs for drink offerings.

The lampstand’s vocabulary is half body and half plant. The shaft is yarekh, literally “thigh”; the branch is qaneh, “reed”. “Knops” is the old English for knobs or buds, rendering kaftor, and the flowers are blossoms. The whole lampstand is pictured as a flowering tree.

The text gives no shape to the branches. The Arch of Titus in Rome shows curved arms on the lampstand carried off from the temple in AD 70, while Maimonides sketched straight diagonal arms. Six branches and the central shaft make the seven lamps of verse 23.

“Made after the fashion of almonds” is meshuqqadim, from shaqed, the almond. Jeremiah 1:11-12 puns on shaqed and shoqed, “watching”, because the almond is the first tree to wake in spring. The ornament on each branch runs cup, bud, blossom, three times over.

The central shaft carries four almond cups where each branch carries three. The stem is marked out from the arms by one more set of ornaments, the only asymmetry in an otherwise mirrored design.

The Hebrew says “a knop under two branches of the same” three times in a row, placing a bud at each point where a pair of branches leaves the shaft. The sentence is built the way the object is built: three identical junctions, one above another.

Jewish tradition found the lampstand the hardest of the commanded objects to picture; the Talmud (Menachot 29a) says Moses was shown one made of fire. Here the difficulty is simply met: “all of it was one beaten work of pure gold”.

The lamps, nerot, were oil lamps that sat on top of the branches. The King James “snuffers” are melqachayim, “takers”, the tongs for trimming wicks; “snuffdishes” are machtot, trays for the burnt ends. In 1611 to snuff a candle meant to trim it.

A talent was about three thousand shekels, commonly reckoned at thirty to thirty four kilograms, some seventy pounds. The lampstand is the only piece of furniture in the dwelling whose total gold is weighed, and the weight includes its tools.

A cubit square and two cubits high, the incense altar is twice as tall as it is wide, and its horns rise out of the same piece of wood. Its instructions were held back until 30:1-10, after the rest of the dwelling had been described; in the making it joins the other gold furniture in sequence.

“The top of it” is gag, literally “roof”, the word for a house’s flat roof. Ark, table and incense altar each receive a gold crown; the three pieces of furniture that stood inside the dwelling share the one ornament.

The ark and the table have four rings; the incense altar, being small, has two. “Sides” here is tsela’ot, the word for the rib taken from Adam in Genesis 2:21-22, used in building for the flank or side of an object.

Three sets of poles in one chapter: ark, table, incense altar. The lampstand, alone among the gold furnishings, has none. According to Numbers 4:9-10, it travelled wrapped in blue cloth and skins and laid on a carrying frame instead.

“Apothecary” translates roqeach, a perfumer or compounder of spices; in 1611 the apothecary was the one who mixed ointments and medicines. The incense is called “pure”, tahor, the word used of clean animals and of the purified people, here applied to a fragrance.