The Sanctuary Has a Courtyard and an Account Book

Altar is mizbeach, “place of slaughter”, from zavach, to sacrifice. Five cubits square and three high is about seven and a half feet square and four and a half high, by far the largest object in the sanctuary. Its footprint is bigger than the ark, the table and the incense altar put together.

The horns rise out of the same wood as the altar, as on the incense altar, but this one is sheathed in bronze, not gold. The horns are where the blood of the priests’ ordination offering was to be put with the finger (29:12), so they are the working edge of the altar, not ornament.

Each tool has its job. The pots, sirot, carried away the ashes (27:3); shovels scooped them; the basons, mizraqot, are named from zaraq, to dash, for throwing blood against the altar; the fleshhooks are forks for handling meat. The firepans, machtot, bear the same name as the gold snuffdishes of 37:23.

The grate, mikhbar, is a mesh of bronze set “under the compass”, beneath a ledge, halfway up the altar. What it did is disputed: some place the fire on it inside the hollow box, others see an outer lattice that let air draw in and ash fall through.

The rings are cast onto the four ends of the grating itself, which means the grating reached the outside of the altar where the poles could pass. That detail is the strongest argument for the outer lattice reading of verse 4.

Throughout the sanctuary the poles match the metal of the thing they carry: gold for the ark, the table and the incense altar, bronze for the altar of burnt offering. Even the carrying gear is graded by where its object stood.

“Hollow with boards” is nevuv luchot, literally “hollow of planks”, and luchot is the same word as the stone tablets of the covenant. A hollow wooden box could not bear a sacrificial fire alone; Rashi and others held that it was filled with earth where it stood, in keeping with the altar of earth commanded in 20:24.

“Assembling” is tsove’ot, a verb used of military service and of the Levites’ service at the tent (Numbers 4:23); 1 Samuel 2:22 uses the same phrase of women at the door in Eli’s day. Since the tabernacle is not yet standing, the door here is probably that of Moses’ earlier tent of meeting outside the camp (33:7).

A hundred cubits is about a hundred and fifty feet of linen fence. The hangings were five cubits high (verse 18), half the height of the dwelling’s ten, so the tent itself would have been visible over the top of the court’s wall from anywhere in the camp.

Twenty pillars along a hundred cubits sets them about five cubits apart. How the corner posts were counted, whether each belonged to one side or two, is an old puzzle, since the sides as given add up to sixty pillars. The hooks and fillets are silver, the first silver seen above ground.

The north side repeats the south clause for clause, a hundred cubits and twenty pillars, with the word order only slightly compressed. The court is a plain rectangle, as symmetrical as the dwelling within it.

Fifty cubits across the west makes the court two squares of fifty. Most reconstructions put the dwelling in the western square, with the ark near the centre of that square; the Book of Exodus gives the measurements that make this reading possible without stating it.

The east side receives only its length, the shortest statement in the chapter. The reason appears in the next three verses: this is the side with the entrance, and its fifty cubits are divided between the gate and the hangings on either side of it.

“Side” here is katef in Hebrew, “shoulder”. The gate has two shoulders of fifteen cubits of plain linen, each on three pillars, flanking the coloured entrance the way shoulders flank a head.

“On this hand and that hand” is mizzeh umizzeh, from this and from that. Fifteen and fifteen, with twenty for the gate, give back the fifty of verse 13, so the east side can be checked against itself.

Added up, the court’s plain hangings run to two hundred and eighty cubits, about four hundred and twenty feet of white linen, with twenty more cubits of coloured gate. From outside, the sanctuary presented a long white wall broken only at the east.

Silver overlay on the chapiters, the capitals of the court’s pillars, is not in the instructions of chapter 27; it appears first here in the report of what was made. The silver for it came from the small remainder of the census money in verse 28.

“The height in the breadth” means the width of the cloth as it hung, five cubits, the height of the fence. “Answerable to” is 1611 English for matching or corresponding. The gate is needlework in the three colours, like the tabernacle door, visible from far off against the white.

The court gate stands on four pillars, the tabernacle door on five (36:38) and the veil on four (36:36). Three entrances lead in from the camp to the ark, each a hanging on pillars, each worked in the same blue, purple and scarlet.

Pins for “the tabernacle” as well as the court mean the dwelling itself was guyed out with cords and pegs like any tent, the fabric roof held down against the desert wind. All of them bronze, the humblest items in the whole sanctuary are made of the same metal as the altar.

“Sum” is pequdei, the accountings, from paqad, to count or muster, the word that gives this Torah section its Jewish name. Ithamar is Aaron’s youngest son; in Numbers 4:28 and 4:33 he supervises the Gershonites and Merarites, who carried the curtains and frames. He is put in charge of the record before his ordination in Leviticus 8.

Bezaleel never heard God speak; Moses did. Yet the verse says he made “all that the LORD commanded Moses”, crediting him with keeping to a command that reached him only secondhand. His descent is given in the same three links as in 31:2 and 35:30.

Aholiab, merely “with him” in 31:6, now receives three titles: engraver, designer and embroiderer. Since the chapters of making credit the wood and metal to Bezaleel by name, the likely inference is that the textiles were Aholiab’s field.

Twenty nine talents and seven hundred and thirty shekels is 87,730 shekels, close to a tonne of gold. “Occupied” is 1611 English for used or employed. The shekel of the sanctuary was a fixed standard of twenty gerahs (30:13), kept so that weights could be checked.

The gold and the bronze are called offering; the silver alone is counted as coming from “them that were numbered”. It is the one metal that came by levy rather than free gift, and the Book of Exodus keeps the two kinds of giving apart even in the accounts.

A bekah, “a split”, is half a shekel, and the only other place the word appears is Genesis 24:22, the weight of the gold nose ring given to Rebekah. The count of 603,550 men is the exact figure Numbers 1:46 records at the census taken months later.

A talent of silver is some thirty four kilograms, and each socket was cast from one: a heavy block to shift every time the camp moved. The Merarites, who carried the boards and sockets, were given four wagons and eight oxen for the load (Numbers 7:8).

The leftover 1,775 shekels, about twenty kilograms, did not go into a treasury. Every shekel of the census silver is assigned to something in the finished work, down to hooks and the bands on the pillars of the court.

Seventy talents and 2,400 shekels comes to 212,400 shekels, more than twice the gold and the largest mass of metal in the account, well over two tonnes. It is called tenufah, a wave offering, like the gold of 35:22.

The bronze is traced into the door sockets, the altar, its grating and its tools. The laver is missing from the list, and the likely reason is verse 8: the laver came from the women’s mirrors, a separate source, not from the general offering of bronze.

The inventory ends at the ground: sockets and tent pegs, “round about” twice. The account that began with the gold of the holy place closes on the pegs of the court, the last things put in when the tent went up and the first pulled out when it came down.