1And Moses assembled all the community of Israelites and said to them, “These are the things that the LORD has charged to do: 2Six days shall tasks be done and on the seventh day there shall be holiness for you, an absolute sabbath for the LORD. Whosoever does a task on it shall be put to death. 3You shall not kindle a fire in all your dwelling places on the sabbath day.”
4And Moses said to all the community of Israelites, saying, “This is the thing that the LORD has charged, saying, 5‘Take from what you have with you a donation to the LORD. Whose heart urges him, let him bring it, a donation of the LORD, gold and silver and bronze, 6and indigo and purple and crimson linen and goat hair, 7and reddened ram skins and ocher-dyed skins and acacia wood, 8and oil for the lamp and spices for the anointing oil and for the aromatic incense, 9and carnelian stones and stones for setting in the ephod and in the breastplate. 10And every wise-hearted man among you shall come and do all that the LORD has charged: 11the Tabernacle and its tent and its cover and its clasps and its boards, its bolts, its posts, and its sockets; 12the Ark and its poles and all its furnishings and the curtain for the screen; 13the table and its poles and all its furnishings, and the bread of the Presence; 14and the lamp stand for the light and its furnishings, and its lamps and the oil for the light; 15and the incense altar and its poles and the anointing oil and the aromatic incense and the screen of the entrance to the Tabernacle; 16the altar of burnt offering and the bronze grating that belongs to it, its poles and all its vessels and the laver and its stand; 17the court hangings and its poles and its sockets, and the screen of the court-gate; 18the pegs of the Tabernacle and the pegs of the court and their cords; 19the service garments to serve in the sanctum, the sacred garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons to be priests.”
20And all the community of Israelites went out from before Moses. 21And every man whose heart moved him and everyone whose spirit urged him came, they brought a donation of the LORD for the task of the Tent of Meeting and for all its work and for the sacred garments. 22And the men came, besides the women, all whose heart urged them, they brought brooches and earrings and rings and pendants, every ornament of gold, and every man who raised an elevation offering of gold to the LORD. 23Every man with whom was found indigo and purple and crimson and linen and goat hair and reddened ram skins and ocher-dyed skins brought it. 24Whoever donated a donation of silver and bronze brought a donation of the LORD, and with whomever was found acacia wood for all the tasks of the work, they brought it. 25And every woman wise-hearted with her hands spun and brought the threadwork of indigo and purple and crimson and linen. 26And all the women whose hearts moved them with wisdom spun the goat hair. 27And the chieftains brought carnelian stones and stones for setting in the ephod and in the breastplate, 28and the spice and the oil for the lamp and for the anointing oil and for the aromatic incense. 29Every man and woman whose heart urged them to bring for all the task that the LORD had charged to do by the hand of Moses, the Israelites brought a freewill gift to the LORD.
30And Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the LORD has called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur from the tribe of Judah. 31And He has filled him with a spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in every task, 32to devise plans, to work in gold and in silver and in bronze 33and in stonecutting for settings and in wood carving to do every task of devising, 34and He has given in his heart to instruct—he and Oholiab son of Ahisamach from the tribe of Dan. 35He has filled them with heart’s wisdom to do every task of carver and designer and embroiderer in indigo and in purple and in crimson and in linen, and of weaver, doers of every task and devisers of plans. 36:1And Bezalel, and Oholiab and every wise-hearted man in whom the LORD has given wisdom and understanding to know how to do the task of the holy work, shall do all that the LORD has charged.
CHAPTER 35 NOTES
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1. And Moses assembled all the community. This initial clause, which brings us back to the interrupted instructions regarding the Tabernacle, beginning with the law of the sabbath that concluded those instructions (31:12–17), is a neat reversal of the inception of the Golden Calf episode: “the people assembled against Aaron” (32:1). Instead of a rebellious assembling of the people, their leader now assembles them in order to rehearse before them all that God has enjoined them.
2. Six days. This very brief version of the law of the sabbath is a kind of digest of the earlier iteration of the sabbath obligation. There is a good deal of summarizing repetition of earlier material in all that follows.
3. You shall not kindle a fire. This prohibition is a new specification. The lighting of fires might well be associated with the “tasks” involved in constructing the Tabernacle because fire would have been required for all the metalwork, and in one Ugaritic text, fire is burned six days in order to erect a sanctuary for Baal. But the kindling of fire—as against merely making use of fire that has been set accidentally—is clearly a primary labor of civilization, as the Prometheus myth suggests, a kind of inauguration of technology, and so it is understandable that a special prohibition of it on the sabbath should be spelled out.
5. Take . . . a donation to the LORD. Whose heart urges him, let him bring it. The language here and in what follows takes us back to the beginning of the Tabernacle section, chapter 25, and then to passages from the subsequent chapters. The structure of command and implementation in mirroring language is common to the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literatures. The Priestly editor, now reverting to a Priestly text, seeks to make this a thematically purposeful structure (though the return to cultic regulations is not likely to please modern readers). That is, the design for a perfect earthly abode for God in the midst of the Israelites has been traumatically disrupted by the story of the Golden Calf and the shattering of the tablets of the Law. Now that divinely mandated order has been restored with the making of the second set of tablets, the text can return to the actual fashioning of the Tabernacle, once again relishing every resplendent detail of indigo and crimson, gold and silver and bronze.
gold and silver and bronze. It is worth noting that although the Torah is a product of the early Iron Age, the report of the metals used for the Tabernacle remains faithful to the late Bronze Age setting of the Wilderness narrative.
10. wise-hearted. As before, the wisdom (ḥokhmah) in question slides from the notion of insight or intelligence to skill in a craft—in part because intelligence itself was thought of as a kind of teachable craft for those who had the capacity. The craft valence of the collocation used here is especially pronounced in verse 25, which speaks of “every woman wise-hearted with her hands” in the skill of spinning.
19. the service garments to serve in the sanctum. In this instance, the writer puts together serad, “service,” and sharet, “to serve,” either because he considered them to reflect the same root or because he is punning on the phonetic similarity.
21. every man whose heart moved him and everyone whose spirit urged him. The impulse of generosity indicated in 25:2 is stated more emphatically here and in the verses that follow. One may detect in this new emphasis a response to the Golden Calf episode, in which the people were quick to offer their golden rings for the fashioning of the molten image. Now they outdo themselves in donations for the LORD’s sanctuary.
22. the men . . . besides the women. The Hebrew construction, haʾanashim ʿal hanashim, is unusual. It would appear to suggest that the women queued up first to offer their donations. Because of the gender-bound nature of impersonal constructions in Hebrew, all the preceding references to “everyone” were masculine. Now we are alerted to the fact that women played an important role in the outpouring of contributions for the Tabernacle—another way of highlighting the comprehensiveness of the new impetus of generosity. The women were also more likely to have possessed an abundance of ornaments than the men.
earrings. The item in question, nezem, was also worn on the nose.
25. spun. Spinning is of course the one craft particularly associated with women.
34. to instruct. God has endowed Bezalel, together with his chief assistant Oholiab, not only with the skill to execute all these sundry crafts but also with the capacity to instruct the crews of ordinary craftsmen how to carry out their work. Canaanite myth, like the Greek, had a craftsman god; here, instead, the LORD inspires a human being with the skill, or “wisdom,” of the craft as well as with the ability to administer the project.
36:1. This verse is a summary of the nature of the workforce for constructing the Tabernacle and therefore would seem to belong here rather than at the beginning of the next chapter.