1And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“On the day of the first month, on the first of the month, you shall set up the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting. 3And you shall put there the Ark of the Covenant and screen the Ark with the curtain. 4And you shall bring the table and lay out its array, and you shall bring the lamp stand and light up its lamps. 5And you shall set the golden altar for the incense before the Ark of the Covenant and you shall set up the screen for the entrance of the Tabernacle. 6And you shall set the burnt-offering altar before the entrance of the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting. 7And you shall set the laver between the Tent of Meeting and the altar, and you shall set water there. 8And you shall put up the court all around and set up the screen of the court gate. 9And you shall take the anointing oil and anoint the Tabernacle and all that is in it, and you shall consecrate it and all its furnishings, that it be holy. 10And you shall anoint the burnt-offering altar and all its furnishings, and you shall consecrate the altar, that the altar be holy of holies. 11And you shall anoint the laver and its stand and consecrate it. 12And you shall bring Aaron and his sons forward to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting and bathe them in water. 13And you shall dress Aaron in the sacred garments and anoint him and consecrate him, that he be a priest to Me. 14And his sons you shall bring forward and dress them in tunics. 15And you shall anoint them as you anointed their father, that they be priests to Me, and their anointing shall become for them an everlasting priesthood for their generations.” 16And Moses did as all that the LORD had charged him, thus he did.
17And it happened in the first month in the second year, on the first of the month, that the Tabernacle was set up. 18And Moses set up the Tabernacle and placed its sockets and put up its boards and fixed its crossbars and set up its posts. 19And he spread the tent over the Tabernacle and put the covering of the tent over it from above, as the LORD had charged Moses. 20And he took and set the Covenant in the Ark, and he put the poles on the Ark, and he set the cover over the Ark from above. 21And he brought the Ark into the Tabernacle and placed the curtain of the screen and screened the Ark of the Covenant, as the LORD had charged Moses. 22And he set the table in the Tent of Meeting on the northern side of the Tabernacle outside the curtain. 23And he laid out on it the array of bread before the LORD, as the LORD had charged Moses. 24And he placed the lamp stand in the Tent of Meeting opposite the table on the northern side of the Tabernacle. 25And he lit up the lamps before the LORD, as the LORD had charged Moses. 26And he placed the golden altar in the Tent of Meeting before the curtain. 27And he burned on it aromatic incense, as the LORD had charged Moses. 28And he put up the screen for the entrance of the Tabernacle. 29And he put up the burnt-offering altar there at the entrance to the Tabernacle of the Tent of Meeting, and offered up on it the burnt offering and the grain offering, as the LORD had charged Moses. 30And he placed the laver between the Tent of Meeting and the altar, and he set water there for washing. 31And Moses and Aaron and his sons washed their hands and their feet with it. 32When they came into the Tent of Meeting and when they approached the altar, they would wash, as the LORD had charged Moses. 33And he set up the court around the Tabernacle and the altar, and he placed the screen of the court gate. And Moses completed the task.
34And the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the glory of the LORD filled the Tabernacle. 35And Moses could not come into the Tent of Meeting, for the cloud abode upon it and the glory of the LORD filled the Tabernacle. 36And when the cloud went up from over the Tabernacle, the Israelites would journey onward in all their journeyings. 37And if the cloud did not go up, they would not journey onward until the day it went up. 38For the LORD’s cloud was over the Tabernacle by day, and fire by night was in it, before the eyes of all the house of Israel in all their journeyings.
CHAPTER 40 NOTES
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2. the first month, on the first of the month. Since the month of the New Grain (Abib, or in later Hebrew usage, Nissan) has been fixed as the first month (Exodus 12:2), one may infer that the Tabernacle was set up and consecrated one year, less two weeks, after the departure from Egypt. Thus verse 17 refers to “the first month in the second year,” that is, the second year of the Exodus.
you shall set up the Tabernacle. After all the instructions concerning the Tabernacle, followed, after the break of the Golden Calf episode, by the report of the fashioning of all the components of the structure, according to the divine instructions, God enjoins Moses to culminate all these labors by actually setting up the Tabernacle. These commands (verses 1–15) are followed by the account of their implementation (verses 16–34), the latter repeatedly punctuated by the refrain “as the LORD had charged Moses.” This perfect execution of God’s directions to make Him a dwelling place and a cultic center in the midst of the Israelites would have been conceived, at least by the Priestly writer, as a fitting conclusion to the Book of Exodus. The doubts as to whether God would dwell among the people as it journeyed through the wilderness are now settled, and that resolution is dramatically confirmed by the evocation of the divine cloud and fire (verses 34–38) with which the book concludes.
4. lay out its array. The reference is to the twelve loaves of the bread of Presence, which were changed daily. See verse 23.
15. their anointing shall become for them an everlasting priesthood for their generations. This rhetorical flourish makes clear that what the Priestly writer has in view is not merely a report of the archaic era of origins in the Wilderness wanderings but a model and permanent authorization of the privileged status of the priestly caste for all time.
20. set the Covenant in the Ark. The Covenant, ʿedut, is a synonym for berit, the other common biblical term for pact, treaty, or covenant, and it clearly refers to the two stone tablets on which the words of the Covenant were written by the finger of God. The Tabernacle, then, has a double function: it is the place where sacrifices are offered, as in all ancient Near Eastern cults, and it is the place where the material document of an eternal contract between God and Israel is preserved. Though the burnt-offering altar is called “holy of holies” (verse 10), the supreme locus of the sacrosanct, the concrete nexus between humanity and the divine, is the Ark within which the tablets of the Covenant are kept.
33. And Moses completed the task. Once again, both the verb and the noun that is its object hark back to the completion of creation in Genesis 2:1–3.
35. the cloud abode . . . the glory of the LORD filled. Throughout these four concluding verses, one hears the resonant cadences of a kind of epic narrative. As is the rule in most literatures, when prose seeks grand effects, it tends to approximate the formal shape of poetry (compare Melville’s repeated use of iambic cadences, coupled with Shakespearian diction in Moby-Dick): these two clauses almost scan (the Hebrew has a stress pattern of three beats in the first clause, four in the second), and they exhibit the semantic parallelism that is one of the most prominent features of biblical poetry. Analogous patterns are detectable in the next three verses. The cloud and the glory appear to be virtual synonyms, or at the very least, overlapping terms. The LORD’s glory, kavod, is clearly a palpably concrete manifestation of the deity, for all the metaphysical attributes that later theology would attach to it. It may have been imagined as a kind of mantle of light enveloping God, with the cloud giving off a luminosity by day parallel to the fire by night. (Thus the English word “glory,” which suggests a nimbus or halo, is an appropriate equivalent.) This cloudy effulgence is so daunting to behold that even Moses does not dare enter the Tent until the cloud lifts.
38. the LORD’s cloud . . . by day, and fire by night was in it. These words hark back to the initial report of the pillar of cloud and fire (13:21–22) that marked the very beginning of the Wilderness narrative, so this whole large segment of text is cinched in an envelope structure. In chapter 13, the cloud and the fire appear directly before the people to show them the way through the trackless desert. Now, the cloud and the fire have been given a constructed, cultic focal point—the Tabernacle that henceforth will be God’s dwelling place in the midst of the people.
in all their journeyings. Pointedly, “their journeyings,” masʿeyhem, is the last word of the Book of Exodus, just as this same verbal stem inaugurated the Wilderness narrative in 13:20, “And they journeyed from Succoth.” We have been left with a sense of harmonious consummation in the completion of the Tabernacle, likened by allusion to the completion of the tasks of creation; but the condition in which the Israelites find themselves remains unstable, uncertain, a destiny of wandering through arduous wasteland toward a promised land that is not yet visible on the horizon. The concluding words of Exodus point forward not to the priestly regulations of the Book of Leviticus, which immediately follows, but to the Book of Numbers, with its tales of Wilderness wanderings, near catastrophic defections, and dangerous tensions between the leader and the led.