SUMMARY
Having received instructions from God on how to build the tabernacleThe tabernacle, a word meaning "tent," was a portable worship place for the Hebrew people after they left Egypt. It was said to contain the ark of the covenant. The plans for the tabernacle are dictated by God in Exodus 26., MosesProphet who led Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land and received the law at Sinai. and the community undertake and complete its construction.
ANALYSIS
While the instructions for the tabernacle (Exodus 25-31) and the account of building the tabernacle according to the instructions (Exodus 35-40) can be tedious to read, their meticulous description is itself testimony to the theological importance of these sections. As a rule, Old Testament narrative tends to be driven by plot and dialogue; descriptive passages are few and far between. There are not many places in the Old Testament where anything is accounted for in such painstaking detail, making the texts about the tabernacle stand out from the rest of Scripture. The tabernacle is the dwelling place for God in the midst of Israel. It is a sacred space that assures the people God is ever with them. As scholar William H. Propp has written, “…the Tabernacle [is] a SabbathSabbath is a weekly day of rest, the seventh day, observed on Saturday in Judaism and on Sunday in Christianity. In the book of Genesis, God rested on the seventh day; in the Gospel accounts Jesus and his disciples are criticized by some for not... in space” (Exodus, v. 2, p. 692). It is a place reserved for holiness, set apart from the rest of the world, where the people and God encounter each other. Thus, these long lists of details are not an afterthought to the exodus story, but a centerpiece of it.
