Exodus26chapter 26

Exodus 26:1-2

The first thing named in the tabernacle is not a wall but a woven cloth, and the figures worked into it are cherubims. Genesis 3:24 set cherubims at the east of Eden with a flaming sword to keep the way of the tree of life, and here they are woven into the covering of the place where God will dwell among the people. The same four materials, fine twined linen with blue, purple and scarlet, return at the vail in verse 31 and at the door in verse 36.

Exodus 26:3-6

Fifty loops and fifty gold taches join the two sets of five, and the sentence ends by insisting on the result, that it shall be one tabernacle. The word one carries the paragraph and it is repeated at verse 11 for the outer tent. Ten separate pieces of cloth are made to count as a single covering.

Exodus 26:7-11

The second covering is goats' hair, eleven curtains against the ten below, and it is called a tent while the linen beneath it is called the tabernacle. Its taches are brass where the inner ones are gold, which is the first of the graded distinctions in this chapter, since the further out a thing sits the plainer its metal. The same insistence on unity closes the paragraph, that it may be one.

Exodus 26:12-14

The extra length of the goats' hair is not trimmed off but left to hang down the back and the sides, so the outer tent overshoots the frame in every direction. Two more coverings go over that, rams' skins dyed red and badgers' skins, and the text gives no measurements for either. What a passerby saw was the plainest layer, and the gold and the cherubims were visible only from inside.

Exodus 26:15-19

Under the curtains stands a frame of acacia boards, each ten cubits high and set upright. Every board rests in two silver sockets, and Exodus 38:27 says where that silver came from, the hundred talents of atonement money gathered at half a shekel a man and cast at a talent to a socket. The frame of the dwelling place stands on ransom money.

Exodus 26:20-25

for the second side of the tabernacle: Twenty boards south, twenty north, and eight at the west end with the two corner boards doubled and ringed together. The east end is left open here and is closed in verses 36 and 37 by a hanging rather than by boards. Forty sockets, forty sockets and sixteen make ninety six under the boards, and the four under the pillars of the vail bring it to the hundred that Exodus 38:27 counts.

Exodus 26:26-29

Five bars a side hold the boards together, and the middle bar runs from end to end while the others do not. Everything the eye would meet is overlaid with gold, the boards, the rings and the bars alike. The whole frame is built to be taken apart and carried, which Numbers 4 sets out in detail.

Exodus 26:30

The building instructions close by saying that Moses is copying something he was shown rather than designing something. Exodus 25:40 said the same at the start of the pattern, and Hebrews 8:5 quotes that verse and calls the whole structure the example and shadow of heavenly things. That the tabernacle is a copy is stated by the New Testament, while readings of each item of furniture as a separate figure of Christ are a tradition taught by Chuck Missler and by Sir Robert Anderson.

Exodus 26:31-33

The vail carries cherubims like the innermost curtain, and it does one job, which is to divide the holy place from the most holy. Cherubims stand again where the way is closed, as they did at Eden in Genesis 3:24. Matthew 27:51 reports this curtain torn from the top to the bottom at the death of Jesus, and Hebrews 10:20 calls the new and living way one that runs through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.

Exodus 26:34-35

Behind the vail there is one object, the ark with the mercy seat upon it, and the Greek word the Septuagint uses for that seat is hilasterion. Romans 3:25 uses the same word of Christ, which is a link no English reader can see without being told. Outside the vail stand the table on the north and the candlestick on the south, so the furniture is placed as carefully as it is made.

Exodus 26:36-37

The door hanging uses the same four materials as the vail and the inner curtain, and the differences are exact. It is wrought with needlework where those are cunning work, it carries no cherubims, and its five pillars stand in sockets of brass where the vail's four stand in silver. The chapter grades everything by how far in it sits, and it never says why.