Exodus30chapter 30

Exodus 30:1-5

The golden altar is described here rather than with the table and the candlestick in chapter 25, after the priests have been consecrated in chapter 29. It carries horns like the brazen altar of Exodus 27:2 and rings and staves like the ark of Exodus 25:13, so the instrument of prayer is built to travel with the camp. Hebrews 9:4 places a golden censer with the holiest of all rather than with the holy place, and readers have long divided over whether the writer means this altar or the censer carried in on the day of atonement.

Exodus 30:6-8

The altar stands outside the vail and its smoke goes over it, so the incense reaches where the priest may not. Burning it is tied to the lamps rather than given an hour of its own, once when the lamps are dressed and once when they are lit, which makes the light and the incense one daily duty. Luke 1:9-10 has Zacharias at this altar while the whole multitude prayed outside at the hour of incense, and Revelation 5:8 calls the odours the prayers of saints.

Exodus 30:9-10

Four things are forbidden on this altar and every one of them belongs on the altar in the court, so the two altars are held to separate work. The single exception is blood, put on its horns once a year with the sin offering of atonements, which ties the golden altar to the day Leviticus 16 sets out. Leviticus 10:1 records the first breach of the rule, when Nadab and Abihu offered strange fire in the week the priesthood began.

Exodus 30:11-13

This opens the second of the seven speeches that build the tabernacle, which fall at 25:1, here, 30:17, 30:22, 30:34, 31:1 and 31:12. What it commands is a ransom paid at a census, half a shekel from every man counted, so that there be no plague among them, and 2 Samuel 24 records a later numbering that ended in one. The phrase shekel of the sanctuary occurs here for the first time in Scripture and fixes the weight against a standard kept at the sanctuary rather than in the market.

Exodus 30:14-16

The rich shall not give more and the poor shall not give less, which makes this the one offering in the book with no scale in it, because a ransom is priced by what is redeemed rather than by what the payer holds. Exodus 38:27 follows the money and says where it went, a hundred talents cast into a hundred silver sockets at a talent apiece. The boards of the dwelling place therefore stand in atonement money, and Charles Spurgeon preached that point from these verses in Silver Sockets, Redemption the Foundation.

Exodus 30:17-21

The third speech gives the only piece of the tabernacle whose size the text never fixes, since the laver is described by its metal and its use and by nothing else. Exodus 38:8 says what the brass came from, the looking glasses of the women assembling at the door of the tent. Aaron and his sons were already washed once at their consecration in Exodus 29:4, and this is a different thing, a washing of hands and feet repeated at every approach, with the reason given twice as that they die not. John 13:10 sets a bathed man needing only his feet washed.

Exodus 30:22-25

The fourth speech opens with a different formula, Moreover the Lord spake, which is why the set in chapters 25 to 31 counts as seven speeches rather than seven occurrences of one phrase. The weights are reckoned by the shekel of the sanctuary named at verse 13, so the standard set for the ransom money governs the apothecary as well. Every spice in the recipe reaches the wilderness by trade, and Exodus 35:28 says the people brought the spice for the anointing oil out of their own hands.

Exodus 30:26-29

The oil goes on the tent and on every vessel in it before it goes on any man, so the place is set apart ahead of the priesthood that will work there. The result is stated as a graded thing, that they may be most holy, and that whatsoever toucheth them shall be holy. Haggai 2:11-13 puts the matching question to the priests, whether holiness carries by contact the way uncleanness does, and the answer given there is that it does not.

Exodus 30:30-33

anoint Aaron and his sons: Aaron and his sons come last, after the tent and the furniture, and the word anoint first occurs in Scripture at Exodus 28:41 in this same connection. Two prohibitions close the paragraph, that the oil is not poured on ordinary flesh and that no one compounds anything like it, with cutting off named as the penalty. Psalm 133 takes the picture up and makes the oil running down Aaron's beard the figure for brethren dwelling together in unity.

Exodus 30:34-36

The fifth speech supplies what burns on the altar of verse 1, four ingredients in equal weight, beaten small and set before the testimony. The chapter therefore ends where it opened, and the altar built in its first verse has nothing to offer until this last speech gives it. The anointing oil is called holy and the incense is called most holy, which is the same grading the chapter applied to the furniture at verse 29.

Exodus 30:37-38

The perfume ends with the same fence as the oil, that a man may not compound it for himself, and the reason given is smelling to it for his own pleasure. What is withheld is private use rather than public use, which is the line the chapter has been drawing since it forbade strange incense at verse 9. Chapter 31 follows at once with Bezalel, the first man in Scripture said to be filled with the Spirit of God, and the filling is for cutting stone, working metal and carving wood.