Exodus36chapter 36

Exodus 36:1-2

The building begins with two named men and the wisdom put in them, before a single material is measured. Exodus 31:3 says Bezaleel was filled with the Spirit of God, the first time in Scripture any person is said to be filled with the Spirit, and the work it equips him for is cutting stone, working metal and carving wood. The word wisdom first occurs at Exodus 28:3, given to craftsmen long before it is given to a king. Moses calls the men whose own hearts stirred them up, so the labour is volunteered rather than conscripted.

Exodus 36:3-4

The materials come in by hand and keep coming, free offerings every morning, so the supply is a daily habit rather than a single collection. The gold is the same kind of freewill gold the people stripped off for the calf at Exodus 32:2-3, which says the metal was never the trouble. The workmen leave their benches to report, so what follows in verse 5 comes from the men doing the work rather than from Moses watching it.

Exodus 36:5-7

Israel gives so much that the work has to be stopped, and a proclamation goes through the camp telling man and woman alike to bring no more. Scripture records no second occasion where an offering is halted for excess. Four chapters earlier this same congregation handed its gold to Aaron and got a calf, and the book sets the two collections that close together and says nothing about the distance.

Exodus 36:8-13

The instruction in chapters 25 to 31 began at the ark and worked outward. The building begins at the tent and works inward, and the ark is not made until chapter 37. Every command of chapter 26 now returns in the past tense, made and coupled and overlaid, which is the reason the work is reported twice. The cherubims of Genesis 3:24, set to keep the way to the tree of life, are woven into the innermost covering of the place where God will dwell among the people.

Exodus 36:14-19

for the tent over the tabernacle: The second covering is goats' hair, eleven curtains against the ten below, and the text calls it a tent where the linen beneath it is the tabernacle. Its taches are cast in brass where the inner taches were gold, so the metal grades plainer the further out it sits, and the same grading runs all the way to the sockets in verse 38. Over both go rams' skins dyed red and badgers' skins, and no measurement is given for either, so the layer the camp actually saw is the one described least.

Exodus 36:20-26

Under the cloth stands a frame of acacia boards ten cubits high, and every board drops by two tenons into two sockets of silver. Chapter 26 ordered those sockets and this chapter counts them out, forty on the south side and forty on the north. Exodus 38:27 says where the silver came from, a hundred talents of atonement money gathered at half a shekel a head and cast at a talent to a socket, so the frame of the dwelling place stands on ransom money.

Exodus 36:27-30

Six boards close the west end, and two more are doubled into the corners and ringed together at the head, which gives eight boards and sixteen sockets. Three sides of the building are solid timber and the east side carries none, because the entrance is a hanging on five pillars in verse 37. The house God asked for has a curtain for a door.

Exodus 36:31-34

Five bars a side lock the boards into one wall, and the middle bar runs the whole length where the others do not. Gold covers the boards, the rings and the bars alike, so every surface a priest stood among was gold. The frame is gilded and pinned and still built to come apart, and Numbers 4:31 gives the boards, bars, pillars and sockets to the sons of Merari to carry.

Exodus 36:35-36

The vail carries cherubims like the innermost curtain, so the figures that guarded Eden in Genesis 3:24 stand again at the one place a man may not pass. Exodus 26:33 gave the vail its work, to divide the holy place from the most holy, and this chapter reports the making and leaves the meaning where it was first said. 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 36:37-38

The door hanging uses the same four materials as the vail and differs from it in three exact ways. It is needlework where the vail is 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 every material by how far in it sits and never once explains why, which Hebrews 9:8 later takes up, saying the way into the holiest was not yet made manifest while the first tabernacle was still standing.