Exodus38chapter 38

Exodus 38:1-2

The altar in the court is the one article of furniture an ordinary Israelite could come near, and it is overlaid with brass rather than gold, which is the metal of the whole court. Its horns are of the same piece as the altar rather than fitted on, and the blood of the sin offering is put on them at Exodus 29:12. At 1 Kings 1:50 and again at 2:28 a man in fear of his life lays hold of the horns of the altar, which is a use Exodus never describes.

Exodus 38:3-7

The altar is hollow with boards rather than solid, and it carries rings and staves like the ark inside the vail. Everything in the court is built to be taken down and carried, and Numbers 4:13-14 gives the order for covering this altar and bearing it on the march. Its tools are brass like the altar itself, so nothing of gold is handled where the people stand.

Exodus 38:8

The laver is the only vessel in the tabernacle whose material is traced to the people who gave it, and the verse names the women assembling at the door and then says nothing further. Exodus 30:18 commanded a laver of brass and gave neither its size nor its source, so this line supplies what the instruction left out and still gives no measurement. The same phrase for women who assembled at the door of the tabernacle returns at 1 Samuel 2:22, where it describes a standing service at the entrance rather than a crowd passing by. Matthew Henry reads the gift as women parting with the metal they had used to look at themselves in, and Adam Clarke argues the word means polished mirrors, since glass did not yet exist and could not have been cast into a laver.

Exodus 38:9-13

The court is walled with cloth rather than stone, a hundred cubits by fifty, and every hanging around it is plain white linen. Colour is held back for the gate alone in verse 18. Three sides get their pillars and sockets counted and the east side gets one short line, because the east is where the way in is and the account turns from wall to entrance.

Exodus 38:14-17

Every pillar of the court stands in a brass socket and is banded and capped in silver, and verse 28 says where that silver came from. It is the odd 1,775 shekels left over from the ransom money once the hundred sockets of the dwelling had been cast. A man walking into the court passed his own half shekel worked into the fittings above his head.

Exodus 38:18-20

The one door into the court wears the four materials of the vail and the inner curtain, blue and purple and scarlet and fine twined linen, and the wall on either side of it does not. It is twenty cubits wide in a wall a hundred cubits long, so the entrance is marked out by colour where everything else is white. Exodus 26:31 puts cherubims into the vail and 26:36 leaves them out of the tent door, and this gate follows the door rather than the vail.

Exodus 38:21-23

The metals given for the tabernacle are counted and the count is written into the record, taken by Ithamar under Moses' commandment. Bezaleel is named again as the man who made all that the LORD commanded, and Exodus 31:3 is the first place in Scripture that anyone is said to be filled with the Spirit of God, given for cutting stone, working metal and carving wood. He is of Judah and Aholiab is of Dan, so the work is not held by one tribe. The line about doing all that the LORD commanded Moses becomes the refrain of chapters 39 and 40, where it occurs thirteen times.

Exodus 38:24-26

The gold came in as an offering and the silver did not. Exodus 30:12-16 fixed the silver at half a shekel from every man numbered, with the rich forbidden to give more and the poor forbidden to give less, and called it a ransom for his soul. The 603,550 men counted here is the same figure Numbers 1:46 reports for the census taken about a year later.

Exodus 38:27-28

The ransom money is accounted for to the shekel and it went into the ground. A hundred talents made a hundred sockets at a talent each, ninety six under the boards of the dwelling and four under the pillars of the vail, so the frame of the tent stands on the price paid for the men who were numbered. Exodus 30:16 said the money was to be appointed for the service of the tabernacle, and this verse says which part of the service it became.

Exodus 38:29-31

The brass total closes the audit, and what it made runs from the altar down to the tent pins. The three metals of the chapter fall by distance from the ark, gold within the vail, silver at the foundations and the fittings, brass out in the court where the people stood. The last thing counted is a pin, the smallest object in the structure, entered in the record beside the altar.