Exodus40chapter 40

Exodus 40:1-2

The last chapter of Exodus opens with a date. Exodus 12:2 had made this month the beginning of months for Israel, so the tent goes up on the first day of the year that the passover created. A calendar reset at the start of the deliverance is answered here by a dwelling place standing in the middle of the camp.

Exodus 40:3-5

The order of the command runs from the inside out. The ark goes in first and the vail covers it before anything else is placed, then the table and the candlestick, then the altar of gold for the incense, then the hanging at the door. Most of what is arranged here stands in two rooms closed to everyone outside the priesthood.

Exodus 40:6-8

Outside the tent the order keeps running outward, the altar of burnt offering at the door, the laver between the altar and the tent, then the court and the hanging at its gate. A man bringing a sacrifice met these in the reverse of the order they were set up in, gate first and the door of the tent last. Exodus 27:9-19 gave that court its measure of a hundred cubits by fifty, so the whole dwelling stood inside a fence of fine twined linen.

Exodus 40:9-11

take the anointing oil, and anoint the tabernacle: The oil compounded by the recipe of Exodus 30:22-33 goes over the tent, its vessels, the altar and the laver, and what changes is the status of each thing rather than the look of it. Matthew Henry observes that each item was sanctified once it stood in its proper place, since until then it was not fit for the use it was set apart for. The altar of burnt offering is called most holy, and it is the one anointed piece standing in the open court where the people came.

Exodus 40:12-13

Aaron is washed with water, clothed in the holy garments, and anointed, in that order. Exodus 29 laid out the whole rite and this is the order to carry it out. The word anoint first occurs in Scripture at Exodus 28:41 and the word atonement at Exodus 29:33, so both arrive with the priesthood rather than with the passover seventeen chapters earlier.

Exodus 40:14-15

The sons are clothed and anointed as their father was, and the anointing is called an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations. Hebrews 7:23-24 takes up the same office and says the priests were many in number because death did not suffer them to continue. Two of the sons anointed in this verse die offering strange fire at Leviticus 10:1-2.

Exodus 40:16

One verse carries the whole report of the obedience. The phrase as the Lord commanded Moses falls fifteen times in Exodus and thirteen of them are in chapters 39 and 40. Chapter 32 sits between the instructions and the building, and the refrain in these closing chapters is the record that this time the people did what they were told.

Exodus 40:17

The date is exact, the first day of the first month in the second year. Numbers 33:3 says Israel left Rameses on the fifteenth day of the first month, so the tabernacle stands two weeks short of a year after the night of the passover. Numbers 1:1 opens one month after this verse, on the first day of the second month of the same year.

Exodus 40:18-19

The sockets go down first and everything else rests on them. Exodus 38:27 says the hundred sockets of silver were cast from the atonement money, half a shekel a man at a talent to a socket, so the frame of the dwelling place stands on ransom silver. The goats' hair tent and the coverings go over the frame, and the refrain as the Lord commanded Moses begins here and returns after each thing is put in its place.

Exodus 40:20-21

The testimony placed in the ark is the second pair of tables, cut at Exodus 34:1 and written at 34:28 after Moses broke the first at 32:19. The mercy seat goes on above it, and the Greek word the Septuagint uses for that seat is hilasterion, which is the word Romans 3:25 applies to Christ. The vail is set up to cover the ark, and Matthew 27:51 reports that curtain torn from the top to the bottom.

Exodus 40:22-23

The table stands on the north side outside the vail and Moses sets the bread on it before the Lord. Leviticus 24:5-9 gives the arrangement, twelve cakes in two rows renewed every sabbath, one loaf for each tribe of Israel. The bread is set out in a room that nobody outside the priesthood will ever see.

Exodus 40:24-25

The candlestick faces the table from the south side, and Moses lights the lamps himself. Aaron and his sons are washed and clothed in this chapter and the seven days of their consecration are carried out in Leviticus 8, so the priestly acts here fall to Moses. John Gill makes the same observation at the incense in verse 27.

Exodus 40:26-27

The golden altar stands before the vail, as near the ark as anything outside the most holy place, and Moses burns sweet incense on it. Exodus 30:34-38 gave the compound and forbade anyone to make it for his own use. Revelation 8:3-4 sets an angel at a golden altar with much incense offered with the prayers of all saints.

Exodus 40:28-29

The hanging closes the door of the tent, and the altar of burnt offering stands outside it where the blood and the smoke belong. Moses offers the burnt offering and the meat offering on it, the first sacrifice made at the finished tabernacle. Exodus 29:38-42 had set a lamb morning and evening on that altar continually, and Leviticus 6:13 orders the fire on it never to go out.

Exodus 40:30-32

The laver sits between the altar and the door, so a priest passes the place of blood and then the place of water before he goes in. Exodus 38:8 says it was made of the looking glasses of the women assembling at the door of the tabernacle, and the text gives it no measurements. The washing is repeated every time they enter the tent or come near the altar, which makes it a thing done continually rather than once.

Exodus 40:33

The sentence that closes the building is the sentence that closed creation. Genesis 2:2 says God ended his work on the seventh day, Exodus 39:32 matches Genesis 2:1 on the work being finished, and Exodus 39:43 matches Genesis 1:31 on the maker looking at all that was made. The instructions themselves came in seven divine speeches at 25:1, 30:11, 30:17, 30:22, 30:34, 31:1 and 31:12, and the seventh of them is the sabbath.

Exodus 40:34-35

At Exodus 33:18 Moses asked to be shewn the glory and was set in a cleft of the rock to see the back parts of it. Here the glory fills a tent in the middle of the camp and Moses cannot get in. The man who went into the thick darkness at 20:21 and into the cloud on the mount at 24:18 stands outside a structure he has just finished. 1 Kings 8:10-11 reports the same thing at the dedication of the temple, where the priests could not stand to minister because the cloud filled the house.

Exodus 40:36-37

The pillar that led Israel out of Egypt at Exodus 13:21 now rests on the tent and sets the pace of the camp. They move when it lifts and they stay while it stays, and the text gives no schedule and no distance. Numbers 9:15-23 works the arrangement out at length and says they kept the charge of the Lord whether the cloud stayed two days, a month or a year.

Exodus 40:38

The last picture in the book is a cloud over a tent by day and fire on it by night, where every household in Israel can see it. Exodus opened with a people made to serve Pharaoh with rigour at 1:13-14 and closes with a tent, a priesthood and an order of service, and the Hebrew root behind serve is the same at both ends. They are still in the wilderness and still short of the land promised at Genesis 15:18, and God is living in the middle of the camp. John 1:14 says the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, using the Greek verb for pitching a tent.