Thread by @JoelBaden

#Exodus 25:23-30

The table

If the ark and its cover are the place where YHWH sits, the table is...well, the place where YHWH eats and drinks. Yeah, I said it.

It’s a gold table with gold drinking vessels and you’re supposed to put bread on it. Later Jewish interpretation went to great lengths to describe how the bread was to be laid out, and changed weekly, etc., but the Bible doesn’t give us any of that.

All we know is that there is supposed to be bread and wine on the table in the inner sanctum of YHWH’s dwelling place, the Tabernacle, and for sure no one else is eating and drinking in there.

Now obviously the bread doesn’t just disappear. So we can imagine that the priests at least knew that it wasn’t being literally consumed. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t feeding the deity, or at least symbolically providing for YHWH’s sustenance.

The table is actually much closer to the idea of feeding the deity than the sacrifices are (even if they all began in the same place). The sacrifices have a totally separate function in the cult. But the table, the bread, the wine jugs - not so much.

Is it unimaginable that we humans could ever sustain God with bread and wine? Maybe to us - definitely not to ancient Israel, or the cultures surrounding it. We can make it symbolic for our own purposes, of course. But that doesn’t mean it is symbolic in the Bible.