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26 Apr, 33 tweets, 8 min read
Time for a summary thread, since we got all the way through the Tabernacle instructions (in one piece, no less). So if you're just tuning in or catching up, here's the last recap of where we've been:
Exodus 24:1-11
Exodus 24:12-14
Exodus 24:15-18
Exodus 25:1-9
Exodus 25:10-17
Exodus 25:17-22
Exodus 25:23-30
Exodus 25:31-40
Exodus 26:1-30
Exodus 26:31-37
Exodus 27:1-8
Exodus 27:9-19
Exodus 27:20-21
Exodus 28:1-5
Exodus 28:6-12
Exodus 28:13-30
Exodus 28:31-35
Exodus 28:36-38
Exodus 28:39-42
Exodus 29:1-9
Exodus 29:10-28
Exodus 29:29-37
Exodus 29:38-42a
Exodus 29:42b-46
Exodus 30:1-10
Exodus 30:11-16
Exodus 30:17-21
Exodus 30:22-33
Exodus 30:34-38
Exodus 31:1-11
Exodus 31:12-17
Exodus 31:18

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More from @JoelBaden

Joel Baden Profile picture
27 Apr
#Exodus 32:1-6

The golden calf

Let’s get the story straight here:

Despite what you may have heard or read, the sin of the golden calf was not idolatry or apostasy.

Come and see.
What is it that prompts the people to make the calf? It’s not the absence of YHWH, who was never just hanging around the camp anyway. It’s the absence of Moses - without whom their access to the deity is eliminated. They don’t need a new god - YHWH hasn’t changed.
What they need is a new conduit to the deity. Specifically, they’re stuck in the middle of the wilderness and need someone, or something, to lead them through. We don’t know what happened to Moses, they say. You don’t replace Moses with a different god. They didn’t worship him.
Read 16 tweets
Joel Baden Profile picture
25 Apr
The amount of pushback I’ve gotten on this raises maybe a more interesting question for me:

Why are people so invested in this as an idea at all?
It’s not that it’s “true” - truth hasn’t got anything to do with this, that’s a category error. So the question I think has to be the classic cui bono - who benefits?
Seems to me that the commitment to the idea stems from some desire to identify with the other “Abrahamic” faiths - but why? For increased tolerance? If you require some shared faith commitment to be tolerant, or kind, or decent, or caring, then you’re an asshole.
Read 4 tweets
Joel Baden Profile picture
25 Apr
Here’s a hot take:

The oft-repeated claim that, despite our differences, Jews and Christians “all believe in the same god” is yet another ostensibly banal but actually deeply insidious token of Christian supersessionism.
Like “Judeo-Christian values” and much other “interfaith” language, it is designed to eradicate the ongoing distinctiveness of Judaism as a lived religion standing alongside, and separate from, Christianity.
It subsumes Judaism under a fundamentally Christian rubric of faith, relegating all of Judaism’s particularities to mere by-products of some essential core, which just happens to be identical to Christianity.
Read 11 tweets
Joel Baden Profile picture
22 Apr
#Exodus 31:12-17

Sabbath

Why does P feel the need to put the sabbath law here? (We might actually ask why P has a sabbath law at all, if we were being cheeky, but I’ll let it slide.) But why here, in the Tabernacle blueprint section?
The rabbinic-style answer would be that here all Israel is working at building the Tabernacle, so they need to know to stop on the seventh day. Which is also why the categories of work forbidden on Shabbat are aligned with those needed to build the Tabernacle.
There’s something to that - at least, the sense that this is an all-Israel venture, and the sabbath is too, while the ritual laws to come in Leviticus are almost entirely about individuals.
Read 9 tweets
Joel Baden Profile picture
21 Apr
#Exodus 31:1-11

Bezalel

This is really just a long-ish section of YHWH telling Moses that a couple of dudes, Bezalel and Oholiab, are going to be the lead craftsmen for the Tabernacle, with help from whoever is similarly gifted. My question is: who is Bezalel?
I don’t mean in the narrative world: we get his full two-generation genealogy and his tribal affiliation, and we know what his function in the story is. I mean more like, where did he come from in the tradition?
He’s known only to P, which is sensible, since only P has the whole Tabernacle thing. But where does P get the name, the genealogy, the tribal affiliation? Is it just invented entirely? Is it some old tradition among the priests? Was the name written in graffiti on the altar?
Read 5 tweets
Joel Baden Profile picture
29 Mar
#Exodus 27:1-8

The sacrificial altar

For the center of activity in the Tabernacle, the altar doesn't get any special attention here - fewer verses devoted to it than to the court in the next section, for example. And there are aspects of it here that, well, don't matter much.
Why does it need to have a mesh grating? I don't know. It just does, okay? The poles and the hollowness - well, those are for carrying the thing, but they have no other function.
All of this just to say: what we're doing here is describing the objects in the Tabernacle - bringing them solidly into the mind of the reader. There's going to be chapters and chapters of what to do with them, especially with this one.
Read 4 tweets

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