#Exodus 38:21-31

A little accounting

It’s not that lists and numbers and adding are foreign to the priestly story - far from it - but this section seems, to my eye at least, patently a later insertion. It both interrupts and contradicts its context.
At the beginning of the construction section, the Israelites were to bring all of their materials to make all the Tabernacle stuff. But here we’re getting an accounting before they’re done - they haven’t made the priestly garments yet.
You might say, sure, but they’ve made all the stuff that uses the precious metals, so that’s why this is here. But they haven’t, actually: the priestly garments require gold too, plenty of it.
Then there’s the question of where the gold and silver and copper come from. The gold was from an “elevation offering” (35:22), as here. The silver and copper, though, were from gifts (35:24). In our passage, those two metals come from different sources:
The copper is also said to come from an elevation offering, even though there is no copper elevation offering; and the silver is said to come from the half-shekel census ransom from back in 30:11-16. And that causes at least two problems.
First, it ignores the gifts of silver that the Israelites are said to have brought in 35:24. Worse, though, is that...the census hasn’t happened yet. That won’t happen until the beginning of Numbers, which is where we get the number 603,550 from.
And back in Exodus 30, while the half-shekel for the census is supposed to be given to the sanctuary, it’s not at all clear that it was actually intended for the initial construction of the Tabernacle. It seemed more like a regular thing: whenever you take a census.
Even if it was meant to be for this, the order of events precludes the possibility. All of which to say, I think this passage is, let’s say, spurious at best. Though we can see that it’s trying to fit in: again emphasizing everyone’s participation in the construction.

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More from @JoelBaden

23 May
In much of “Western” thought, it is standard, to the point of barely noticeable, to describe monotheism as an “advance” over polytheism - as “enlightened,” or “superior,” etc. As if the natural course of human development leads naturally to monotheism.

I think this is nonsense.
I saw it just the other day in a recent essay on the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, often considered the first monotheist: the author asks, “Was the king an enlightened religious leader?” as if monotheism is self-evidently enlightened.
It’s natural enough: we are monotheists, we are descended from monotheistic traditions, traditions that replaced polytheism with monotheism, so naturally we think ourselves to be enlightened, and monotheism to be the advanced state of being.
Read 12 tweets
21 May
#Exodus 37:1-38:20

Bezalel gets to work

Here we have the long description of everything that Bezalel, master craftsman, made for the Tabernacle. Which is to say, all the good stuff, basically in descending order of awesomeness. (Okay, holiness.)
He starts with the ark, which resides in the innermost sanctum; then the table and the menorah and the incense altar, which are in the chamber just outside the ark. All of these are made of gold, which signals their status and sanctity.
Then it's on to the copper stuff outside the sanctum, in the courtyard: the altar for burnt offerings and the wash basin. And here we encounter what is decidedly one of the weirdest details in the whole thing: the wash basin and its stand are made from...women's mirrors?
Read 5 tweets
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
26 Apr
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:
Read 33 tweets
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
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

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