Thread by @JoelBaden

#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.