Lecture

In this sixteenth lecture, we begin our study with the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 21–24. Then we shall go on to the building of the tabernacle, which takes up the rest of Exodus 25–40.

The Book of the Covenant is largely a brief code of civil laws based on the moral law of the Ten Commandments. Of course, we remember that there are other civil codes scattered through other parts of the Pentateuch, and as we have said before, the attitude toward civil code in the ancient times of Israel was that here we have examples for the judges to administer justice and not a complete book covering all particular instances. But there are quite a few instances and examples of different types of crime that are mentioned here in Exodus 21 and following.

They begin with a word about the limitations of slavery and then the code goes on with consideration of murder, manslaughter, assault and battery, criminal negligence, theft, seduction, loans, usury, and so on in connection with loans. Then in the last part of the Book of the Covenant, there are also some rules for the national religious festivals. Our remarks on these, of course, must be very brief.

To begin with, we have the subject of slavery in chapter 21. It says, “If you buy a Hebrew servants, six years he shall serve and in the seventh, he shall go out free for nothing.” Notice that we have here, of course, a limitation of slavery. Slavery was not abolished in the Mosaic Code. There are other things too that we recognize as wrong that were not abolished in the practical life of ancient Israel. The world was not ready perhaps for the total abolition, and yet these bad social practices were indeed regulated, so the worse results of these social practices were not a hardship for the children of Israel.

Christ refers to this in connection with the matter of divorce, and I think the terminology that Christ uses with respect to divorce can also be applied to polygamy and to slavery. He says that divorce was permitted “for the hardness of your hearts.” He does not say that it was ideal; indeed, He says that God gave us monogamy at the beginning with one man and one wife in perpetual union, but that for the hardness of their hearts in the actual civil code of ancient Israel, all the abuses of society were not abolished. But they were controlled as much as was practical in the real situation of life, and so it was with slavery. The Hebrew slave actually was not much different from the seven-year indentured servant of the early colonies. A man would sell himself for seven years in order to get the price of the trip across the Atlantic in the early colonies. Then he would be given his freedom after the seven years of labor. It was the same way with the Hebrew situation. If a man was very bad off financially, he could sell himself or he could even sell his family. The whole family would be slaves for a while, but then they would be released in the seventh year, the Sabbatical year of ancient Israel.

There was a case where a slave would have a wife given to him by a master, and if he would go free, his wife who was the master’s property would not go free with him. He might well prefer to stay in the service of the master and with the wife, in which case he would be a voluntary and perpetual servant; this was allowed also. It would amount—in a good society with a kind master—it would amount more or less to a permanent job, simply for one’s keep. But the slaves in ancient Israel had rights of their own, and these rights are specified in the Mosaic Code. So although we may indeed feel that the institution of slavery is not good; nonetheless, there would have been possible a kind of beneficent slavery to a limited degree, and this apparently is what was allowed in ancient Israel, though we must not feel that there was an extensive use of this slavery either. It depended on the circumstances.

There is the law against murder in chapter 21, verse 12. It’s very clear “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.” But murder is distinguished from manslaughter in the next verse, “If a man does not lie in wait, but God delivers him into his hand.” That is to say if it’s an accidental death; what we would call an act of God in modern legal parliaments, then the man who was guilty of manslaughter should “flee to a City of Refuge,” and there he would be safe. And if his accuser would come and demand that the people of the City of Refuge, the elders of the city, would give him up before a trial. He would be tried, and if it turned out that it was actually murder, the man would be executed. If on the other hand, it turned out that it was an accidental killing, it was really manslaughter. Then the man would be protected in the City of Refuge and the avenger of blood, which is the Hebrew name for the near of kin who would do the executing, would not be able to touch him in the City of Refuge.

There is the law against murder in chapter 21, verse 12. It’s very clear “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.” But murder is distinguished from manslaughter in the next verse, “If a man does not lie in wait, but God delivers him into his hand.” That is to say if it’s an accidental death; what we would call an act of God in modern legal parliaments, then the man who was guilty of manslaughter should “flee to a City of Refuge,” and there he would be safe. And if his accuser would come and demand that the people of the City of Refuge, the elders of the city, would give him up before a trial. He would be tried, and if it turned out that it was actually murder, the man would be executed. If on the other hand, it turned out that it was an accidental killing, it was really manslaughter. Then the man would be protected in the City of Refuge and the avenger of blood, which is the Hebrew name for the near of kin who would do the executing, would not be able to touch him in the City of Refuge.

The Cities of Refuge are not named in chapter 21 of Exodus because the Children of Israel were not yet that near to enter the land of Canaan. They are mentioned again in Numbers 35. The statement is made that they should appoint six Cities of Refuge, three in Transjordan and three in Palestine proper. Then in Deuteronomy 4, after the conquest of Transjordan, the names of the three Cities of Refuge that were in Transjordan are given. Then in Joshua 20 after the conquest of the land of Palestine proper, there the names of all six Cities of Refuge are given. So we find a regular progression with regard to the Cities of Refuge, which is just what you would expect if these chapters were written in the way the Bible says they were by Moses through these years.

There are laws also for assault and battery. “If men strive together and one smite another with a stone or with a fist and he die not, but keepeth his bed, if he rise again and walk abroad upon his staff, he that smote him shall be clear.” That is to say, if a person kills a man in a fight, that is murder and the man who killed the injured person is guilty of murder and would be executed. If on the other hand in a fight, one man was wounded and did not die for a while, then the person who hit him would not be guilty of murder. If he died two or three days later, it might have been because of the fight or it might have been from natural causes, and the man who hit him would not be guilty of murder. He would, however, be guilty of assault and battery and would have to pay damages. The Hebrew system of jurisprudence included two things. It included the idea that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent. This is not the American system. This is more like the English system. In America, we say a man is innocent until he’s proved guilty. The Hebrew had it as the English do, that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent.

Also there was very little constraint on people by means of prisons. In the wilderness, of course, they had no prisons. In the later days during the Monarchy, there were some people imprisoned, apparently largely for political offenses. But in the wilderness journeying, the penalties given are mainly fines.

There are laws concerning theft. If a person breaks into a house and he is killed by the owner while he is breaking in, the owner is guiltless because he killed the man in self-defense. However, the penalty for thievery is not capital punishment, but he should pay a fine. This is given in chapter 22.

With regard to seduction, it says in chapter 22, verse 16, “If a man entices a maid that is not betrothed,” there the penalty is that they should get married. The penalty for adultery was death, but here is a case of a couple that are not married, neither of them, and they should get married is the teaching in chapter 22, verse 16.

Verse 18 is a famous one, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” It is on the basis of this verse that there were witch burnings in Massachusetts and more of them in England. This verse should be understood differently. Massachusetts had no right to give civil penalties for these religious offenses. But a witch in the meaning here of this verse was not one who would put a hex on somebody, but a person who was a necromancer and practitioner of a heathen religion. And heathen religions were just not allowed in ancient Israel.

There is also a rule for loans, and we could spend a good bit a time on these, but must not do so. If a person of the Hebrews was poor, you should not lend money to him. You should give him what he needs. It was proper in certain cases to give a loan. It says, “you shall not take the neighbor’s raiment to pledge overnight.” Now this doesn’t mean that the loan only lasted for twenty-four hours. I think it probably means that the garment or pledge or some token was taken from the house and shown to the judges as a legal instrument where the loan was more or less recorded. Then the pledge would be taken back to the man, and the loan of course would be paid in due time.

There were three feasts that are specified in chapter 23. These are the three Pilgrimage Festivals in chapter 23, verse 14. They are mentioned again in Leviticus 23, in Numbers 28 and 29, and in Deuteronomy 16. These three religious festivals would be the Passover, which is called the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Then seven weeks after that would be the Feast of Wheat Harvest, which is called here the Feast of Harvest and sometimes called the Feast of Weeks, and that is also called Pentecost. Then in the fall of the year, the September festivals would be the fruit harvest. The seventh month was called Tishrei in some of the Hebrew enumerations, and that was the feast of ingathering of the olives and the grapes and so on. There were seven days of living in booths during the Feast of Booths.

Now we turn to the building of the tabernacle. In chapter 24 and following, God said to Moses, “Come up unto the mount unto the Lord,” and Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu came up part of the way and seventy elders of the Children of Israel, and worshiped afar off. Then Moses went up to the top of the mountain and there the Lord gave him in forty days a wonderful intimate experience of face-to-face speaking of God with man. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, which we have been speaking of, and the Book of the Covenant, the laws of Israel, and also gave instructions for establishing the worship of Israel. I think it is helpful for us to realize that the Children of Israel had worshiped God before. We have read in Genesis how Abraham built an altar here and there and worshiped the Lord and so did Isaac and Jacob, and before that Noah and on back to Cain. Cain, of course, worshiped wrongly, but Abel worshiped with sacrifice as the Children of Israel did years later at the tabernacle.

It was all right for Abraham with his family situation and small entourage to worship the Lord in altars wherever he was. On the other hand, now there were some two million people, and the Lord told Moses to arrange an institutionalized worship. Therefore, God gave Moses instructions as to who was to build a tabernacle that would be meaningful and to arrange a system of sacrifices that would be typical. God also gave instruction to put this all in the hands of a priesthood that would be able to instruct the people and lead them in the worship of God.

The tabernacle is a very interesting building. It was indeed a moveable sanctuary. I may remark that critical scholars for some years have said that there was no tabernacle. One of the older critical scholars, Cornell, had the idea that the tabernacle was made up in times after the exile by the people who wrote the P document that we have referred to. The theory was there had been a temple of Solomon and if they had invented a story about Moses leading the Children of Israel across the wilderness, then why couldn’t you have the temple of Solomon? He must have had a moveable structure something like the temple of Solomon. Cornell remarks that with somewhat “contemptable acumen,” the P author invented the tabernacle. I was never able to understand why this acumen of the P author was so contemptable. When he made up the instructions for the building of the tabernacle, it seems to me it would take rather a smart man to do all this.

Actually, Cornell did not know it, but in later years we have found a structure in Egypt very, very similar to the architecture of the tabernacle, which indeed argues that the P document, which includes the building of the tabernacle, was original in ancient. This was not an invention of the post-exilic mind as the critics have sometimes said, but that this is actually what happened. It’s much easier to believe it just as Moses writes it rather than to argue for this strange invention by a later person for no good reason at all.

The structure that I refer to that is similar to the tabernacle is the one that is in the tomb of King Tut, which I have mentioned already. It is on display in the Cairo Museum. It was a small chapel. I suppose we could call it a tabernacle. This small chapel inside the tomb was made demountable so that it could be carried in and out and set up. It has boards on the four sides and these boards are made in framework. They are not solid boards, but they’re more like the boards that you would use or the frames that you would use in building a screen porch. These panels, however, are put together in the tomb of King Tut by sliding bolts, just as the Bible says the boards were of the tabernacle. They’re covered with gold leaf just as the boards of the tabernacle were, and on a stool beside this structure in the case in the museum, there is a folded linen curtain decorated with gold rosettes. This linen curtain was thrown over the whole structure just as the curtains of the tabernacle were thrown over the whole structure.

So God told Moses to make the tabernacle this way. It was to be ten cubits wide and the rear room would be ten cubits long and ten cubits high. The front room, separated from the rear room by curtains, would be twice as long, but the same width and height, which would make the whole structure thirty cubits long.

There were foundation pieces made of silver and these silver sockets would be laid out on the sand in a row, each socket weighing one talent. That is seventy-five pounds of silver, and the holes in these silver sockets would have the tenons in the bottom of these frames set in those sockets. The different frames would be brought together by bars and over the whole structure curtains would be thrown. These curtains were attached to each other by loops and toggles. They didn’t have exactly what we have as buttons, but it was the same idea. These curtains were four cubits wide. This is the standard width of the Egyptian loom on which the cloth would have been made in those days, so the tabernacle structure was made ten cubits wide, ten cubits high, and thirty cubits long. A cubit is about a foot and a half.

As the boards were set up all the way around, the corner boards would give some solidity to the structure too. Probably these boards were also kept in place with ropes and pegs as tents are. There were four layers of curtains over the structure. The inside layer was very rich and was embroidered with golden cherubim. Then there was another layer of curtains, and the last layer outside was made out of skins. We’re not sure whether the skins were from a sea creature called dugong or whether it was the skins of animals. The word in Hebrew is not too clear. Also, it is not clear whether these skins were thrown over so that the whole structure would look like a cube or whether it looked like a tent with a ridge pole. There was no mention of a ridge pole, and this would be against that conception. To shed water, of course, it would have been rather natural to have the inside curtains draped over the tabernacle so that inside there would be a reasonably flat ceiling. On the other hand, the outside curtains, made of leather, may indeed have been in tent form so as to shed water. But, of course, remember they were using this in the desert and rain was extremely rare; it is probable that it was not the tent form. At least there is no ridge pole referred to, and so we may suppose that it was more or less rectangular in shape and that the roof would have been flat just like the Palestinian houses, which had flat roofs.

The meaning of the structure is shown by the furniture in it. The inside room, the rear room, was called the debir or shrine and in it nothing was found but the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant of gold had the tables of the covenant. The tables of the testimony overshadowed the Mercy Seat with cherubim. The word Mercy Seat really there means “atonement place,” and is used in the Greek form in the New Testament for Christ in Romans where it says that Christ “has become a propitiation for us.” This is the word that is used for this place where the blood was sprinkled on the Day of Atonement in the tabernacle of ancient Israel.

Only the priests would go into the tabernacle. The people worshiped outside. There were no pews there. No one went inside. The priests went inside the first room, and the high priest alone was inside the inner room. This showed that God is difficult to access. God is holy. We cannot just rush into God. There is no way to get to God except through the prescribed methods of worship.

The tabernacle was all of gold, signifying the preciousness and glory of God. Some of the curtains were made of the blue cloth. The blue cloth that was at least like it if it wasn’t the actual material of the Phoenician dye, which was so very expensive and used only for royal clothing. Blue was the color of royalty. God was the king, eternal, immortal, invisible, and it was to be approached only in certain ways.

In the outside room, there were three items of furniture. There was the table on the right-hand side as you enter, which was the place where the priests’ meal offerings—bread or cakes—were presented there, and this was the offering of the priests themselves. Then on the left was a candlestick, the seven-branched lampstand. They did not use candles, but little oil lamps. The form of this lampstand is familiar. On each of the seven different branches, there would be a little oil lamp, but this oil lamp would be saucer-shaped and made of gold. The ordinary everyday lamps were made of clay and are found in all the Palestinian diggings. But these would be special of course, and they would be trimmed and would burn all through the day, but not at night. The tabernacle was thus given some light, and according to Zechariah 4 where the prophets see a vision of this lampstand, there is a question by the prophet, “What does this mean?” And the angel says, “Do you not know?” and he say, “No, my lord.” And the angel says “This means that you will build the temple of the Lord not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit.” I take it that these verses in Zechariah 4 imply that the seven-branch candlestick is symbolic of the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, in His seven-fold perfections. But it was made in a unit; it was one talent of solid gold hammered into shape, and there the symbol of the Holy Spirit stood in the very center of the tabernacle of God. There was also an altar of incense for prayer and worship at the far end of this outside room.

So here are the central parts of the tabernacle, and the furniture that was inside. Of course, this was not all because there was furniture outside. Outside the tabernacle there was a court set apart by curtains. Within this court the people would gather, the work of the priests would be done, the animals would be killed, and in front of the tabernacle there were two other items of furniture. There was the great brazen altar. This altar was wood sheaved with brass, and it had a heavy brass grate so that it would really be kind of a chimney, and the fire would burn brightly on this altar. This was the altar of burnt offering. Every morning a lamb was offered as burnt offering, and every night another at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice before the sun went down. This was a sacrifice for all Israel and it was to go perpetually. The fire was always burning on the altar.

Other offerings were made on this altar from time to time, and the book of Leviticus tells about these offerings. We shall give them in some detail as we turn to the book of Leviticus. The priests officiated at the altar, the animals were sacrificed, and the blood of the animals was given special treatment, because the principle is that life is in the blood and the animals were given in substitutionary atonement of life. So the worshiper came in, offered his animals and various types of offerings, and with prayer consecrated himself to the Lord, asked for forgiveness for sins of the past, and worshiped there in fellowship with God.

Not only was there the altar of burnt offering, but also there was the laver. The laver was a large basin, and, of course, a good bit of water was necessary for handling all the sacrifices. The priests would wash there. Wash their hands; wash the offerings. And so there was the laver of cleansing. And outside the temple, therefore, one approached God through the priesthood. But they approached God with blood sacrifices and there the blood paid the price. The person was cleansed and the priest then entered the tabernacle and prayed for the worshiper who stood outside. This was the institutionalized worship of ancient Israel, and the people came, not every Sabbath, they did not travel on the Sabbath; they came three times a year. Of course, in later times they lived quite a distance away and would come only occasionally. But the priests ministered daily for the people before God.

The directions for the giving the tabernacle are given in Exodus 25 to 31. When Moses came down and he saw the great sin of the golden calf, he saw Aaron and others dancing before the golden calf; they turned away quickly and God judged Aaron and the people for this apostasy. Moses called “Who is on the Lord’s side?” The tribe of Levi came to Moses’s side and God through Moses sent them through the camp to kill those who had turned aside so quickly from the Lord’s way. After this apostasy and things were straightened out, then Moses went back up the mountain and pled with God not to destroy the Children of Israel. In Exodus 34:6, there is the great passage where God proclaimed His name before Moses, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” A declaration of the goodness of God, which is quoted several times in other passages of the Old Testament. And here Moses got the Ten Commandments given to him again and went down after another forty days and nights and supervised the construction of the tabernacle. The last part of Exodus tells how it was all set up, and then at the end of Exodus after the tabernacle was set up. It says that “The glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle and God was pleased, and the worship of Israel was established and the priests then began their ministry as being ordained, as it is said in the early chapters of Leviticus, to which we turn next.