The Erection of the Tabernacle

Make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them—the purpose of the Tabernacle was not a house for God but a place where presence becomes tangible. The people donated gold, silver, copper, wool, goat hair, skins, acacia wood and precious stones; women spun the goat hair on the animals themselves. The gifts came so freely that Moses had to issue the only recorded ban on giving. The work was directed by Bezalel of Judah and Oholiab of Dan, men filled with a divine spirit of wisdom, understanding, knowledge and craft. The structure had a courtyard with a copper altar and laver, a Holy Place with the menorah, the table of showbread and the golden incense altar, and the Holy of Holies with the Ark and the tablets. Everything could be dismantled. On the first of Nisan, 2449, exactly a year after the first Passover, it was erected, the cloud covered it and the divine glory filled it. That same day Aaron's sons Nadav and Avihu died bringing strange fire, and Aaron was silent.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.