The Tabernacle, the Creation, and the Ideal of an Orderly World

The Importance of Ritual Spaces

Jonathan Z. Smith has written poetically about the ways in which human beings create sacred space and about the relationship between ritual and sacred places:

Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention. It is a process for marking interest. …It is this fundamental characteristic…that explains the role of place as a fundamental component of ritual: place directs attention….[This] understanding of ritual is best illustrated by the case of built ritual environments—most especially crafted constructions such as Temples. When one enters a Temple, one enters marked-off space…in which, at least in principle, nothing is accidental; everything, at least potentially, demands attention. The Temple serves as a focusing lens, establishing the possibility of significance by directing attention, by requiring the perception of difference.^[1]

Sacred spaces, Smith stresses, are built and constructed, not inherently sacred. Further, with their power to mark difference, to facilitate ritual, and ultimately to push ritualists to pay attention and become aware of the significance of the space, sacred places—whether physical or even just imagined—tend to hold deep cultural meaning.^[2]

In what follows, I would like to consider what the Tabernacle, as a textually constructed sacred space, may have meant to the ancient Israelites.^[3] Drawing, in particular, on the literary relationship in the text between the construction of the Tabernacle and the first creation story of the world in the beginning of Genesis, I would like to suggest that central to the conception of the Tabernacle as sacred place was a fundamental idea about order in the world.

Tabernacle—Creation

Interpreters have long noticed explicit literary connections between the creation of the mishkan, or, Tabernacle in Exodus 25–40 and the creation of the world in Genesis 1–2. Most strikingly, as Nahum Sarna puts it, “the account of the construction of the Tabernacle is …laced with phrases and expressions that unmistakably echo the Genesis creation story.”^[4]

A possible extension of this parallel has been suggested by Peter Kearney, who shows that the first section dealing with the Tabernacle before the sin of the golden calf, Exodus 25–31, has been constructed in seven parts, with each section marked by new announcements of God speaking to Moses (“And God spoke to Moses…”). The seventh of these sections is the command to observe the Sabbath in Exodus 31:13–17.^[5] The first exposition of the Tabernacle’s making, in Kearney’s analysis, mirrors the seven-day structure of Genesis 1:1–2:3, which also culminates in the Sabbath.

In multiple ways, then, the biblical accounts of Tabernacle’s construction create literary linkages with the account of creation at the beginning of Genesis. These connections provide one important interpretive key to what made the Tabernacle meaningful as a sacred space in the ancient Israelite understanding.

The Centrality of Order

Order in Creation

This connection between Tabernacle and creation suggests the centrality of the concept of order. As has often been pointed out in biblical scholarship, the six days of creation in Genesis 1 unfold in an extremely orderly manner. The repeated language each day, “God said…Let there be…It was so…God saw…God called…it was evening and it was morning…,” even with the variations that exist between days, highlights the regularity of the process and the high degree of structure in the created world.

As parts of the world are separated and created, it becomes more and more clear that there are distinctive types or parts of the world, each with its own place: light and darkness; land and sky; water, air, and dry land; types of living things in the water, air, and land; types of vegetation; male and female.

The structuring of the six days of creation into two symmetrical parts, as can be seen in the chart on page 12 of the Jewish Study Bible, further underscores the order that exists in the universe as it comes into being: lights (sun, moon, stars of day 4) parallel light (day 1); fish and birds (day 6) fill the sky and the waters separated from the sky (day 2); and land animals and humans fill and consume the land and plants (day 3).^[6] In the creation, God sets each element in its proper place and into a well-structured system of spaces, objects, and beings; God organizes the universe into an ordered place.

Order in Sacrifices

The ritual that takes place in the Tabernacle—typical of many types of ritual—is also structured and orderly. The calendrical regularity and rule-governed precise repetition of the sacrifices can be seen in particular in Numbers 28–29, where the repetitive language and organization of the passages highlights these features of the rituals. To a lesser degree, the same features of regular repetition, structure, and order, appear in the description of the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16.^[7]

The structure and order associated with Tabernacle sacrificial ritual may be related to the affirmation of power and power structures in Ancient Israel. The ritual events in the Tabernacle—and later Temple—may have served the political interests of Priests, Levites, and other leaders, such as the tribal heads, who are mentioned in the orderly and structured passages in Numbers 7, among others. But I believe there is more to the idea of order embedded in the structure and ritual of the Tabernacle.

Ordering Our Environment

In her classic work on ritual and purity, Purity and Danger, the British anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that rituals of purity and impurity, like the effort to remove dirt, are “positive efforts[s] to organize the environment,” or a “re-ordering [of] our environment.”^[8] Perhaps this idea can be extended to the Tabernacle and the ritual it houses—not only rituals of purity and impurity but all of its ritual. The Tabernacle can be seen as a place of ritualized order, which mirrors the orderliness of the created universe.

These ordered worlds, that the Torah describes as having existed in the initial moments of time and subsequently in the Tabernacle, are not real—they are imagined. As Jonathan Z. Smith writes, “ritual represents a controlled environment where the variables (i.e. accidents) of ordinary life have been displaced…ritual is a way of performing the way things ought to be.”^[9] While Smith does not spell this out explicitly, he implies that “marked-off” sacred space can be a focal point for the ideal, for the way things ought to be, or as Adam Seligman et al. put it, for the “subjunctive universe” created by ritual.^[10]

The real world is a complex, chaotic place. The Tabernacle in part represents the perfect orderliness that for many people is the way the world “ought to be.” It is a place that captures the primal organization of the world when first created by God in seven days. The ritualized, rule-bound, repeated, formal, and invariant quality of the ritual performed there helps create this subjunctive “as-if” idealized orderly world within the Israelite sacred space.^[11]

The Implied Message of the Tabernacle

The ideal orderliness of the universe to which the Tabernacle is connected may suggest further nuances to what the Tabernacle as sacred place represented and meant to ancient Israelites. If God who creates such an ordered universe is majestic and all-powerful, the Israelite sacred space recalls and highlights these characteristics and perhaps imbues the people as a whole with some part of the divine qualities.^[12] Moreover, the connection to the universal cosmos hints at the far-ranging importance of the Israelite sacred place, its worship, and the people who worship there: these are the fulfillment of the creation of the entire world.

Beyond indicating the importance of the people of Israel, each of these qualities may have a prayerful purpose as well: to remind God of the cosmological centrality of Israel and to entreat God to exercise divine power and majesty and fulfill the biblical covenantal promises of protection and blessing.

Finally, as Nahum Sarna points out, the construction of the Tabernacle on the first day of the first month—the New Year—may indicate its meaning as a site for re-creation.^[13] The Tabernacle (and later the Temple) and the rituals conducted there, in Sarna’s words, “afforded every Israelite the possibility of spiritual renewal and moral regeneration.”^[14]

Orderly Space and an Ideal World

The world was and indeed is a morally and spiritually complicated place. It is filled with chaos, evil, ambiguity, and often an absence of control. The possibility for renewal, for harkening back to the ideal orderliness of creation, and for establishing God’s power and majesty provide an opportunity to escape from the problems of the world into the real or imagined orderly sacred place. Such an ideal world was likely meaningful for our ancient Israelite ancestors and can perhaps be meaningful in a similar way for us today.