The Tabernacle
The Tabernacle, the Creation, and the Ideal of an Orderly World
The account of the Tabernacle’s construction echoes the creation story in Genesis 1-2:4a, providing an interpretive key to the ancient understanding of this structure. Ritual theory provides further insight into what Israelite readers may have found meaningful about the Tabernacle as a ritual place.
Published: March 8, 2015
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 104.
Smith, throughout To Take Place, focuses on thoughts, but ritual places and rituals acts impact emotions and bodies as well, and this contributes further to the cultural importance of sacred spaces.
My analysis does not presume that the Tabernacle corresponds in a simple way with any of the Israelite sacred places, but I believe that the textual descriptions are suggestive of what early sanctuaries and possibly the (first) Temple meant as physical spaces to the ancient Israelites.
Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel (New York: Schocken, 1986), 213. See references to earlier scholarship there. And note that the second and possibly first of these connections is pointed out in the midrash in Tanhuma Pekudei (standard edition, section 2; see also Bemidbar Rabbah 12:13). Here I do not touch on the wider connection between the Tabernacle and the Sabbath, noted by the early rabbis (Mekhilta Shabbata 2; Mishnah Shabbat 11:2, 12:3).
Peter J. Kearney, “Creation and Liturgy: The P Redaction of Exod 25–40,” Zeitscrhift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 89 (1977): 375–87. The sections are as follows: (1) Exod 25:1–30:10; (2) Exod 30:11–16; (3) Exod 30:17–21; (4) Exod 30:22–33; (5) Exod 30:34–38; (6) Exod 31:1–12; (7) Exod 31:13–17. These seven speech acts made to command the Tabernacle’s construction thus mirror the speech acts that shape the seven days of creation, though the language is not identical. Kearney’s observation is somewhat reminiscent of the move in Midrash Tanhuma to connect each of the seven days of creation with elements of the Tabernacle and language used to describe the elements.
Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12. For earlier scholarship demonstrating this point, see for instance, Bernhard W. Anderson, “A Stylistic Study of the Priestly Creation Story,” in Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 148–62.
For more on the significance of repetition in the description of the Tabernacle, see Amy Cooper-Robertson’s TABS essay, “Repetition and the Tabernacle: Eternity in the Face of Change.”
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2–3.
Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” History of Religions 20 (1980): 124–25. This essay is also published in idem, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 53–65.
Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.
Ritualization and the qualities of ritual I mention are highlighted by Catherine Bell in Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 138–69.
These ways of thinking of the orderly creation are discussed—and significantly complicated—in Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Note that in the Bible, this means our month of Nissan, not Tishrei. As the first month, it is by definition the start of the year.
Sarna, Exploring Exodus, 214.
