The Gold Incense Altar: Activating the Tabernacle in Meditatio

The Tabernacle instructions (Exod 25–30) move in a precise and orderly fashion—inside to outside. They begin with the ark, which is to be placed inside the Holy of Holies—the inner-most space—followed by the table and the menorah, the other items inside the Tabernacle (ch. 25).

The instructions then move to the construction to the Tabernacle structure itself (ch. 26), the bronze altar which stands outside the Tabernacle structure, and the courtyard (ch. 27). Then the text turns to the priestly vestments (ch. 28), followed by the ordination of the priests and the institution of the regular offering (ch. 29).

At this point, we appear to be finished receiving instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle, its furnishings, its staff, and the regular offering—everything you’d need to get started on day one. It thus ends with a statement suggesting that God is ready to do God’s part:

^{שמות כט:מד} וְקִדַּשְׁתִּי אֶת אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד וְאֶת הַמִּזְבֵּחַ וְאֶת אַהֲרֹן וְאֶת בָּנָיו אֲקַדֵּשׁ לְכַהֵן לִי. ^כט:מה וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְהָיִיתִי לָהֶם לֵאלֹהִים.

^{Exod 29:44} I will sanctify the Tent of Meeting and the altar, and I will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve Me as priests. ^29:45 I will abide among the Israelites, and I will be their God.

Even more strongly marking that we’ve reached the end of this section, the text then zooms way out from the details with which it has been occupied, and reminds us of the much bigger picture: YHWH’s bringing the Israelites out of Egypt:

^כט:מו וְיָדְעוּ כִּי אֲנִי יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֵיהֶם אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִי אֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לְשָׁכְנִי בְתוֹכָם אֲנִי יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֵיהֶם.

^29:46 And they shall know that I YHWH am their God, who brought them out from the land of Egypt that I might abide among them, I YHWH their God.

This is the only such reference in the entirety of the Tabernacle instructions, and clearly punctuates the section that precedes it. The text is ready to move on… or so it would seem.

The Out-of-Place Incense Altar

In fact, the text does not move on, but circles back to describe the incense altar, which is located inside the holy space of the Tabernacle, along with the table and the lampstand, which were described in chapter 25. Why wasn’t the incense altar described alongside them in the text? Why would the instructions double back in this way? This problem was already noted by R. Moses Nahmanides (Ramban ca. 1195–ca. 1270):

^{רמב"ן שמות ל:א} "ועשית מזבח מקטר קטרת" – הנה מזבח הקטרת מן הכלים הפנימיים היה, ראוי שיזכירנו עם השלחן והמנורה שהוא מונח עמהם, וכן הזכירם במעשה בפרשת ויקהל (שמות לז:כה).

^{Nahmanides Exod 30:1} “You shall make an altar on which to offer incense”—the incense altar is one of the implements that is found inside [the Tabernacle], so it would have been fitting to mention it with the table and the lampstand, with which it was placed, and this is where they are mentioned in the construction [of the Tabernacle] in Parashat Vayakhel (Exod 37:25).

Notably, in both the Samaritan Pentateuch and 4QpaleoExod^m, this text appears after the (second) reference to the table (Exod 26:35), a more understandable position but still not the expected one.

Literarily out of Sync

To heap strangeness upon strangeness, despite the abrupt transition back to descriptions of furnishings in the Holy space, the description of the incense altar also lacks the literary cue that is otherwise consistently used when the text changes in topic or even moves between gradations of holiness. To this point, these shifts have been marked with a change in syntax, frontloading a noun or pronoun for emphasis:

• The shift from making furnishings that will be inside the Tabernacle to building the Tabernacle structure itself is marked by וְאֶת הַמִּשְׁכָּן תַּעֲשֶׂה “As for the Tabernacle, you shall make it…” (26:1).
• The move to priestly vestments is introduced with וְאַתָּה הַקְרֵב אֵלֶיךָ אֶת אַהֲרֹן אָחִיךָ “And you, bring Aaron and his sons close to you…” (28:1),
• The final section about ordaining priests is introduced with וְזֶה הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר תַּעֲשֶׂה לָהֶם “this is the thing you shall do for them” (29:1).

Within each section, in contrast, as we move from prescriptions for one object or action to another, we typically see the verse begin with a verb in the imperative form. When describing the construction of an object, the text uses the verbal root ע.ש.ה/י “do or make,” in second person singular וְעָשִׂיתָ “and you shall make” or the third person plural וְעָשׂוּ “and they shall make.”

Since the incense altar passage comes after the description of the ordaining of the priests, it should certainly get a marked introduction, showing that we are moving to a new section, but instead it gets a plain second person singular imperative verb:

^{שמות ל:א} וְעָשִׂיתָ מִזְבֵּחַ מִקְטַר קְטֹרֶת עֲצֵי שִׁטִּים תַּעֲשֶׂה אֹתוֹ.

^{Exod 30:1} You shall make an altar on which to offer incense; you shall make it of acacia wood.

If the text needed to circle back to inside the Tabernacle for some reason, why not mark the text literarily as a new unit?

Redaction Critical Approaches

Critical scholars have long suggested that the passage describing the incense altar is an artificial insertion in the MT, though several approaches have been offered to explain how and why this occurred.

Wellhausen—A Late Innovation

In his Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) argued that this passage simply must be a late insertion:

The reason why the author of chaps. xxv.–xxix. is thus silent about the altar of incense in the passage in which the furniture of the tabernacle, consisting of ark, table, and candlestick, is described is that he does know of it. There is no other possibility; for he cannot have forgotten it.^[1]

Wellhausen continues by noting note that this problem occurs elsewhere in the Priestly text, where the incense altar is missing exactly where we’d expect to see it:

And the phenomenon is repeated; the altar of incense occurs only in certain portions of the Priestly Code, and is absent from others where it could not possibly have been omitted, had it been known.

For example, the ritual of consecrating the priests makes no mention of incense (Exod 29, Lev 8). Even more striking, in the purgation-of-the-Tabernacle ritual, Aaron seems to be taking incense firepans from the main altar (Lev 16:12, 18–20), with no mention of the incense altar inside the Tabernacle, even though that is where he was going with the incense! Similarly, in the contest with Korah and the 250 Levites, the incense is simply on pans with no mention of the incense altar (Num 16:17–18).^[2] Afterward, these pans are made into plating for the main altar, and Aaron’s next act of lighting incense comes from this altar, and not the incense altar (Num 17:11).

Wellhausen explains this by positing that the authors of the core Priestly text (P^g) assumed that incense was offered on pans, and that the fire would come from the main—and only!—altar.^[3] Only at a later period was it believed that incense should be offered from a special golden altar in the Temple precinct. This was added into the text in certain places, but the Priestly text was never revised systematically to give this altar a natural place in all the relevant laws and stories.

Propp—A Controversial Text

William Propp of UC San Diego suggests that the incense altar is out of place in the MT because it was controversial and thus had been removed and then replaced by later redactors. This, he suggests, is why it appears in different places depending on the textual tradition:

There is something fishy about the affair. But for the present purposes, the fact remains: every extant version of Exodus includes the Incense Altar somewhere. All efforts to explain how it got there are conjectural. One does not get the impression of a simple evolution (pace Wellhausen), but it does seem that incense was controversial. Like artwork in the Church, it may well have been periodically expunged and reinstituted throughout the Second Temple period and afterward.^[4]

According to Propp, the incense altar is likely an integral part of P, but its original placement in the text is lost.

Shapira—Competition with the Menorah

A new approach, put forth by Hananel Shapira, is that originally, the menorah also functioned as a place for lighting incense in the Temple. Eventually, the golden altar was conceived to take the menorah’s place, but the final editors compromised, keeping the menorah for light, but moving some of its functions to the new altar.^[5]

Synchronic Approaches

Other scholars explain the strange position of the text on literary grounds.

Menahem Haran (1924–2015) argues that the incense altar was a special type of incense, and thus not included or alluded to in discussions of incense elsewhere.^[6]

Jacob Milgrom (1923–2010) claims that when we focus not on the location of the object but on the instructions for the ritual, incense is something the priests are to offer twice a day, and thus, the instructions for building it were placed right after the daily offering (Exod 29:38–46), which is also a twice a day ritual.^[7]

Carol Meyers, while noting the law reads like an addendum, expresses skepticism about the diachronic approach in general, without settling on a specific explanation:

[G]iven the arcane nature of these materials, at least from our contemporary perspective, it is just as likely that another kind of logic obtains for them, individually or collectively, whether or not scholars can retrieve it.^[8]

Gary Anderson argues that the placement of the incense altar as the “capstone” of the Tabernacle instructions is a literary foreshadowing of the significance of the incense in the death of Nadab and Abihu (Lev 10) at the end of the Tabernacle’s consecration.[9]

In line with this idea, that the delayed instructions for the incense altar are related to its potential to be dangerous, I suggest that the placement of the incense altar text can be understood in relationship to my overall reading of the Tabernacle text as being construction in meditatio.

Sacred Space: The Final Act of Consecration

In my “Building the Tabernacle in Your Mind” (TheTorah 2024), I compared the Tabernacle instructions to the Buddhist texts accompanying the construction of mandalas, pointing out the ways in which both texts evince a similar and unusual combination of detail and lacunae, and suggesting that this is because both are aimed at engendering a ritualized visualization experience rather than supporting a physical construction project.

If we take seriously the idea that the imaginative construction of the tabernacle as we read these instructions is the construction project^[10]—that is, if we imagine that something on a ritual plane happens as we encounter and envision each part of the instructions—then the way that the reading process unfolds merits comparison to the way in which physical construction of sacred objects or sacred spaces might unfold.

While a synagogue or church building construction project is in many ways similar to any other building construction project, one difference is that a religiously significant detail is left until the very end, so that it can be that detail that completes the whole. In other words, beyond considering only practicality and logistics for the building plan, the ritual significance of completion or activation is factored in.

For example, a church renovating its sanctuary will sometimes reserve the installation of its primary religious marker, the cross, for the last detail, rather than an unceremonious doorknob. To take an example from my own synagogue in Atlanta, it was only after our new building was ready to function as our spiritual home that we brought the Torah scrolls to the ark. There was no practical reason they couldn’t have been taken out of storage and moved into the new ark earlier, but reserving that moment for the end allowed it to mark a transformation of the space from a profane building to one that is sacred to us.^[11]

The “misplacement” of the incense altar can also be understood in this light. If the reading of this text has the power to create imaginative reality—if the reader is, in some way, constructing and exploring a mental tabernacle as he or she reads—then it is appropriate for a significant object to be intentionally left out of the ordered description and, instead, appended when the rest of the instructions are complete.

In fact, in his Tzror HaMor commentary on the Torah, R. Abraham Saba (ca. 1440–1508),^[12] suggests just this, that the text wishes to end with an object of special significance:

^{צרור המור שמות ל:א} ועשית מזבח מקטר קטורת – הנה חתם מלאכת המשכן במזבח הקטורת לפי שהוא הכלי היותר נבחר זולת הארון שצוה בראשונה לפי שהוא מכפר ומעשיר ומשמח כאומרו (משלי כז:ט) "שמן וקטורת ישמח לב."

^{Tzror HaMor Exod 30:1} “You shall make an altar on which to offer incense”—the depiction of how to construct the Tabernacle ends with the incense altar because it is the most significant object—except for the ark which was the first thing commanded—since it atones, and brings wealth, and happiness, as it says (Prov 27:9): “Oil and incense gladden the heart.”

In the realm of ritual, we must also take seriously that holy items and holy spaces are understood to have real power, so the reservation of a significant detail might not only be for ceremonious purposes, but also to prevent a ritual accident.

Being Mindful of the Danger!

In the construction of religious icons, especially where those icons are believed to require special care and treatment, a specific and significant detail might be left off until the artisan is confident that the object is ready to be completed—that everything else is in order—and then can act with intention as he or she adds the finishing touch. If minor details are left to the end, the artist might absent-mindedly finish the object without even realizing it, which could lead to the unintentional commission of ritually inappropriate acts.

Thus, for example, the completion of a Torah scroll often takes place with the scribe finishing the work in a public ceremony or even honoring key members of the community with the final dots of ink which turn the scroll into a sacred object. The liminal period of assembly is thus ended boldly and knowingly.

This point is strengthened when we remember that the construction of the Tabernacle, which was to serve as YHWH’s home on earth, is a dangerous enterprise simply by virtue of human proximity to the divine. Such construction projects must be mindful of this, especially when nearing completion.

Imagine the care one would take while assembling a power tool: one should know the precise moment that blades and electrical current will come together, lest an incomplete chainsaw accidentally get fired up. When constructing such powerful tools, the maker must leave out aspects of the device that are critical to its function until he or she is prepared to treat the item with appropriate caution.

If the incense altar’s description were found where we might expect it literarily, the entire Tabernacle would have been completed before any priesthood was in place. This would be a dangerous situation indeed. Instead, the tabernacle is only completed and potentially “activated” once the priests have been identified, dressed in clothing that is both honorific and oriented toward their safety, and anointed into their roles. The ordering of the text as we have it ensures that all necessary pieces of the system are in place and ready before imaginative construction can be complete.

The Life and Death Power of Incense

Perhaps the incense altar is chosen above any other piece of furniture as the last detail precisely because the author has the issue of danger and safety in mind, and this altar is connected to both ends of that continuum. On one hand, as noted by Carol Meyers and Gary Anderson, it is an unsanctioned incense offering that leads to the death of Nadav and Abihu. On the other hand, part of the purpose of the incense altar was to prevent the high priest from accidentally seeing YHWH upon entering the inner sanctum – an accident that could be lethal:

^{ויקרא טז:יב} וְלָקַח מְלֹא הַמַּחְתָּה גַּחֲלֵי אֵשׁ מֵעַל הַמִּזְבֵּחַ מִלִּפְנֵי יְ־הוָה וּמְלֹא חָפְנָיו קְטֹרֶת סַמִּים דַּקָּה וְהֵבִיא מִבֵּית לַפָּרֹכֶת. ^טז:יג וְנָתַן אֶת הַקְּטֹרֶת עַל הָאֵשׁ לִפְנֵי יְ־הוָה וְכִסָּה עֲנַן הַקְּטֹרֶת אֶת הַכַּפֹּרֶת אֲשֶׁר עַל הָעֵדוּת וְלֹא יָמוּת.

^{Lev 16:12} And he shall take a panful of glowing coals scooped from the altar before YHWH, and two handfuls of finely ground aromatic incense, and bring this behind the curtain. ^16:13 He shall put the incense on the fire before the LORD, so that the cloud from the incense screens the cover that is over [the Ark of] the Pact, lest he die.

The question must follow, then: why isn’t the actual construction, reported in Exodus 35-39, and the actual set-up, reported in Exodus 40, ordered in this fashion? Wouldn’t that be the more significant moment to delay the placement of the central altar? If we take seriously the possibility that the reading of this text can create a different reality in the sphere of ritual—if the reading of this text is thought to imaginatively construct something in the mystical cosmos—then it is important only that the first account be ordered in this way. When we read the second and third accounts of the space, we are simply revisiting the tabernacle that has already been constructed in our mind. We are not constructing it again.

Reciting Incense is Akin to Offering It

While it may sound strange to talk about the danger of reciting the creation of a holy object that remains entirely in the mind, ritual logic often works this way. Ritual acts are understood to be real acts that impact the cosmos in real ways, and sometimes that “act” is as simple as reading, reciting, or visualizing a particular end with great concentration. For example, the Talmud quotes a tannaitic text that lists the various ingredients of the holy incense, and ends with an exhortation:

^{בבלי כריתות ו.} חיסר אחת מכל סממניה – חייב מיתה.

^{b. Keritot 6a} If he left out any of these ingredients, it is a mortal offense.

Jewish liturgy long included the recitation of this tannaitic text, complete with the ingredients list, as part of the korbanot (sacrifices) section, as a way of replacing the ancient practice of sacrifice with prayer. Taking this equation seriously, R. Isaac Aboab II of Castile (1433–1493) wrote in his commentary on the Tur:

^{אבוהב טור אורח חיים קלג} ואין לאמרו אלא מתוך הכת[ב], שמא יחסר א' מהסמני[ם], וחייב מיתה בקריאה כמו בהקטרה, ואולי שמזה הטע[ם] אין או[מרים] אותו בקצת מקומו[ת], אף על פי שאו[מרים] פ[רשת] הקרבנות.

^{Aboab, Tur OḤ 133} One should only recite this from a written page, lest one leave out one of the ingredients [by accident] and commit a mortal offense, since reciting is akin to lighting the incense. And perhaps this is the reason it isn’t recited in some places even though they recite the passages about the offerings.

In the next century, the great Ashkenazi halakhic decisor, R. Moses Isserles of Krakow (Rema 1530–1572), adopted Aboab’s thesis as an explanation for why Ashkenazi Jews do not recite this passage during the week:

^{רמ"א שלחן ערוך אורח חיים קלב:ב} ולכן נהגו שלא לאומרו בחול, שממהרין למלאכתן וחיישינן שמא ידלג.

^{Rema Shulchan Arukh OḤ 132:2} Therefore, the custom is not to recite this during the week, because people are rushing to work, and we are concerned lest they skip [any of the ingredients].

This remains Ashkenazi practice (outside of Israel) to this day. Here we have a clear example of ritual taking the recitation of instructions as the equivalent of doing the act itself. I argue that, in the Tabernacle text, we see something similar.

Activating the Tabernacle with Consciousness

If completing the visualization of the Tabernacle by reading these instructions ritually activates the Tabernacle, it follows that the final detail of that imaginative process should be bold and religiously significant. Indeed, the editors withheld a critically important important detail until the very end, finishing the tabernacle instructions only after giving instructions for the anointing of priests.

Just as the high priest lights the incense to protect him from seeing the divine, the readers of the instructions call to mind the incense altar only when we are ready for the moment of the Tabernacle’s completion. The “misplacement” of the incense altar insists that the reader pay attention to their final step in the activation of this holy, awesome, and fearsome space.