Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
An Offering from a Willing Heart
Exodus 25:1-9
1 Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, · WEB
God asks slaves for building materials they own only because he gave them, and asks for them only from those who want to give.
Speak to the children of Israel, that they take an offering for me. From everyone whose heart makes him willing you shall take my offering Exodus 25:2.
The first instruction about the sanctuary is about funding, and the condition attached to it governs everything else. Nothing is levied. A nation under a law that could compel almost anything is asked for a voluntary contribution, and the qualification is stated before the list of materials: from everyone whose heart makes him willing.
The list itself is worth reading as an inventory of a slave people's possessions. Gold, silver, bronze, dyed yarns, fine linen, acacia wood, oil, spices, onyx Exodus 25:3–7. Brickmakers do not own these things. They own them because Egypt handed them over on the night of the exodus Exodus 12:35–36, which was arranged for and announced at the burning bush Exodus 3:22. The wealth being asked for was given to them, from a source they had no claim on, for a purpose none of them knew at the time.
Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them Exodus 25:8.
The purpose clause of the last sixteen chapters of the book, and of a good deal of Scripture besides. Not so that they may visit him, and not so that they may have somewhere to bring offerings. So that he may live in the middle of the camp. Everything in the design that follows — the fence, the veil, the priesthood, the blood — exists to make that possible without the arrangement destroying the people it was made for.
The order of the instructions makes the same point. God does not begin at the fence and work inward. He begins with the ark in the innermost room and works out, because the sanctuary is not a building with a God installed in it but a presence with a structure built around it.
According to all that I show you, the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all of its furniture, even so you shall make it Exodus 25:9.
A pattern is shown, and the word recurs at the end of the chapter Exodus 25:40 and again after the specifications for the tent Exodus 26:30. Nothing here is left to the taste of the builders. This is not because craftsmanship is suspect — two men will shortly be filled with God's Spirit precisely in order to exercise it — but because the structure means something, and a meaning cannot be improvised.
What it means is stated much later, by a writer arguing that the earthly priests serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things and citing this verse to prove it Hebrews 8:5. The tent in the wilderness is a model of something real. That is the reason for the insistence on exactness, and it is also the reason the long catalogs that follow are not decoration: every measurement is a statement about a reality the builders could not see.
settled What this mark means