Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Glory Filled It
Exodus 40:34-38
34 Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and Yahweh’s glory filled the tabernacle. · WEB
The fire that burned in a bush without consuming it moves into a tent at the center of the camp, and the book ends in mid-journey.
Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and Yahweh's glory filled the tabernacle Exodus 40:34.
The work is finished and the presence arrives. Nothing in the construction summoned it; the tent was built to a pattern shown by the one who then came to occupy it, and the arrival answers the purpose stated at the outset — let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them Exodus 25:8.
Moses wasn't able to enter into the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud stayed on it Exodus 40:35.
The man who had spoken with God face to face, who had been in the cleft of the rock, who had just assembled every board of this tent with his own hands, cannot go in. The book closes the way it opened. At the bush there was fire that did not consume, ground made holy by a presence, and a man told not to come close Exodus 3:5; here there is fire in a cloud, a tent made holy by the glory filling it, and the same man kept outside.
The distance has not changed. What has changed is where the fire is. It was on a mountain in an empty wilderness that one shepherd found by accident, and it is now in the middle of a camp, portable, with the whole nation watching it.
When the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward, throughout all their journeys; but if the cloud wasn't taken up, then they didn't travel until the day that it was taken up Exodus 40:36–37.
Movement and rest are both decided by something they do not control and can always see. The last verses describe a routine rather than an event.
The book ends in a desert, with the promised land not reached, the priesthood not yet functioning, and the nation camped around a tent. It does not end at a destination because arrival was never what it was about. A people who began as seventy in a foreign country and became slaves have been brought out, given a law, and given God's own presence in the middle of them — which is what the whole rescue was for, and it is enough to stop on.
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