Exodus 32-40: more bloodshed, more gold

OK, I'm even further behind now. Blame the evil three legged cat (I'm sure there must be something in this fat book about casting weird little yowly three-legged things like that out into the wilderness). He killed Marc's computer monitor by throwing up down the back of it, so we're now sharing a computer and on rationed blogging time.
Anyway.
Chapters 32 and 33 recount the tale of the making of the Golden Calf. As if to confirm all the stuff I've been talking about regarding the importance of ritual, the Israelites take a very short time indeed to start freaking out about the fact that Moses has vanished up to the top of Mount Sinai to commune with God, and demand that Aaron makes them something else to worship instead.
Collecting jewellery off them, Aaron takes very little persuading to make a statue of a bull calf, which immediately becomes the new God.
God, who has been showing himself to be a rather insecure and demanding character since at least the beginning of Exodus, and of course on occasions like ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, gets understandably stroppy about this:

“Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them”
(Chapter 32 verse 10)

Moses manages to talk him down a bit, and back down at the bottom of the mountain seems to be happy to go along with some spectacular buck-passing by Aaron (I thought we had major legal precedents established that 'he told me to' was no excuse?):

“And Aaron said, let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.
For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”
(Chapter 32 verses 22-23)

Despite this, Aaron gets comprehensively forgiven and reinstated into his God-assigned role as the head of a lineage of priests, while in a typically Biblical bit of understated callousness 3,000 people apparently get butchered for this bit of cow-worship, but this only warrants one very short verse and no real explanation as to why. Bit like the massacre of the people of Shechem or various other non-Israelite groups, who, like the girl in the B movie whose function is just to scream and look terrified, just exist to get minced to show off Israelite power:

“And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.”
(Chapter 32 verse 28)

Yep, that's it.
Having generously forgiven the leadership of this rather hierarchical set-up, God now reinforces his position by ordering the destruction of any other gods who might be knocking around, and yet again all those commandments about rituals get repeated, just in case anyone had forgotten them.
Chapters 35-38 mainly recap in the actual performance the instructions delivered by God to Moses for the making of the Ark of the Covenant, involving lots of gold, silver, brass, shittim wood and purple, red and blue cloth. The level of detail entailed extends to listing the number of tenon joints needed to hold some of the boards together:

“One board had two tenons, equally distant from one another: thus did he make for all the boards of the tabernacle.
...
And forty sockets of silver he made under the twenty boards; two sockets under one board for his two tenons, and two sockets under another board for his two tenons.”
(Chapter 36 verses 22 and 24)

Collecting all the materials for this – all apparently accumulated from the existing wealth of the Israelite people (even though they've been enslaved in Egypt for several generations?), so at least it's recycled. I remember from archaeology classes at uni that one of the types of evidence considered to indicate that a society was hierarchical is the carrying out of large-scale construction projects (Stonehenge, for example), the presence of crafts specialisations (because people doing specialised crafts obviously need someone else to be growing/producing the goods to feed them, since they don't have time to do it themselves, so you need some kind of social system that supports this differentiation) and burials or other accumulations of wealth such as gold jewellery or ritual objects.
Giving little credence to hippy notions of co-operation, it is assumed that the presence of hierarchies and leaderships is necessary to get enough people together at the same time and for long enough to actually build anything of any significant size or value – and although this Ark isn't particularly huge in itself, it does involve major accumulation of wealth and of labour, with all the society's women apparently engaged in weaving the hangings, and its skilled craftsmen (rejoicing in the wonderful names Bezaleel and Aholiab) devoting their time to this effort.


We also get quite a bit about the priests' ephods, which is apparently a word of which there is controversy about the meaning of, but may be some kind of loincloth, or possibly a kind of ritual apron. In this case, they seem to be accompanied with 'curious girdles,' which also sound great but lack specifics as to why they are curious... this for me is one of the joys of the Old Testament and especially the King James Version, that we come up against some bizarre and in some cases totally incomprehensible words and phrases, their exact meanings lost in the mists of time, but their general resonance remaining.
And so the Book of Exodus ends, with the completion of this great creative and ritual work, a social bonding experience between the Israelites who donate their valuables and time to create a symbol of their belief and their identity as a people. And, armed with a growing conviction that they are God's one chosen people, and with a substantial list of laws as to the proper conduct of society, they're ready to head off to the land of Canaan:

“For the cloud of the LORD was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”
(Chapter 40 verse 38)

Exodus 24-31: some very, very detailed instructions

I've slightly had my comeuppance here. OK, so I decided to talk about the importance of ritual in my last post. But this section is really going for it – although I suppose if you're setting out details of religious rites that are meant to last for thousands of years it could take a while.
But God has obviously put some very serious thought into exactly how he wants worshipping.
So, after a ceremony to celebrate the fact that the Israelites have been given the Ten Commandments (involving, as usual, some gory sacrifices), Moses heads up to the top of Mount Sinai, and doesn't come down for 40 days.
As far as can be told from chapters 25-31, that 40 days is spent being given intensively detailed instructions on what God wants the Ark of the Covenant to look like. Marc obviously finds the instructions rather OTT and the lists pretty boring, but I quite like some of them.
The descriptions of what the Ark should look like is quite enjoyable to read, with excitingly lush materials:

“And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair,
And rams' skins dyed red, and badgers' skins, and shittim wood,
Oil for the light, spices for anointing oil, and for sweet incense,
Onyx stones, and stones to be set in the ephod, and in the breastplate”
(Chapter 25 verses 4-7)

It's a bit like reading fat glossy women's magazines, full of celebrities wearing designer labels and wearing fabulous shoes – you wouldn't necessarily want to do it yourself, but it's kind of fun.
The Ark is also to include something called a Mercy Seat, which explains the origins of the Nick Cave song (also covered by Johnny Cash) which I had vaguely wondered about before. It apparently translates better as a seat of grace, which fits with it being where God shall appear.



One question that occurs to me is exactly where all this gold and other expensive trappings are meant to come from, from a people apparently still wandering around in a desert and who only a few chapters back were busy kicking up a fuss over the prospect of dying of thirst.
Not only do we have extensive amounts of gold and gems on the design spec, with chapter 25's long lists of bowls, candlesticks, vessels and other bits of metalware which have to be made with pure gold, but also lots of precious jewels:

“And thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of stons: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle: this shall be the first row.
And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.
And the third row a ligure, and agate, and an amethyst.
And the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper: they shall be set in gold in their inclosings.”
(chapter 28 verses 17-20)

Many of the cloths have specifically to be purple, which as far as I can remember from my ancient history means that it has to be dyed with extracts from the murex shell, which was fabulously expensive and very much sought after, with major trade routes and conflicts linked to various empires' desire to get their hands on good supplies of it. And we're not just talking the priests' robes here, but also curtains for the temple courtyard which are meant to be 20 cubits in length – which I think is about 30 feet, or 10 metres.
Aaron, Moses' brother, is designated the father of a line of priests, since this is to be a hereditary post – and a rather cushy billet too. As well as getting to wear all that purple, the priest class seems to do rather well out of the massive amount of blood sacrifices ordered, which include large quantities of bullocks, rams and lambs – surely a huge challenge for this desert nomadic people?

“And thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for atonement: and thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast made an atonement for it, and thou shalt anoint it, to sanctify it.
Seven days thou shalt make an atonement for the altar, and sanctify it; and it shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth the altar shall be holy.
Now this is that which thou shalt offer upon the altar; two lambs of the first year day by day continually.
The one lamb thou shalt offer in the morning; and the other lamb thou shalt offer at even:
And with one lamb a tenth deal of flour mingled with the fourth part of an hin of beaten oil; and the fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering.”

(Chapter 29 verses 36-40)
But, it needs noting, the priests get to eat a bit of this stuff – that which isn't completely incinerated as burnt offerings – which implies that they're going to have a better diet than a lot of their people.
And, as with events such as the massacre of Shechem and the Tower of Babel, the actual handing over the the stone tablets gets just a brief mention at the end of these very long and details demands for how ritual must be carried out:

“And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.”
(Chapter 31 verse 18)

Exodus 28 to 29: Priests as the New Boss...

Exodus 28

Aaron is being kitted out for second-in-command

Verse 4-5 “And these are the garments which they shall make; a breastplace, and an ephod, and a robe, and a broidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle: and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office. And they shall take gold, and blue, and purple, and scarlet and fine linen.”

Good God, gaudy goods.

Get grotesquely garishly glamrockly gaudier... gaah!

Verse 33 “And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about:”

See what I mean?

Ah,

Verse 38 “And it shall be upon Aaron's forehead, that Aaron may bear the iniquity of he holy things, which the children of Israel shall hallow in all their holy gifts; and it shall be always upon his forehead, that they may be accepted before the LORD.”

Verse 42 is kind of poetic

“And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their nakedness: from the loins even unto the thighs shall they reach:”

Exodus 29

Ah, here comes the rationale for all this . Here comes the money shot-

Verse 1 “And this is the thing thou shalt do unto them to hallow them, to minister unto me in the priest's office: Take one young bullock, and two rams without blemish.”

And the priest class is going to sit on its arse... and scoff unleavened bread, cakes, wafers etc

Verse 22 “And thou shalt take of the ram the fat and the rump, and the fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and the fat that is upon them, and the right shoulder: for it is a ram of consecration.”

Oh, and Aaron's gladrags will stay in the family...

Verse 29 “And the holy garments of Aaron shall be his sons' after him, to be anointed therein, and to be consecrated in them.”

ah, after all the recipe instructions for rams and so forth, we get to the nub of the issue.

Verse 32-3 “And Aaron and his sons shall eat the flesh of the ram, and the bread that is in the basket, by the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And they shall eat those things wherewith the atonement was made, to consecrate and to sanctify them: but a stranger shall not eat thereof, because they are holy.”

The priest class, entrenching itself...

Yeah, more health and safety hygiene instructions for sanctification of altars etc.

Verse 44 “And I will sanctify the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar: I will sanctify also both Aaron and his sons, to minister to me in the priest's office.”

'We're God's henchmen. Do what we tell you.'

Sigh.