Exodus 40: Moses Finishes and Then Can't Go Inside

Tuesday night at about 9:40 a migration at work finished. For three weeks we'd been moving old merchant records into a new ledger table, a few hundred thousand rows at a time and mostly overnight, and the last batch went through without a single retry. I sat at the kitchen table and refreshed the dashboard maybe eleven times. The only thing that changed was the timestamp.

Melissa came through with a laundry basket and asked if it was done. I said it was. She asked why I was still looking at it, and I didn't have an answer. Exodus 40 was Wednesday morning's chapter. It's the last chapter of the book, and it's about a man who finishes an enormous job and then isn't allowed to walk into it.

Why couldn't Moses go into the tabernacle?

The chapter reads like an inventory. On the first day of the first month Moses sets up the tabernacle one piece at a time: the ark behind the veil, the table of shewbread on one side of the Holy Place and the lampstand across from it, the golden altar of incense, the altar of burnt offering out in the court, the laver between that altar and the tent. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth time the text says he did it the way he was commanded, I stopped hearing the line, the way you stop hearing the fridge. I think that's the point of the repetition. Nobody is supposed to be surprised by anything in this chapter until the very end.

If you've been reading along you've already watched the pieces get made. I wrote about the lampstand and the table back in Exodus 37, when Bezaleel's crew was building the furnishings, and about the walk-through where Moses inspects the finished work in the chapter just before this one. So by chapter 40 the reader is ready for a ribbon cutting. What you get instead is this.

Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

I didn't like it, at first.

When I read it as an adult it seemed a little rough. Months of work, careful measurements, a whole nation's gold and linen, and the man who oversaw it stands outside. I read it as a letdown with a holy label on it.

Then a friend in my Sunday School class asked what we'd expect to happen if the tabernacle worked, and that undid my reading right there in class. Not if it was built right, but if it worked, if the thing it was built for actually showed up. And of course that's what the verse describes. Moses didn't get shut out for doing something wrong, since the chapter gives him no failure to point at. The place was finished and then it was occupied, and an occupied house has a different set of rules than a job site.

The Hebrew behind "glory" has the sense of weight, which is how I've seen it explained, and I find that easier to picture than light. Weight is something you notice when you try to walk into it. A ledger table is not a tabernacle, and nobody's cloud settled on my kitchen table, but I do know the feeling of finishing something and discovering it's no longer yours to fiddle with. That was the unsettling part of Tuesday night. For three weeks I'd had my hands in it. Then it was just running, and the right thing to do was nothing.

What does the anointing oil actually do?

Before the cloud there's a lot of oil. Moses anoints the tabernacle and everything in it and the altar too, then he washes Aaron and his sons, dresses them and anoints them as well.

And thou shalt anoint them, as thou didst anoint their father, that they may minister unto me in the priest's office: for their anointing shall surely be an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations.

I've heard the oil talked about as though it did something on its own, like a coat of sealant. The order of the chapter doesn't support that. The oil comes first and the cloud comes after, and the text never says one caused the other. To me the oil reads more like putting a name on a thing so everyone knows what it's for. Whether the Lord shows up is a separate matter, and it's his to decide.

A cloud you have to read

The chapter doesn't stop at the filling. It runs a few more verses, and they're the ones I'd have skipped if I were summarizing.

And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys: But if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. 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.

The first thing that stands out is "in the sight of all the house of Israel." Moses couldn't go in, but nobody else could be left out of the seeing. It wasn't a private experience he'd report back on. Every family in the camp could step out of their tent and look up, which makes it a very different kind of leadership than the kind where one person holds the map.

The second is that Israel got no map, only a cloud they had to keep an eye on. When it lifted they packed and went, and when it sat over the tent they stayed where they were for as long as it sat. The book of Exodus finishes there, with the camp still waiting to be told.

I fly a helicopter now and then, a lot less than I'd like, and the closest thing I can offer is the windsock at the little field south of the valley. It tells you nothing about what to do, only what the air is doing, and you keep glancing back at it, because nobody looks at a windsock once and considers the matter closed. I hadn't flown since early June, and what I missed most while reading this was that sort of attention, the kind where you're not working on anything at that moment but you're also not off duty.

I don't know what it was like to be a person in that camp when the cloud sat still for what must have been a long stretch. I'd like to know if somebody's teenager muttered that surely it was time to go, but the chapter is silent and I'd rather leave the gap than fill it with a nice thought. What I do know is that I'm bad at it.

On Tuesday night I wanted somebody to tell me the work was over, and a cloud that stays where it is gives you no such sentence.

We leave for Bear Lake on the twenty-fifth and I've already made the packing list twice. Melissa has suggested, politely, that the Odyssey will be loaded when it's loaded. Fair enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was the tabernacle anointed with oil?

Anointing set the tabernacle and its furnishings apart for holy use. The oil was the sign of that dedication, and the text doesn't treat it as the thing that made the place holy. The Lord's acceptance came afterward, in the cloud.

Could the Israelites actually see the glory of the Lord?

They saw a cloud over the tabernacle by day and fire on it by night, and verse 38 says that was visible to the whole house of Israel. What the text doesn't describe is anything inside the cloud. I'd keep it that way and not invent a picture.

How does the tabernacle connect to Latter-day Saint temples?

The way I was taught, the tabernacle's three zones (the court, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies) give the pattern of moving closer to God's presence in stages, and Latter-day Saints see that pattern again in how a temple is laid out and how its ordinances are taught. The tabernacle itself was a tent that traveled with the camp, though, and temples are permanent buildings, so I try not to flatten the two into one thing.

What did the cloud's movement mean for Israel's travels?

The cloud was how the camp knew when to move and when to stay. They went when it lifted and waited when it didn't, however long that took. It gave them a signal to watch for and no schedule to work from.

By Wednesday morning the dashboard was still green and still boring, and I let it be. Thursday I work from home, so I'll probably look at it again, mostly out of habit.

— D.