By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips
After several weeks of lengthy elaborations on details of Mishkan construction, one could be forgiven for assuming that all details of God’s desert residence had now been unambiguously resolved. This is certainly not the case however according to Dr. Jaeyoung Jeon, a senior researcher at the University of Lausanne's Institute for Biblical Studies, writing on TheTorah.com (here). Dr. Jeon claims that two free-standing tales of tabernacle-tents can be identified in the Torah: a priestly version focused on rituals and sacrifices, and the Tent of Meeting at which Moshe received divine communications.
According to Dr. Jeon the distinguishing features of the priestly tent, whose construction was a national project, include its elaborate and intricate design as well as its central location for national sacrifice. Moshe’s tent, by contrast, was a simple tent pitched by Moshe alone at the edge of the camp. Instead of sacrificial ritual, Moshe’s tent was a place of prophetic encounter at which God communicated with Moshe and, by extension, the nation that he led. While the ‘’priestly tent’’ is depicted as a permanent resting place for God’s Presence, God must ‘’descend’’ in a pillar of cloud to appear at Moshe’s abode.
Most importantly, writes Dr. Jeon, the Torah’s accounts of events at ‘’Moshe’s tent” do not directly relate to their surrounding narratives. This, he claims, is evidence that the verses containing those accounts were later additions to the Torah’s text by an anti-priesthood school of scribes looking to challenge priestly control of religion in the early second Temple era.
Setting aside the author’s far-fetched claims of inter-scribal strife, this article on TheTorah.com is a perfect exhibit of the extent to which many academic source-critics are prepared to ignore far simpler ways of resolving the text internally. Rather than seeking to read and understand the text in its own terms, they let their pre-conceived (and often academically disputed) hypotheses propel them towards the creation of convoluted contradictions that compel them to carve up verses and passages to fit their arguments.
There are two obvious flaws in Dr. Jeon’s thesis. First of all, it ignores a verse (Exodus 38:8) in which both tents are described:
“And he made the washstand of copper and its base of copper from the mirrors of the women who had set up the legions, who congregated at the entrance of the tent of meeting”.
Which group of scribes, according to Dr. Jeon’s hypothesis, might have been responsible for referencing Moshe’s tent in the context of the construction of the priestly tabernacle?
Furthermore, while Dr. Jeon claims that “Exodus 33 is not directly related to the Golden Calf episode which it ostensibly continues”, an overview of the dynamics surrounding God’s communications with Moshe in the desert shows that the moving of Moshe’s tent plays an integral part in the narrative surrounding the construction of the Tabernacle.
In the initial months following the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, none of God’s communications with Moshe appear to relate to any particular area or tent within the camp. It is only in the aftermath of the sin of the Golden Calf that God warns (Exodus 33:3) “I will not go up in your midst since you are a stiff necked people, lest I destroy you on the way”. Immediately following God’s disclosure that He will no longer be entering the camp “Moshe took the tent and pitched it for himself outside the camp, distancing [it] from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting, and it would be that anyone seeking the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp”.
Thus Moshe’s pitching of his tent outside the camp is a direct reaction to the fall-out from the Golden Calf sin. Moshe then prays that God will once again enter the camp and be amongst the people – a prayer that God appears to accept (33:15-17).
It is only months later however – in the second year following the Exodus – that the Tabernacle is constructed and God is once again willing to “reside” in the midst of the camp and communicate with Moshe there:
“And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst.” [Exodus 25:8]“I will arrange My meetings with you there, and I will speak with you from atop the ark cover from between the two cherubim that are upon the Ark of the Testimony, all that I will command you unto the children of Israel.” [Exodus 25:22]
And immediately following the Tabernacle’s inauguration ceremony:
“When Moses would come into the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he would hear the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the covering which was over the Ark of Testimony, and He spoke to him.” [Numbers 7:89]
From this point onwards, Moshe no longer appears to have a personal tent of any significance. The proposed distinctions between “Moshe’s tent” and the “Priestly tent” by Dr. Jeon become ever weaker and ignore considerable counter-indications from within the text itself that there is one single tabernacle where all these events take place.
While it is true that certain events highlighted by Dr. Jeon (Miriam and Aharon’s rebuke, the appointment of 70 elders, and the appointment of Yehoshua) do describe God descending or appearing in a cloud, this does not contradict the notion that God’s presence was ever-present in the Tabernacle. As the verses (above and elsewhere) make clear, God’s Presence resided within the Holy of Holies “between the two cherubim above the covering which was over the Ark of Testimony”. The events in which God descended in a cloud however took place at the “entrance of the tent” or “surrounding the tent” – which were not the regular places for prophetic communication.
A careful reading of the text also demonstrates that these events at “Moshe’s tent” are not described as taking place outside the Israelite encampment as Dr. Jeon claims. When the Torah seeks to signify people exiting the entire encampment it employs the phrase “יצא אל/מחוץ למחנה” as can be seen repeatedly in Leviticus 13-14, Numbers 5, 15, and regarding Miriam’s leprosy in Numbers 12). This too is the phrase used to describe Moshe removing his tent from the camp in the aftermath of the sin of the Golden Calf in Exodus 33. This phraseology is to be contrasted with the language used in the episode of the 70 elders and God’s rebuke of Aharon and Miriam (Numbers 11 and 12) where they are described merely as “יצאו”, going out to the tent, while Eldad and Meidad remain in the camp. This terminology indicates, as Ibn Ezra writes, that the people are being described as leaving the main Israelite camp and entering the area of the Mishkan (Machane Shekhinah) rather than departing from the entire encampment.
It is not merely the text of the Torah itself that invalidates the theory of Dr. Jeon. His claims that the verses describing Moshe’s tent are very late additions are disputed from within academic source criticism too. Rival biblical scholars theorise that the supposed "E" [Elohist] source is the one of the oldest sources—preceding other parts of the Torah by hundreds of years. Additionally, a further group of scholars argue that there never was an independent "E" source at all. Yet other scholars, such as Gary Rendsburg, are of the opinion that all narrative portions of the Pentateuch are from a single author, which would undermine Dr. Jeon’s claims.
In short, what we see here is scholarly willingness to ignore the simple flow of the narrative in Exodus 33 in order to isolate the descriptions of Moshe’s tent from the surrounding narrative and frame the passage as a contradiction between texts authored by rival scribal groups. Rather than examine possible ways of understanding the text that avoid claims of contradiction, the author ignores inconvenient verses that challenge his ideas and proceeds to construct outlandish theories, unsupported by evidence or credibility, which relate these verses to supposed power-struggles in the early second temple era.
First posted on Facebook 14 March 2021, here.
