By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips
As with other areas of academic interest in the Torah, the Mishkan (Tabernacle) has provided fertile ground over the years for those who seek to dispute traditional belief in biblical accounts of the Exodus and the Jews' subsequent journey through the Wilderness. While traditionalists are often portrayed as primitive and closed-minded for remaining loyal to their received texts, it is eye-opening to see the progression that these academic accounts have gone through over the years.
In the early days of source criticism, Julius Wellhausen confronted believers with a theory that the Tabernacle had never existed. The academic world of that era embraced the notion that the entire account was simply a retrojection of worship in the temple used to explain how the Israelites offered sacrifices in the desert. Wellhausen’s position is still upheld by some today, as Benjamin Sommer summarises: “many modern scholars contend that the priestly tabernacle is a fiction invented by priests in the exilic era to represent Solomon’s temple”.
Nevertheless, this theory has been increasingly challenged in recent decades, as scholars have started to identify specific parallels between the Mishkan and older shrines from the Ancient Near East. Sommer cites sources to show that several details of the Tabernacle’s structure and operation recall large tent sanctuaries used by Northwest Semites in the Late Bronze Age.
He adds “in some respects the tabernacle’s plan is closer to that of a genuine ancient Semitic tent shrine than to Solomon’s temple”. Sommer notes that just like the Tabernacle, these ancient Semitic shrines held “the presence of the god…traveled through the desert, and were made of red leather (as opposed to the usual black tent of Semitic nomads).” Furthermore “the use of acacia wood rather than olive or oak for building the ark and various elements of the tabernacle calls a desert setting to mind, because it comes from a tree common in the deserts south and southwest of Canaan”. This evidence led other scholars such as Richard Elliot Friedman to concede that “the Tabernacle probably was housed in the Shiloh structure. And then it was housed in the first Temple”.
Famed archaeologist, Kenneth Kitchen, shows that the Torah’s detailed account of the Tabernacle’s structure exhibits a number of parallels between the Tabernacle and other movable shrines that predate 1200 BCE. He writes of “large tents over wooden frames set in socketed bases were used for both ritual and royal purposes at Mari, still half a millennium before any Moses.” He also describes how divine houses in Ugarit myths from this time period draw not only upon similar themes, but even their terms to describe building materials are identical to those of the Torah (qerashim, ohel, mishkan).
Kitchen offers further detailed evidence supporting the antiquity of the Tabernacle, showing parallels of gods dwelling in Tabernacles, two levels of ritual priests similar to the Cohanim and Levites, consecration rituals for both high priests and sanctuaries lasting for days, wagons to transport these structures, the shape and style of the ark itself, and silver trumpets to assemble people and signal a march to war.
He then concludes: “Thus the old nineteenth-century dogmas must be abandoned in the face of those facts. There is no reason whatsoever to deny that the tabernacle and temple building accounts run true to form, and would normally be considered as records of actual work done. Thus, for the Sinai tabernacle, in retrospect, we possess a considerable—and growing—amount of valuable comparative data (much of it very old, and much, contemporary; far less, of later date) that favor the hypothesis that a small but well-decorated dismountable tent shrine (based on usages of its time) accompanied the Hebrew from Sinai to Canaan, its rituals being of appropriate modesty in extent and format.”
While the building materials of the Mishkan can therefore be seen to reflect those of an era which significantly pre-dates scholarly theories and estimates, the particular structure and layout of the Mishkan may contain an even more specific and significant theme.
One of the most significant recent developments in the traditional response to biblical criticism has been the work of Rabbi Dr Joshua Berman, who emphasizes the need to evaluate the Torah in the context of parallel literature from the Ancient Near East. In Ani Ma’amin, Berman shows how various key biblical features appear to have been deliberately formulated in a way that mirrors and, in crucial ways, departs from the religious, military and cultural writings of ancient Egypt.
Dr. Joshua Berman goes into great detail explaining how Ramesses II’s military camp at Kadesh “constitutes the closest parallel to the Tabernacle—including the Temple of Solomon—known to date”. As can be seen from the attached diagram, the layout and proportions of the Mishkan are identical to the military camp of Rameses II – believed by many to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus. In a recent post we showed how the Song of Sea could be seen as a deliberate appropriation of Rameses’ victory celebration over the Hittites – ironically replacing Rameses with the God of the Bible. Here too we can see the Torah’s subtle symbolism working to glorify God in place of the deified Egyptian monarch.
Berman adds that just like the four camps of Israelites in the desert: “Egypt’s four army divisions at Kadesh would have camped on the four sides of Ramesses’s tent compound”. In Richard Elliot Friedman’s words “its size, shape, proportions, surrounding courtyard, golden winged accoutrements, Eastern orientation, and arrangement of outer and inner rooms are a match”.
Berman concludes that the Egyptian parallel is far more convincing than previous scholarly attempts to view the Tabernacle in the context of Canaanite or Assyrian shrines: “Neo-Assyrian camps are routinely depicted as oval in shape, and feature no throne tent of any kind”. Had the Torah been written during the Neo-Assyrian or Babylonian exiles, which at one point represented the academic consensus, we would have expected any Israelite writer to have been influenced by the designs of these cultures’ temples rather than express intimate knowledge of Egyptian and Ugaritic religious and military structures from centuries earlier.
- Kenneth Kitchen, “On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2006)
- Richard Elliot Friedman, “Who Wrote the Bible” (1987)
- Richard Elliot Friedman, “The Exodus” (2017)
- Joshua Berman, “Inconsistency in the Torah” (2017); Ani Ma'amin (2020)
- Benjamin Sommer “The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel” (2011)
- James Kugel “How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (2007)
First posted on Facebook 3 March 2022, here.
