Reading Exodus with Leon Kass: Completing Creation

Once a week for the last several months, Mosaic has taken to publishing brief excerpts of Leon R. Kass’s new book on Exodus, Founding God’s Nation. Curious about one of the foundational texts of the Jewish tradition? Read along with us. To read earlier excerpts, go here.

This week is our last installment. On the coming Sabbath, Jewish communities all over the world read Exodus 35:1-40:38, which constitute the two final portions of the book, known as Vayakhel and P’kudey. Following on the heels of the sin of the golden calf, these chapters recapitulate instructions for crafting the Tabernacle and its various accoutrements, and they catalogue donations collected for this purpose.

In Leon Kass’s reading, these mundane-sounding design instructions carry a larger and more majestic significance. The Israelite construction of the Tabernacle culminates a process that was first introduced to readers of the Hebrew Bible back in Genesis.